But it's undeniably part of eugenic ideologies (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/eugenics), whose promotion is the thing he described as the aforementioned 'bad thing'.
Good for you, that has nothing to do with what we wrote though. Not sure if you’re trolling or if English is a second language but just in case it’s the latter, when someone writes:
“using IQ and EA genetic predictors for embryo selection may promote eugenic ideologies (which I hope I don't need to explain why that may be a bad thing).”
the “that” refers to the sentence as a whole (“using IQ and EA genetic predictors for embryo selection may promote eugenic ideologies”) not just the “using IQ and EA genetic predictors for embryo selection” part.
This is so irrelevant. If you go in with your partner to select which embryo gets implanted then ALL those embryos have the same racial makeup so this application doesn't affect this in the slightest.
That someone else who believes bad things believes something doesn't make it bad.
Whatever critique you have about the effectiveness of PGS for EA, you must acknowledge that it's better than chance at predicting EA, even among non-European groups.
One could similarly argue that not wanting to help women make the most informed reproductive choice possible could promote anti-choice ideologies. What concern is "eugenics" if it means better informed reproductive choices that are consensual and improve human wellbeing?
"Better than chance" isn't the same thing as "would ever be action guiding". If Emil above is to be believed, the <<15% of the variance explained between embryos from a couple is unlikely to overwhelm information about the relative healthspans of candidate embryos. I'm open to quantitative arguments showing that the probability that embryo choice would be affected by this information -- given reasonable assumptions about number of embryos to choose and relative weights assigned to healthspan and intelligence -- is sufficiently high to justify the project, but the point is that the argument has to be made, and "better than chance" doesn't cut it
My point is in response to the critique that it is bad/worthless/unethical to even try to use this information. Whether using EA will be more important than health information is a second question that relies on certain assumptions about what makes a good life as well as expectations about the future. I expect some diseases to be basically cured in the next half century, and so I see selection on the basis of psychological characteristics as more worthwhile. Of course, it invovles certain trade offs, and I would not totally dismiss longevity. Investigating the possible returns is worthwhile, and in an instance in which two embryos have similar estimated lifespans, EA could serve as a tie breaker. It's not really an one or the other type situation.
EA being heritable at 40-80% doesn't mean that we actually have predictors to estimate EA to that accuracy.
"Information > no information" is only true if there's enough content in the information to guide choices between embryos, and there isn't in current best EA PGSs
Imagine I give you 6 siblings. You must estimate who has the highest EA. I have a piece of paper in an envelope with their EA PGSs. Would you throw the envelope away? Obviously, not. It would help inform your choice.
In the case of embryos, you can imagine that you value health 5x as much as EA and traits like that. STILL, you would want to know EA because it can help inform your choice even if the variance explained by the PGS is low. For example, imagine you see the healthiest embryo but the EA PGS is extremely extremely low. Should you disregard that information? I think now. You are at risk of having a psychologically impaired child. If you think there is a low risk of that, you can weigh that risk to factor into your decision. Throwing out information is not useful.
So if I have an undergraduate degree in Gender Studies I'm Officially Smart, am I?
When I consider the amount of "pshhh, stupid dumb liberal arts degrees" sniping that goes on here, clearly only Real Eggheads Do Real Degrees That Are Hard Science is the measure everyone means for educational attainment and IQ.
But go right ahead guys, select your future Queering Glaciers Via Indigenous Ways Of Knowing degree students with this great new tool, what could possibly go wrong?
Not all highly educated people have the traits of gender studies majors. Selecting for EA will be generally good, even if not all highly educated people have good ideas. Extremely high levels of intelligence would, in my view, move us away from stuff like gender theory.
A curious question might be whether EA is a better or worse proxy than how rich you are. Scott himself gives one way the two are conflated in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-match-school-and-student-rank; coming from the other side, commenters in this very substack have in the past unironically suggested that we skip the research bit and just straight up pay rich people to donate to sperm banks, because in a just world there must obviously be correlation between how rich one is and heritable qualities people might desire for their children.
EA as a proxy for IQ is a blunt instrument. Back when getting a college degree was unusual and mostly for the very smart but poor, or for the sons of the gentry, then having a degree = smart/well-off tracked.
Nowadays, there's a push for 'everyone must go to college'. By brute EA measurement, using the kinds of questions used in sample tests and studies: "high school dropout? College graduate? PhD? Etc", means that a degree is a degree is the same, be it a BA in Gender, Sexuality and Queer Studies from Evergreen State College or a BSc in Statistics from Harvard.
Of course people will refine that down to "this university is better than that university" and "this course is better than that course" but if you're selecting embryos, you're not selecting "STEM degree versus Arts degree".
Jeff Bezos is smart; he graduated from Princeton with a BSc in Engineering. What did he make his fortune from? Selling things online. If you're selecting for "EA = success in life", again, you have no idea where the locus for "will become a billionaire" versus "will remain poor as church mouse but does fascinating research into beetle wings" is located when you're checking the genes.
It's the same problem as AI - what you *think* you're asking for, and what you *get* out of it, are not necessarily the same things.
When you write of heritability within families do you just mean the proportion of variance within that family explained by genetic variance?
This might not be correct, but considering the case of intra-offspring variance (which seems relevant in this case) and taking heritability to mean narrow-sense heritability, I think we can take the intra-offspring additive genetic variance to be half the total additive variance (i.e., the Mendelian sampling variance) and so, uncharitably assuming all other variances remain as large as in the general population, we can take a intra-offspring heritability of $\frac{h^2}{2-h^2}$ (i.e. where $\frac{h^2}{2-h^2}$ is the proportion of intra-offspring variance explained by additive genetic variance).
Given the apparently quite large heritabilities of educational achievement and scores on IQ tests, the intra-sibling values remain substantial. The relative sizes of the heritabilities are bounded below by 1/2 – even in the worst case, the intra-sibling heritability is at least half the population heritability.
Actually, I am not sure I quite understood what you meant, when you say that the heritability drops substantially within families, do you just mean the SNP estimates of heritability?
Not to mention the costs and risks associated with IVF/PGT and resulting pregnancies and the disparities in access it would exacerbate because it most certainly would not be covered by insurance.
These are some terrible ideas which will result in massive deadweight loss.
If we had examples of people fleeing capitalist countries for communist ones, you might have a point about avoiding each extreme, but net population movement is instead always from communist to capitalist ones.
Arbitrary wealth cap would only provoke elaborate holding-company schemes, dividing everything up into chunks just below the cap and obfuscating ultimate ownership - that sort of thing already happens, even with far less extreme incentive gradients. Georgist land value tax and UBI is a far better solution.
It would be unwise if we were *primarily* building for rationalists, which we're not. Our thesis is we need a bigger cross-section of subcultures for a meaningful enough seed market to beat the cold start problem. Though incentive design is an important factor in designing dating products (that modern dating apps fail to fulfill), it won't work for branding either, i.e. gives a lot of people the ick.
Of course. Our marketing won't center on prediction markets.
Our biggest insight is actually having a public directory of profiles. It sounds like it wouldn't work because people value privacy, but that's not actually true, or not completely true anyway.
I can also help, and it is an area of interest for the company I'm forming (the goal of the company is to create services whose metric for success is people feeling closer to friends/family, and feeling more satisfied and contented at the end of using the service for any extended period of time).
I used 2011 OKC. It was full of women looking for single men near them...for new friends. After a week of messaging, you'd ask someone out and they'd say "uuuuhhhhhhhhh, that's really fast, I dunno, I'm uncomfortable, you're weird for asking." The longform text thing was just used by women to list their ever-growing sexualities and gender identities. And all this was before the Geek Blood War.
I also used 2011 OKC (okay it was probably more like 2013). The long form text definitely wasn't just for queer identity lists, and I successfully got a nerdy girlfriend out of it. No offense, but based on the tone of your comment, I suspect you just failed the vibe check with most of these "week of messaging" and they just weren't interested. Dating as a man just sucks, but OKC at least sucked less for having conversation starters.
I've met a wife and two partners on OKCupid. The last was maybe 4-5 years ago.
Yes, it was really, really grindy. And OKC has gone downhill since then. But as dating sites go, it was better than any other site I've used. (Which, perhaps, isn't saying much, I admit.)
Cluster people. If you're in the bottom 20% (exact cluster sizes aren't important), you only see other users in the bottom 20%. Clustering is performed by evaluating the ratio of messages sent, to the ratio of messages responded to (plus some minimum threshold of messages, and possibly additionally some minimum level of "effort invested", as measured by, for example, matching questions answered), and is separated by gender. This discourages mass-messaging people, and encourages women to message men (as otherwise they're left in the default cluster). Also plausibly helps set people's expectations more reasonably.
Simultaneously, limit the number of new conversations per day; 5 is probably a good target.
If the goal is to avoid becoming yet another Dating App: open-source the project. Possibly host it in a P2P network; if so, encrypt everything at the user level.
This sounds like a great idea, but it also sounds like you'd need a lot of people to make it work. The big challenge is getting the first few hundred people (ideally playing off of some kind of existing connection. Facebook started out on college campuses, for example.)
I'd love to see an open source generic connection matching app. It doesn't have to be just for dating. I worked a very long while back for MyMuse which was like a dating site but for artistic collaboration. It didn't seem to go anywhere, but it had prepared a nice hard launch. ... I kindof wonder why it foundered, but suspect it was for technical reasons.
The URL is still up and claims to be 'by invitation only.' So... maybe it eventually launched?
Clustering could still create a problem of best-within-a-cluster getting overwhelmed. If you're going to limit who can contact who, better fix would be to have a slightly different range for each user - can't proactively contact someone more than one standard deviation away, for example.
I don’t have the bandwidth to do it myself, but a lot of experience analyzing EEG data and could help out with analysis or connect to people who could.
One idea would also be to reach out to the folks at MUSE (https://choosemuse.com) and ask them if they’re willing to help with infrastructure and even finding somebody to do this.
I also have a lot of professional experience working with EEG data, and possibly access to hardware. Happy to collaborate on this, and organize efforts if needed.
I would be interested in helping out with this project. My experience with EEG only comes from a university intro class but recently I've been looking for projects where I could delve deeper into it. With some guidance, I'd be happy to take up any work throughout this project.
Are there any consumer grade EEG devices (MUSE?) that a person can use to determine their own alpha brain rhythm? I'm interested doing a little citizen science on my own, but I'm not entirely clear on whether MUSE presents you with the data you need to extrapolate that.
- They produce their own EEG devices, which are more advanced than MUSE's.
- They provide data through an API for your own experiments, and they have an impressive lab with a superior R&D track record with top scientists.
- They are open and actually offer collaboration in the form of an Accelerator. They actually publicly call and encourage scientists/engineers to play with their devices/data, build your own product based on what they developed so far.
They might provide you with both data and hardware to boost your research and attempts to build something with their help.
Just check them out.
Also, their founder, Alexandr Panov, is an amazing guy and is open to requests from any interested and talented researchers. I highly recommend getting in touch with him, his TG channel is
Hey, thanks for the link! Definitely looks interesting and I subscribed to the telegram channel but their EEG system seems to record the data only from 4 electrodes and not the ones we want (the ones we want for entrainment are in the back of the head)
I'm not an expert in this field, so I might miss something here. But since I've been following them for a few years, it seems absolutely worth it to get in contact with them for a few reasons:
They might have other devices or prototypes of devices not currently announced on their website or ready for retail, as they've spent years on hardware.
Regarding the zones to interact on the back of the head: again, I suggest contacting them directly. Through communication, you might change your opinion on which electrodes you need. They might supply you with some new data, or they might even have a data library that will help you with your research, etc.
As a bottom line, it seems you've made a whole way down to Scott's announcements and funding, so at least talking with the company who is your focus directly is something more than worth doing.
I've written him to ask about the prospects but never got an answer. His other finished projects suggest he is up the challenge skillwise, I suppose labour is the only thing left to invest. Perhaps if you wrote him as well he would be more inclined to follow through.
This looks amazing. If Giacomo Miceli is currently an Italian teacher or tutor, it would be interesting to get his thoughts on using this type of text as a teaching tool. Could it replace standard grammar/drills/memorization? Or is it more of a supplement?
I was also fascinated by it. He is nothing of this sort, however. From his site's bio:
"Giacomo Miceli is a creative coder, entrepreneur and computer scientist originally from Rome, Italy. Currently viator maximus in the Orion Arm, he enjoys visual exploration and semantic amazement. He doesn’t enjoy writing in the third person."
Anyhow, I think any input could replace all of those, though memorization and learning explicit grammar rules helps.
Hi Mark - Giacomo here. Thanks for mentioning my project here. I never got your message, please send it again.
About the language teaching idea -- it doesn't work practically. It would only work if you had thousands and thousands of pages because, especially in the beginning, in-context learning takes a lot of content to make sense.
I agree. I think it's one thing to figure out the meaning of a word where it's substituted in a context that makes it easy (where it carries little Shannon information), but this decoding is short of learning the word proper, which would likely still be unfamiliar when encountered in a surprising context.
Still, it could work, but as you say, the text would have to be long. Even if it was not any long text but one engineered to facilitate the process, still it would be very long.
There's a kind of natural instance of this process, spanning generation rather than one individual's life. I suppose the transition from Old through Middle to Modern English was akin to this. At the edges you have languages whose speakers would not understand each other, but along the way was a gradient of speakers who understood their contemporaries.
My message was rather short, I might as well stick it here:
Awesome projects that you are working on.
Will The Adventures Di Pinocchio be available to the public by any means at any time? I'd be very interested.
Thank you for your kind words. I'm (slowly) setting up a shop on my website to sell, among other things, that book. I'll shoot you a message once it's ready.
Hi Giacomo, I would also love to buy your Pinocchio book! If it ever happens (I read you only now start setting up a shop) I would immediatley place an order. It resonates exactly with how I talk italo-english with a friend.
Hi elnicc, did you send me an email by any chance? Your username looks familiar. Short version - I'm collecting email addresses of people interested that I can notify once everything is up and running. Write me on jamez at jamez dot it.
I used to encourage my English students to pick up a book they loved in their home language, preferably from their early teens, and read it in English translation. Read it aloud. Ignore words you don't know, don't look them up. You already know the story well, know the characters and what is going to happen, so do your best reading for enjoyment. These days, you can listen to popular novels, so it's easy to to practice listening and reading, self correction.
I think you may have an incorrect understanding of how time consuming software engineering is. 😁 Your estimates remind me of estimates made by junior engineers who imagine everything will go perfectly on the first try and they will not run into any problems.
Sadly, the reality is that if you want an actual production piece of software (meaning something that is packaged up and can actually be used by real people, not just your dev buddies) it takes orders of magnitude longer than the "happy path" estimate. 😢
To be fair, building a website used to be a weekend's work 15-20 years ago. I distinctly remember how easy it was to toss together some HTML designs and javascript into a few PHP pages and have a functioning website. The modern web is many things but it is not quick to develop for I will agree there.
As for the "reusable piece of software" I think plenty of people in a community like this are willing to go through *some* technical steps for a good piece of software. Heck, see most stable diffusion installs. The open source EA project could for example be more "dev buddy" leaning.
My point is I agree on the website ones, less so on the discrete algorithm ones.
> building a website used to be a weekend's work 15-20 years ago
With the advent of web 2.0, the definition of ”website” largely changed from ”text file” to ”dynamic application with a backing db.” You can still make a static site in a couple hours, but that’s usually not what’s being asked for.
For clarity to anyone following along, the initial publishing of this article had more specific numbers for the programming tasks. The current revision is a bit more vague, which helps significantly. 😄
I was imagining that the psychological test would be something that you could distribute to people (maybe online) and they would be able to use it, or have a website where people can easily generate tests. However, I suppose maybe the target audience is a few highly motivated people running psychology experiments who are willing to put in some elbow grease in order to get things up and running.
> With the advent of web 2.0, the definition of ”website” largely changed from ”text file” to ”dynamic application with a backing db.” You can still make a static site in a couple hours, but that’s usually not what’s being asked for.
PHP could do dynamic content and access the DB. I was not describing a static site. While you are right the change of the definition of website from text page to dynamic application is part of the issue. The text file days were not necessarily that static, static is a different thing.
Maybe it should have been said outright — 20 years ago we talked about an explicit category of advanced users, people who wouldn't want to learn the exact strictures necessary for many-many-thousands-of-lines programming, but were willing to read and understand ten pages of relevant text at once before trying the software, if given a compelling reason. They also could be convinced to ignore the visuals when the functionality matched their needs and reliabilty were acceptable.
If the target audience is «Scott Alexander's writing is not too long» intersected with «annoyed that ACX Substack is more modern-Web than SSC», maybe it is a good idea to target the estimates given and cut down the mission creep?
Pro-tip: the tools to quickly create websites still exist. Contrary to common belief, not every website must be designed to scale to millions of concurrent users, run on AWS, be based on bloated JS libraries, have a microservice architecture and be backed by a NoSQL database.
Even the latest browsers with their fancy JS engines and GPU support will still be able to render https://blog.fefe.de/ quite well.
That looks super conservative to me? Let's look at the dating site one -> 100s of hours and thousands for hosting cost?
With free-tier cloud services you don't need to pay _any_ cloud costs. 100s of hours for a software engineer? You can build a pretty involved website with that.
This would only be inflated if your engineer is a junior with no experience.
For the genetic testing for education attainment thing, I think that the main work will be figuring out the correlations and creating a simple proof of concept CLI program which just prints a few probability estimates.
I agree that this is commonly the end result of open source software developed by hobbyists (certainly for my projects). Investing time to make it usable for the masses of Windows users which are unwilling to do a git clone and follow a few lines of compilation instructions sounds a lot less rewarding.
Luckily, the transition from arcane CLI utility to website usable by anyone can be accomplished by throwing money at the problem. The results for "turn this tool into a website" seem to me way more predictable than "study correlations between genome and EdAt, and see if you can predict the latter" (which sounds more like a master thesis or something). Given that Scott clearly cares about that project, I think that he might be willing to spend a few thousand euros to create and host a single-purpose website, as well as coping with the "How a website tries to create the world of Gattaca" stories which will inevitably appear.
For the IAT, I think that building a basic version using java script is probably not all that hard for proficient web devs. Making it so that people can upload their own tests would be a bit more work, but "upload a zip file with four directories, A, not-A, B, not-B with images and word lists" seems a compromise between "the modal internet user can probably do this" and avoiding having to implement a full-blown editor with image support and everything. (The real problem with the IAT is see is hosting a site where everyone can post pictures. Someone will intentionally create tests which are offensive on purpose, so you want to have moderators or something.)
For dating websites, user interfaces are of course more central than that. But I don't think people generally go "this website is using less than four javascript libraries. I can even load it on my five year old phone. This is horrible." Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and so on all started small. The bloat will come on its own.
This is definitely a notable time sink. The easiest way is to make it work on a relatively small device, in which case it will "work" on the larger device (but just be super annoying because it wastes a huge amount of screen space). Ideally though, you would build something that properly scales up and down based on available resolution like you suggest, but this is a quite time consuming process to get right.
I gather that it can't be automated, and if it could be automated, the requirements would change soon enough that the automation wouldn't work any more.
There are definitely people who are building tools to make it easier to build responsive websites (websites that work on all resolutions), and things have improved greatly over the years. I suspect things will continue to improve, but at the moment it still takes at least some thought and effort to build a proper responsive webpage.
You can half-ass it (like most people do) and get something that works at like 2 resolutions ("phone" and "desktop"). This is notably less work than something that works at all resolutions and it is often considered "good enough". This website is an example of such a thing, it works at a few resolutions and it feels "bad" at others but not too terrible.
Technically different things. Neurofeedback involves giving someone a readout of their own brain activity in real-time so they can try to alter it towards a certain goal. #1 involves measuring someone's brain activity and altering the external stimuli to match it. The former is internal change, the latter is external change.
Based on how much latin and ancient greek I've picked up just from reading acoup.blog every week, and how I enjoy reading sci-fi or fantasy with passages in constructed languages, I feel like the language teaching novel is a great idea. It would require a lot of skill to do well though, not just in both languages but also a literary sensibility.
Absolutely. We have examples in fiction of intelligent systems that optimise presentation of material to enhance learning (e.g. the AI in Enders Game, or the Young Ladies Illustrated Primer from the Diamond Age). It seems that if we take what we know about learning and spaced repetition, throw in a dash of AI to make it hang together and gamification to enhance motivation, we should be able to create something really outstanding for getting people to fulfill their learning potential.
I'm keen on this too, but current life situation doesn't really allow me to work on it. It's something I hope to get to at some point, or that someone else will build it and I'll get to use it.
I am definitely interested in working on this. Actually I am currently trying to work on something like this for my job as a physics and math teacher.
However, I have to admit I am rather skeptical whether this would ever become a revolutionary technology. The reason for this is: There are already people creating games, movies, and various apps for the sole purpose of entertainment. 99% of these fail, for the simple reason that they are competing against other, slightly more entertaining games. If you were to make an educational system, whether it would be like a game or something like TikTok it would still have to compete against actual games and actual TikTok. With the handicap of having to be educational for real you would almost certainly lose.
Now, with my main point of skepticism stated clearly, how do one volunteer for this project?
This is an extremely good point. There are mitigating factors though - while such a system should aim to be as motivating as the best games/movies/apps, there is a level of motivation that comes from learning too that those games/movies/apps don't generally have access to. Another factor is that what counts as success - while what I envisage would aim to make profit, it wouldn't necessarily have to make profit at the level of a hits based industry, it'd be aiming at something a bit longer term. Finally, within reason I think such a system shouldn't worry too much about cloning what works - in most entertainment, too obvious a clone is something to be ashamed of and some level of pushing the boundaries is expected, but if the entertainment is only one part of the goal, I think that cloning successful mechanics is more acceptable.
Rather than "educational for real" being a handicap, a pill whose foul taste the rest of the meal is obligated to conceal, think of it as a potential spice in its own right, key ingredient for reaching an under-served demographic: people who are currently making a conscious choice to avoid TikTok and similar because, while tempted by the empty rhythms of entertainment, they want to actually be learning things.
If entertainment can survive having "offensive content" excluded, or being bound to various political agendas, it can surely also cope with a requirement to convey particular scientific knowledge. "Edutainment" got a bad name because of a principle-agent problem between the schools or parents making purchasing decisions, and the kids who'd actually end up using it.
For whatever it's worth, there has been a paper that looked into the utilization of machine learning for the optimization of flash card presentation (trading off number of repetitions with long-term retention) which another person implemented as an add-on for Anki. You feed your Anki history into it, it spits out a vector of parameters which you then put back into the add-on's config file.
Given that Wiki Walk is a pretty real cognitohazard for a large enough chunk of people for initial prototyping, like how do we construct topic-specific hypertexts to use it for good?
Some gamified wiki setup that rewards people with points and badges for contributing snippets of knowledge? But it also needs some scoring/rating system for accuracy and understandability.
Apparently even without badges people end up tracking the stats one way or another. Not simplifying things to Wikipedia's «article quality», but separating accuracy, «level», and maybe «text quality» — that sounds like a good idea.
Probably different levels could be useful, but unclear how to structure them to avoid duplication of accuracy checks…
Separating writing quality and technical-detail accuracy seems like it could be reasonably straightforward, but rather than "level" as a scalar value, I'd recommend laying it out as a directed graph of prerequisite subjects: "this explanation assumes you already know X" and "once you think you've got this figured out, see Y for more advanced aspects."
Specialists are notoriously bad at judging how many steps their specialty is from genuinely common knowledge, https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Familiarity ...but mapping out immediately adjacent parts of the tech tree seems like a much easier problem, and then those can congeal into a wider map.
Another useful feature could be explicit tagging for different degrees of epistemic rigor. Rather than categorically excluding original research, make that flow naturally from someone reaching the end of a documented prerequisite chain and realizing they know what ought to come next.
Wiki walks live exactly on the non-serial nature, and yes I find them desirable.
Nodes are probably pieces of explanation, and getting granularity right is probably hell. Depending on the background, people need different amount of details, but might also prefer different points of view on the same facts…
Procedural knowledge is kind of a trap; procedural knowledge like «what is a proof and what is not» is still not easy to transfer without human feedback, but it kind of needs to be learned once… the easier to define procedural knowledge is often needs replacement anyway (e.g. guiding symbolic-algebra systems is a different skill than computing derivatives by hand, and we are not good at defining the former yet)…
So maybe «how to replace textbooks with something less linear» is an unbounded enough project not to think about the not-text-with-images part yet. Of course if there a picture can be easily made parametric and someone volunteers, that's a cool contribution, but this improvement is not aiming at the core of the non-text-stuff issue.
I often think about how computer based learning for kids has mostly been a wash in term of results, and how I'd fix it. When I see kids use the software it looks like a flash intro from 2001.
Imagine if we created a reading or Math program that was as well designed and cost as much to make as a triple-A game. How awesome would it be?
I think you need to use game dynamics to get people to learn, very high reward values for leveling up, competition with your friends. Teams to create social dynamics where you want to succeed. You'll need to use AI to understand where they are and help them achieve mastery. You need large scale to run A/B tests to see what gets kids learning faster and more reliably. There i
They were obviously not designed for that end, but regular computer games in a foreign language (the more text the merrier) already accomplish that. That's how I learned most of my English. I'm sure I'm not alone. Luckily many games today are released with localisation to major languages.
I've used YouTube shorts for that, I guess these are equivalent. They are short, loop by default and often have transliteration on the screen. When it's only marginally eluding your comprehension, after a few times you understand it completely, a few words to lookup notwithstanding.
Another key feature that distinguished 2011 OKCupid from what followed is the thumbnail display of profiles, sorted by match percentage. It enabled you to "browse" instead of being pushed into making a binary decision one random profile at a time.
On language learning (#4) -- There are web plugins that substitute foreign vocabulary words into your webpages as you read, with a slider for how far down the vocabulary list you want to replace. Since most of the page is still in English, you pick up the meaning of the words by context. Since I mostly just want to be able to read foreign languages, and the hardest part of that is vocabulary (you can mostly just ignore word-ending changes) I find this pretty useful.
The main issue with the language learning idea I think is that it’s fundamentally a translation learning style, which is not how polyglots tend to recommend learning languages. Instead you want to think of a language as a tool that you use on the world. Japanese is not just English but with a different vocabulary and grammar style, it’s an entirely different way of conceptually interacting with the world.
I do think this might be useful for learning more vocabulary within the same language; though. Chapter 1 uses basis vocabulary, chapter two starts replacing “good” with “excellent” and so on.
> it’s an entirely different way of conceptually interacting with the world.
It may be that, but it's not clear to me that existing teaching methods really give you any of that either. And even if you don't get it directly, most people aren't trying to be polyglots, they just want basic translational and understanding skills.
I think the low end of language learning will probably be replaced by AI tools. Anyone that isn’t committed to the massive project of learning another language will just use a quick translation tool.
> most people aren't trying to be polyglots, they just want basic translational and understanding skills
This is a false dichotomy, and the largest group slips through the cracks. Most language learners are learning a single second language, and while they don’t expect to become fluent, they do want to be able to perform basic social interactions and have simple conversations.
And this modest goal is incredibly hard to acheive. It absolutely requires the language-as-tool framing Kiefer is proposing.
I'm not so sure - if there was a way to have basic translation even without a different conceptualization of the world, I think a lot of people would use it, especially if it was easier than existing methods. Though to be honest, I'm not exactly sure what you're claiming is preventing people from having basic conversations using "just" translations. Do you mean something about the culture, like levels of formality in Japanese?
You can’t learn to play basketball from watching tape. You have to practice running, dribbling, jumping, shooting, and critically, you have to get real world feedback from your actions. Language is the same.
I’m skeptical that you *would* make it to the end of the book. It would be like trying to learn a single piece of music - but never practicing scales, never improvising, never listening to new songs. If it’s any harder than three blind mice, you’ll probably never learn the song. And even if you did, it wouldn’t generalize.
We already know how to learn languages - spend hours and hours on every aspect, most importantly conversation. (This is expensive, but eg italki is really your best bet.)
If you want to accelerate language learning, that’s great. But what is missed by Scott (and Duolingo for that matter) is that you have to have some grasp of what actually works.
Given that English is my second language I can (anecdotally) affirm that using a foreign language to order some food/ask for something/etc/etc basic kindergarten stuff doesn’t require one to use another’s language conceptualisation
Basically if you speak somewhat similar language (I speak Russian, for example) natively, then it’s possible for you to have simple communications translating a phrase in your native language word-by-word. It doesn’t give you much of a conceptual understanding but definitely allows you to have all sorts of basic conversations
Also, the things that startle me in my-second-language written by my-fourth-language native speakers are traceable to vocabulary (two things being expressible by the same word aren't always even considered close in the target language…). Sure, it's all European languages, though.
I happen to know some hebrew and it doesn’t seem too hard to use the same “translate everything verbatim and dgaf about syntax”, but sometimes I wonder would I be able to do so in, say, Chinese or some African languages
Sometimes translations done by non-first language speakers are technically correct, but um...
My two favourite examples of this come from old foreign language movies with subs done in English.
One was a Chinese martial arts/historical fantasy movie. The group of heroes gets beaten up by the baddies until New Guy turns up to assist them and turn the battle. Afterwards, they're injured, so he invites them back to his house for medical attention:
"Come back with me and get plastered!"
That's - not the correct phrase in this context, though I see where you're going 😁
(Get plastered, in Irish/British English, means "get drunk". I'm presuming they meant to convey he was inviting them back to get sticking plasters,* or mustard plasters**, or plaster of Paris for casts and the like for their wounds and injuries).
Second is an old Tamil language mythological/devotional movie, where the god Shiva is speaking with his spouse Parvati about how pleased he is with her devotion and his general state of contentment:
"I'm feeling groovy".
Probably very current English at the time this was being translated, but again - not what we'd use for this context.
And, I guess, the dichotomy is very real, there is a barrier between being understood and being able to phrase something in a way that’s possible for other speaker to understand verbatim.
There is no discrete threshold for that, I suppose, since you sorta gradually learn what the appropriate grammar is, etc, but it seemingly makes sense to distinguish speaking other language with extra signals (e.g. hand waves) and word-by-word translations from speaking other language while staying completely or almost completely in syntactic norms
I had five years of English classes at school, but what actually really taught me English was reading books, fanfiction and watching movies in English, all completely passive activities with no language-as-a-tool component. Yes, speaking lacked elegance and flow and I only got better at that (and oh, pronunciation! stress patterns!) when I started regularly having conversations in English, but 90% of my skill is from media consumption.
I've long wanted translations in the style that Scott describes. I think some people approach language learning as a vocabulary memorization game and the flow, style, idiosyncrasies of the language as unimportant (and sure, it is, if all you need is to get very basic points across - but it's the best part of another language!)
I think what I want to get at here is that it's less of a translation than usual translations, because they translate the stuff that gives a feel for the language and the grammar first, and the vocabulary last. It gives you sentences like you'd create in that language, but with vocabulary you're familiar with. That's taking out most of the things that are harmful at translation-focused language learning.
I agree about translation based learning being sub optimal but I have thought for a while that it should be possible to use LLMs and generative AI to come up something that actually simulates full immersion. Like imagine a star dew valley type experience, basic graphics, where you are repeatedly forced to interact with characters who speak no English. It progresses you through various contrived situations from initially just naming and pointing at objects, or actions, repeating back selections of words people offer, then recounting basic stories etc. basically simulating the process a child goes through to learn a language - sense data -> language instead of language -> language.
Something similar has already been done with no graphics at all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gostak#Interactive_fiction so I'm cautiously optimistic. Maybe something a bit more like Factorio, but with no useful option for violence? NPCs chat and trade among themselves, only way to stop them from stealing what you build involves asking politely, but fancier structures provoke stricter standards for eloquence.
Ideally, mastering complex grammar would also let you offer beneficial deals, which they'd accept when appropriate, or else give coherent, contextually-grounded reasons for refusing. That might require alarmingly agentic AI to properly implement, though.
I'd enjoy a 4-like book even if it didn't, in the strict sense, "work" for "teaching language". Actual fluency is more effort than I feel like expending (even watered-down stuff like dicking around on Duolingo takes effort), but it'd be cool to, like...be able to watch anime without subtitles. Lots of experience avenues open up even with just a passing level of interpretation.
I also wanted to point out that my Substack is something an attempt to educate people on the breadth and history of art and aesthetics, as most art /architecture magazines are very uncritical of contemporary aesthetics and art styles. Any change in this area starts with education, as “I like old architecture” or “art used to be more beautiful” is generally too vague to be actionable.
I have a team that is working on the dating site more or less as Scott described (for everyone, not just rationalists). I have a data science/machine learning background so we will try to take a data-driven approach to solving the social engineering problems. If you're interested in getting involved (especially re: funding) contact me at tmoldwin[at]gmail .
It is more "okc before 2012". ;) Difference: a) it was not yet sold to a company that felt the natural need to make money out of it. b) it was used mostly on laptops/desktops, NOT on smartphones, and that has made all the difference: Writing longer texts about yourself and even more reading those of potential partners got way less comfy - same with longer letters - so people did less of that. On a big screen it is fine to see several pics of potential matches even with added data (age/place ...) . Not on a smartphone
You would write a profile several paragraphs long and publicly answer many yes/no and multiple choice questions about yourself (it was common for people to answer >100), and the website would estimate your compatibility score with everyone else based on your answers. A man would message a woman and wait for a response (didn't need to "match" with or be "liked" by her first) instead of swiping right on her and waiting for a match.
I am a data scientist, and I wanted to work on #2. However, the best datasets, e.g. the UK Biobank, are locked for "legitimate researchers" and take particular care NOT to allow this specific thing. If I tell them that I have no degree and I want to use the dataset for correlating genes with IQ, they won't even answer my email.
So what I'm getting at is - if anyone reading this is associated with a research institution and wants to make this happen (apply for access to UK Biobank), I am willing to do the data side of this for free. petar.istev@gmail.com.
I think the barrier is access to data and the size of data. Raben, Lello, Widen, and Hsu tried looking at different machine learning methods and found they performed about as good as LASSO (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-37580-5). Might be good to reach out to Steve Hsu on this, Scott. :)
Others have tested deep neural nets and haven't found large gains from them. In general, there seem to be good theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that linear models are accurate for the purposes of predicting individual traits. Hsu has some papers on this.
I don't know anything about the task of analyzing genetic datasets, not even the sample size and number of covariates, but: the kind of problem you describe seems perfectly suited for Bayesian regression methods, BART (Bayesian Additive Regression Trees) in particular. It has a hierarchical prior giving more weights to main effects, less to second order interactions, and so on. As far as Very Bayesian methods go, it's quite fast and scalable. I'd expect it to perform much better than LASSO. There exists a variant of BART called DART which does variable selection with shrinkage. The only question then is if the dataset is too large for the level of optimization of current implementations, which is not that good yet. Could you tell me what are p and n, and what's the type signature of the covariates?
I'm afraid that is against the rules of the UK Biobank. When one applies (as a researcher at an approved institution), one states what data one wants to work with and why, and that is provided via their system, the Research Analysis Platform. Researchers are not supposed to be doing stuff which isn't what they said they would do in the application - and if the system is the same as it used to be, it's actually not possible to access data not originally requested (ie if I am researching cancer, and I don't ask for participants' educational attainment data, I won't have it in the data I am provided with for that project). The same is true for All of Us, the American database, although submitting a new plan is easier in that setup, and you don't have to specify which data you need beforehand.
Your possession of a degree is irrelevant. You need to be vouched for by a trusted system, and according to the UK Biobank website, what they want is affiliation with a bona-fide research institute which has previously conducted health-related research. Most universities across the world will count for this. But they aren't handing out personal genetic data to just anyone, and they take care to ensure that their users know not to do that as well.
And how exactly can I have an affiliation with a bone-fide research institution if I don't have a degree? I'm basically subhuman for academia and bureaucrats.
Even if I did, this specifically, the correlation between IQ and genetics, is explicitly forbidden to investigate.
That (first point) is a problem you will have to work out yourself, I'm afraid, since I don't know your situation. If you can find a research group with an interest which matches yours, and you are really committed to this project, it would be worth asking if they have space and cash to hire a data scientist. However, cash is always scarce in academia. But you might get lucky.
As to the second point, the UK Biobank publications include two which mention heritability of IQ/educational attainment, so I think you may be exaggerating somewhat, but it isn't my field:
Anyway, what you are talking about is not a simple thing, it's a full-fledged project. I would guess it would take a year at minimum, with support. If you have never worked with human genetic data before, and I'm guessing from your post that you haven't, don't underestimate how annoying biology is.
Also, the reason these datasets are closely guarded is because data are not free. Are you, personally, willing to stick your genome online to let anyone play with it? If so, good on you - that's pretty impressive (and if you haven't already, please check out the relevent local big database and volunteer). If not, then you are in the same boat as the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who have contributed their data to the various big health databases around the world. They are promised privacy and due care. That means doublechecking all those who want to work with the data, and if you want access to that very personal information, you have to pay the dues.
Or start working with mice. They don't care about privacy. But the connection between EA and genetics would be rather harder work in mice, I suspect!
However, I still feel pretty confident that this is a very doable project, and not a year-long endeavour.
Let me modify my offer: if anyone reading this is associated with a research institution and wants to make this happen, I am willing to do the data side of this for free.
Have you done the estimates for how much of the variance in EA you could explain with the biobank's 500k sample? Hsu did this for height last decade (unsure which paper, but you could dig it up)
I'd recommend settling for some lower-quality dataset which is accessible without any felonies. If there's truth to be had, some of it will still be in there, and if the service is worthwhile, better data will become available to refine the model as time goes on.
FWIW, pharma companies can also access UKB (I work in one and have access to it, having only an undergrad degree in a relevant field). So, maybe look for a rationalist or effective altruists owned company that can convince UKB they're doing a pharma research?
#2: Whenever people here start talking about selecting for higher IQ I pipe up in favor of a couple of alternatives, and I'm doing it again here. Assuming it was possible to identify genetic contributors to either of the following, I think it would benefit our species more to select for them:
-Mental health, especially a low risk for depression. While depression, except for the fairly rare godawful kind, is less disabling than schizophrenia & bipolar illness, it is MUCH more common. Even if your sole goal is to increase productivity and speed up scientific advances I think you might come out ahead there by reducing the population's burden of chronic sadness and inertia, rather than raising average IQ.
-High empathy and a low propensity for violence -- argument in favor is similar to the one for low vulnerability to depression.
Also note also that both of the above are much better candidates for reducing human suffering than increased IQ is.
Mental health, high empathy, and particularly low propensity for violence are positively correlated with IQ, so any selection on IQ selects for these traits as well. And generally, embryo selection can optimize for a variety of traits without much loss of selection power. For example, if you have 4 SD of selection power total and two completely independent traits X and Y you're optimizing for, then you can apply 4/sqrt(2) = 2sqrt(2) SDs of selection power for both X and Y, rather than 2 each (once again, the effective power is even greater if X and Y are positively correlated, which most beneficial traits are)
Another reason to optimize for IQ is that measuring it is much easier than measuring other traits. My understanding is that IQ is the most reliably measured psychometric variable, with other tests being noisier and less reliable. This has benefits in constructing accurate predictors.
There have been lots of studies of the relationship between mental illness and IQ, with results all over the map, some studies finding a positive relationship and some a negative one.. My impression is that the later and better studies find no relationship. Here's a good one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5014225/
IQ is the most easily measured trait -- far easier than creativity, sociability, etc. But depression is not a trait, it's an illness, and is not difficult to measure. The gold standard is diagnostic interview with very clear criteria where you get high test-retest reliability and high inter-rater reliability. I and someone I was working with on a study trained in administering the diagnostic interview and had inter-rater reliability of about 0.90.
So I agree with you that selection for other things besides IQ would be a good thing to do.
And fortunately, it is already being done! Genomic Prediction includes risk of depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder in their health index that is currently being used to select embryos.
I agree that empathy and low propensity for violence would also be good to select for, though the issue there is lack of phenotype data. You could likely get a lot of genetic data from prisoners arrested for violent crimes and form a fairly strong predictor. But this is one of the areas where there is almost no research being done, for what I believe are mostly political reasons. There is a very strong belief among some academics that genetics have no or little effect on human behavior, so any study that could undermine that narrative is not especially popular in funding committees.
While I would agree that reducing depression and mental health risk would be more effective at reducing suffering for the treated individual, my best guess is that increasing IQ would likely have a larger effect on society as a whole via an increased rate of scientific innovations like better medical treatments.
FL-Teacher here (German). I remember your "crazy idea for language teaching" and "can’t think of any reason this would work" ;) - See: Foreign language teaching in US-schools (+other countries) is pretty broken (as Bryan Caplan declares so often), and this may explain why you people come up with most of the "crazy new ideas" for FLT (during my Master, I learned about a couple of them, including a group-therapy-approach). Thing is: FLT is not broken. With good course-material, a reasonable schedule and a competent teacher: it actually works mostly fine.
As I am a) kinda qualified - b) underworked - c) an "embarrassing fanboy" d) actually believing this approach might have some use with German for English-speakers (Japanese: ... less so ...)
I am a native German speaker, and have a background in teaching and education (not FL, though), as well as in translation. I am interested in this project as well. If you want to connect, let me know as a comment and I can shoot you an email.
Btw. I do think starting with a German graded reader (A2) a more promising approach than "Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften". Also, there is a text that tries to teach Grammar ("Die Schöne ist angekommen" Grammatik-Krimi) - and the exact thing Scott thinks about, but for heavily simplified orthography of German (English could use that even more), where the author introduces one new simplification each chapter: "fom winde ferfeelt" by Zé do Rock
I'm going to try the language learning idea for learning Estonian -- while reading ACX.
I'll process all next ACX posts with ChatGPT, will probably make a browser extension to do it automatically. Here is the prompt:
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I'm trying to use a new method to learn Estonian language. I'm going to read a text in English, which shown below. Please replace some of the English words with Estonian words. Just simple ones at first, ones that were obvious from context.
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I’ll be starting a new round of ACX Grants sometime soon [...]
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and the result:
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I’ll be starting a new round of ACX Grants sometime soon. Ma ei saa garanteerida I’ll fund all these projects - some of them are more like vanity projects than truly effective. But ma võin fund some of them, and others might be teostatav without funding. Nii if you’re feeling left out and want a põhjus to devote your life to, here are some lisad.
Replicate aju entrainment learning results.
Osused needed: familiarity with EEG
Eelarve: A few thousand dollars for machines, plus a few hundred hours of your aeg?
Tasu: Inimesed can learn things several times faster?
In 2022, a meeskond at Cambridge found that experimental subjects õppisid faster when stimuli were presented at their brain’s unique alpha rhythm. The teadlased monitored their brain waves to figure out exactly what each subject’s alpha rhythm was (usually a pattern of flashes about a dozen times per second), then presented a flashing pattern that hit the trough of each alpha wave, then asked subjects to solve tough visual recognition problems. They found the alpha entrainment helped them õppida faster:
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The result is quite good, it's exactly what I need on my current Estonian level.
My goal is to learn words -- I don't care much about grammar. From my experience with learning English, grammar is relatively easy to grasp after having a large enough vocabulary. Knowing only very basic grammar, you can improve it from reading and listening. Also, Estonian grammar is so weird that it's impossible to transform English into it's resemblance anyway.
Main problem is that I can't control how many words ChatGPT is replacing. If I add more instructions to the prompt like: "Replace at least 1 word in each sentence", "Replace 50% of words", it replaces all words, doing a full translation.
Maybe someone talented in prompt engineering can help?
As a native estonian speaker most of the replaced words felt quite normal to read in an english text, especially for nouns and verbs. For words like "so" it doesn't work that well due to the different grammar. So judging by this example it does seem like a fun and interesting way to learn new vocabulary. For estonian you do have to keep in mind that there aren't any prefixes but instead the word endings change. So if in english you have "in a car" and "into a car" then in estonian it is "autos" and "autosse". Same applies for past, present and future for verbs. That might make learning vocabulary a lot harder, especially since there are 14 different forms for nouns.
Also ChatGPT might have made a typo, the word for "skills" is "oskused" not "osused". That is quite a big difference in pronunciation.
Isn’t the answer to 8 just lobbying? In practical terms, get a bunch of money and hire a k-street outfit that draws from whatever regulator or political tendencies in congress are on your side.
In gears-level terms, you need to connect your reform to the interests of the people who can make it happen, then increase its salience. For congress, that’s donations and lobby connections to reps who have sway and/or are on the relevant committees. For regulators, that’s industry connections and and getting plum bookers to make it a hobby horse through connections.
The missing moods in your take are image/action distinctions and patronage. In the US, where individual politicians fates aren’t wholly tied to their parties, get lots of credit for grandstanding (sponsoring bills, endorsing things), not much for doing things (passing laws). Make something popular, and everyone will introduce laws to do it but no-one will achieve anything because that’s too far downstream of anything you get credit for with the electorate if you’re not the president.
Patron-client relations are how things actually work; in summary, people align with someone important and do them favours, on the basis that that person (more likely, their other clients) will do things for them. The patron is basically a co-ordinator, much of whose influence comes from their clients.
Lobbyists are patrons for profit; they can donate to campaigns (politicians) and find people jobs (everyone, including civil servants), as well as acting as a favour clearing house in the normal way. They don’t have to promise anyone anything, but you know they’ve got your back because you’re their client (in the patronage sense, not the customer who foots the bill).
I’m really interested in #3, #4, #7, and #8, and willing to contribute to any of them if anyone takes them up, although, as an otherwise unremarkable ‘guy who graduated in polsci from a top uni and is into old architecture as a hobby’, I wouldn’t be outstandingly useful for any of those. I’ll have a look into #8, at least :-)
I am looking for something related to #8: a primer on ethical, effective methods of political persuasion. With your background in poly sci, can you suggest anything?
Everybody seems to know George Lakoff's work relating linguistics to politics, but linguistics isn't everything. Research in areas such as cognitive biases, marketing, and political science should be relevant, but I've had trouble finding this sort of thing.
I hadn’t actually heard of Lakoff, seems very interesting, thank you. I think Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind, made a broadly similar argument that conservatives and liberals had distinct values and that it was interesting to study those differences. The thing it most directly reminds me of is all those social psychology papers that claim that conservatives are conservatives because they’re anxious, and it makes them want authority more, or whatever. Probably an inkling of truth in there (in times of distress, people do tend to turn back toward the ingroup, in a somewhat more conservative manner), but quite biased, of course. But none of that is the same as "effective methods of political persuasion", and I’m not fully sure what those would be? I assume that, while Scott was asking for "how to convince the government to move", you’re asking "how to convince a member of the public to change their views on something"… and that’s something a degree in polsci focuses much less on. I’m also interested in psychology, in people believing in weird conspiracy theories, etc., however, and you might want to look that way for part of the answer. Basically, if you want to convince your uncle that the Illuminatis aren’t actually responsible for the socks he’s lost in the wash, you have to befriend him, accept that he actually believes what he does, and go from there, by helping him question, himself, all the details that aren’t quite right in his narrative. A bit like what this guy does: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes
Thank you for your helpful reply! Knowing what political scientists say that is related to my question helps me find what I am looking for. Knowing what they don’t say prevents me from barking up the wrong tree.
I have read Haidt’s Righteous Mind and a book by Hetherington and Weiler on authoritarianism in politics. The black guy talking to the KKK and Street Epistemology are new to me. Thank you.
I recently asked someone with a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology about this. She recommended the book “Influence” by Robert Cialdini, which I have just started to read. This is a wise but not at all obvious choice. The book is not about politics, but the political implications are obvious.
4 sounds a lot like https://donquixote.fun/ (which has content in Spanish, Italian, German and French) except that it progresses one sentence at a time. (When I last saw it, it was actually using Don Quixote as the text, but people didn't like the archaic language https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26601643 )
⸻ ⸻
After self-experimenting with various language-learning methods over the years, my current favorite is to do lots of dictation exercises (to force the foreign language through my head) until I know a few thousand words, then start reading comics (consuming at my own pace + pictures to aid with understanding).
For dictation, the simplest option is to take an existing Anki deck with audio files and modify the card templates to have a "type answer" field; slightly more complex is to start with https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en/datasets sorted by word frequency and construct an Anki deck from that; my most elaborate attempt so far is https://github.com/Yorwba/alphabet-soup but the scheduling algorithm would require significant performance optimization to be useful as a web service, so I've mostly left it to rot for now.
Even if you don't get them, I'll just copy down their advice here, it's invaluable:
"AshLael
2 years ago
Context: I have worked as an advisor to 3 different (Australian) Senators.
I would say if you want to maximise political impact-for-effort, the best method is probably:
Form a lobby group. You can literally do this with a handful of friends. Give yourselves some sort of name that sounds like you might represent someone, appoint people office holders, adopt a constitution. The group doesn't need to do anything, it exists purely for you to be its representative.
Call up politician's offices and ask for appointments to express your concerns about some bill that's coming up. Some will meet with you, some will have their advisors meet with you, some will ignore you. But you'll get a much higher strike rate than you expect.
Take the meetings, sit down with legislators or advisors, tell them what you like or don't like about the proposed law and how you would like to see it changed. Literally no one will ask how many people you actually represent or why they should listen to you.
Most importantly, *rinse and repeat*. Find any opportunity you can to call around and ask for new meetings. You will build relationships over time, and legislators will learn and begin to internalise your concerns.
Why this works:
Politicians and political advisors spend a large percentage of their time having meetings with concerned interest groups. You're not asking them to take time out of their normal schedule to talk with you, you're slotting into their normal operations. It's not at all hard to get a meeting. I've seen professional lobbyists who make careers from "getting access" for corporate clients. It's pure grift, the client could have just called and asked for the meeting directly.
Politicians use the number of times people come and meet with them over an issue as a rough proxy for how important that issue is. Just by repeatedly badgering them on X issue, you can create an impression that people really care about X.
Politicians get most of their claims and talking points from interest groups (which is a part of why they so often say things that are so misleading). They do very little research of their own. There is no better way to put the salient facts in front of them, or for those facts to become a part of the public debate..."
&
"CONGRESS 509: HOW TO LOBBY WITH AN INTERNET CONNECTION AND A $3 POSTCARD
FireDistinguishers
2 years ago
...
REDUCED WORKLOAD > MONEY
When I first got my job as an LC I worked for a minimum of 40 hours a week. I don't mean I was at work for 40 hours a week. I was at work maybe 50 hours a week, of which I spent 40 hours working, 2.5 hours eating, and 7.5 hours goofing off. If there was a national crisis those numbers could double. The volume of things that need to happen on the Hill is unparalleled. So if someone comes up to me and says "Hey I can take care of that," and it turns out they legitimately can, then it's a wrap. I said it in the last post, having someone else write something that my LA was fine with circulating is *the closest thing to a bribe I've ever gotten.*
...
FOLLOWING UP MEANS MORE THAN REACHING OUT
Everybody says "follow up after your meeting" but the amount of people who take that to mean "write a thank you and never talk to them again" is astounding.
Yes, write a thank you note. Like I said we're all very busy, we took time for you, we like when you acknowledge that. Pro tip, send in thank you mail, a thoughtful letter might be something that the staffer holds on to, reminding them that you mean business. *The best thank you mail is a postcard...*"
Sorry if this is a naive question but is there any sort of FAQ or anything on ways for rationalists to impact government? If I got like 20 people to email this to my congressperson would anyone read it? Have people in congress pretty much already heard all of these arguments before and don't care?"
BONUS EDIT: It might also be worth studying Dominic Cummings... whatever you think of his (lack of) morality, there's no doubt he was effective (albeit at referendums rather than legislative politics). At the very least he seems to be one of the most open about how exactly he did what he did: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/dominic-cummings-how-the-brexit-referendum-was-won (Dominic Cummings: how the Brexit referendum was won) -- an abridged summary for Effective Altruists, written up in the wake of the Carrick Flynn debacle, is available at https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/how-to-win-an-election-in-10-easy?sd=fs (How to win an election in 10 easy steps: an effective altruist's guide)
I was a bit surprised to see this. I would rather see a good primer on social change, including the sorts of changes that can start small and grow exponentially, like a startup or a fad or a disease; the sort of changes that ignore politics, ooze around it; the sort of changes that by comparison make ineffective solutions look as ineffective as they are.
I suppose a charitable reading might include in a good primer on politics methods for finding and repealing bad solutions, or creating reforms that allow people to modify bad solutions by learning from experience.
A dating site that doesn't suck is a good idea. One that is old OKC is a bad idea, because old OKC wasn't good and no one but a couple weird rats liked it.
All the bring back OKC crowd have failed at answering a simple question: if it was so good, why did Tinder eat their lunch? As soon as tinder existed OKC fell off a cliff, so why would you think women would come back? You need a good explanation for why they wouldn't hate it this time just as much.
(BTW, all the normie-ish women i know hate dating docs. Not the current population of people who have them, the idea and structure. Like you show them one and they freak out and say things like "why would anyone write anything like this??? This is so unappealing to do or read!" Before you bring back long text profiles maybe figure out why women hate that? I don't understand it either but I'm not telling everyone OKC is the best solution.)
My guess is that OKCupid was for people who were serious enough about dating to write a giant profile and answer dozens of questions. Tinder et. al. have a much lower barrier to entry and become more "eh, why not? can't hurt." Thus, millions more people installed Tinder and only kinda sorta half-heartedly look through it.
Re #4, as a native Portuguese speaker with experience teaching English as a foreign language (and Science) I think I have the skills for this. Still I wouldn't do it for free as quite honestly, interesting as it seems, it doesn't seem better than either traditional methods employed by a good teacher or Duolingo used by a motivated learner.
I had similar thoughts! Except that I'm a Latin teacher. No Latin teachers are fluent in Latin, but we all have access to students to use as guinea pigs, so there might actually be a chance at cross-comparison. I started a grant proposal for #4, then read the end of the blog post and thought - "Wait , are we just supposed to mention general interest in the comments? Should we all get together and have a Hunger-Games-style elimination first to decide whose language to try it with?" I saw Dutch mentioned earlier in the comments, and a couple others have expressed interest. I hope Scott lets us all apply. It would validate this vanity project!
You're right, they can be pretty good! But I guess I'm niggling about "fluency." The type of Latin that classicists speak (even the ones in the Vatican, or the ones you mention in the comment below who rented the apartment, etc.) is not the Latin that the Romans spoke. Written Latin is highly artificial, and we know that even the vocabulary was often different, based on the way that words developed from spoken Latin into the Romance languages. By the way, I'm in complete awe of the few people who can train themselves to communicate successfully in classical Latin. But it's not the same as being fluent in a natural language.
Out of curiosity, have you used diglot weaves for teaching Latin before? I've seen them around, but they always look to me as if they go too slowly for the average student, so I've never really used them. And I've seen nothing (at least in print) that scales up the way Scott is envisioning.
#4 I know several Latin teachers who are truly fluent in Latin (they rented an apartment in Rome and only spoke Latin for a couple of years before returning stateside. Myself and a colleague communicate in Latin in front of students in order to induct them in our future Hive. I myself am not fluent enough to read the highest level texts without vocab help.
I use GPT4 (3.5 can't do languages well!) almost daily to practice Spanish, German, and Finnish. It's solid at Latin, but not as involved in rhetorical flourishes as Seneca or Cicero or the classical corpus, which is an interesting fact in itself (I would like to know the training data volumes).
I have tried several methods for teaching Latin in my time. Something like what Scott says works, however, it's very slow. I think we underestimate how many moving parts there are in languages and how slow vocabulary acquisition would be using this method. Really, once a word or grammatical form is introduced in the Tale of Genji, it would need to be changed everywhere in one's experience of text.
What I would want is an API that runs on top of everything you engage with on your phone and computer and increases the "filter-strength" a little more based upon your progress in the Tale of Genji (or heck, an Anki deck or grammar book).
I'm the cofounder of Tract (https://buildwithtract.com/), a startup trying to make it easier to reason about planning risk. One of the things I'd like to prototype, and which might dovetail rather nicely with §7, is a modern approach to visual preferences survey: a 'Tinder for buildings', somewhere local communities can vote on and discuss various architectural styles. We can use generative AI methods to slot new facades into existing streetscapes, analyse the data, and see if we can find meaningful clusters that pin down quantitively what a 'local vernacular' actually consists of.
Regarding the OkCupid clone: my sense is that it should not try to make any money – I'm normally definitely not opposed to people getting rich from their product, but I don't see it working out in this case. My first point is that maintaining an OkCupid-like site should have very moderate running costs. As I understand it, it's mostly a text-based website that doesn't need to have a lot of throughput. I think running costs could be covered by donations like Wikipedia does (in fact Wikipedia asks for way too much money; they're trying to set up an endowment fund).
Another problem with a for-profit OkCupid clone is that the company behind it will be very tempted to endlessly tinker with it in order to increase profits. This seems very unnecessary for such a site. I think once the software is written, it only occasionally needs to be slightly modified to keep up with new web technologies. There is a risk here that the site will look outdated after a while (similar to how Wikipedia looks maybe outdated), but I think that would be fine? You'd maybe need a few part time programmers for this, but most of the modifications should come from open source contributors. (As you're not making money off this software, there is no reason not to make it open source.)
The main question then is, who would be willing to fund the creation of the software if there are no profits to be made? And I think this can only be solved by a funder with public goods in mind (as might be happening here).
If someone was serious about funding this, I would maybe recommend structuring it as a competition with two (or three) rounds: multiple teams start to write software, then when everyone has a prototype, judges determine who goes to the next round and gets funding for developing it further; at the end, one team's software wins and the team gets paid to extend until it has reached feature-completeness.
I think that the usefulness of a dating website scales with the number of potential partners in your target demographic much more than other social media: I can interact with people on ACX, LW or the motte just fine even though almost all people in my country are not on them. By contrast, a dating website which, say, only includes a small part of the ratsphere will probably not be very useful outside the Bay Area, and of limited use even within. Dating websites are natural oligopolies.
Wikipedia succeeded because it had a first-movers advantage, and it is a fundamentally altruistic project: AOL had no incentive to set up their own encyclopedia wiki, and even if they had, few authors would have wanted to write articles for the benefit of AOL.
The dating website market today is very well established. I also do not see participating in a dating website as a deeply altruistic action.
I agree that user interests and company interests are rarely aligned for websites (see: reddit, twitter, etc) and often lead to what is technically known as enshittification.
I like simple black-on-white-with-blue-links old school websites. But then I am an aging male computer nerd. Like most of these, I do not want to date other aging male computer nerds. I think if you want to attract the sort of people essential to running a successful heterosexual dating website (that is, women), it would be a good idea if the website is shiny and has some fancy "app". If it requires people to use mediawiki or github syntax, it will fail.
I don't see a not-for-profit succeeding in that field, but would be happy to be proven wrong.
Are women who do happen to be nerdy satisfied with their options for finding dating prospects who can understand their interests (those women who want such)? Because if not, this gap can probably be within reach of a non-profit project… The results might not scale, but also might not require as much annoying polishing work.
Am currently developing a dating app. Similar to Tinder, but you CANNOT chat, just schedule a date and meet.
Pretty much the opposite of what Scott suggests. I feel like rationality/autism types always focus on the matchmaking algorithm whereas I think that that's all bullshit, except for the aspect described in "Sadly Porn" where people like having a "big other" saying that you are "compatible"
I've definitely had language learning books similar to #4 advertised to me in my Facebook feed. They're illustrated children's books, IIRC, and they start by swapping in a handful of foreign words and you can work out what they are from the pictures, and then they gradually increase the density. I can't remember the name now, but I'll come back and update if I see them again.
Also worth mentioning the Lingua Latina series, which does something roughly similar for Latin, except it doesn't bother with any English. It starts with a map labelled in Latin and very simple sentences that explain in Latin the relationship between the places on the map, like "Roma in Italia est. Italia in Europa est." and builds up the vocabulary and complexity from there.
I've used the Lingua Latina! A lot of their effectiveness depends on Indo-European similarities between English and Latin. But the method works. Also, I've seen the cute children's books you mention as well. There seems to be an actual trademarked method for the replacement-style of learning, based on the Clockwork Orange.
The problem with #8 is that there are orders of magnitude more "good ideas" for new laws than there is legislative capacity. In the current system, most of those good ideas don't even get the attention of someone in Congress. But if someone figured out the "cheat code" and publicized it, congresspeople would be overwhelmed, and they'd develop new filters for getting their attention.
Scott's idea sounds kind of like Search Engine Optimization - there's thousands of websites competing for the first few Google results, and as soon as someone figures out a way to game the system, Google changes the algorithm and that game no longer works. It's an arms race between you, all your competitors, and Google.
Someone else pointed out that the current system is lobbying is already designed to address this issue. And the general public is always complaining about lobbyists - making them more effective would just make the public even more mad, and nudge us even more toward vetocracy.
I think in the ratsphere, the general opinion is that overregulation is more of a problem than underregulation (possibly excepting paperclips).
The threshold a new law should have to pass is not "is this on it's own better than the default?" but "is it so much better that it is worth making our codebase larger?"
Scott's goal of reducing regulations of kidney donations feels like a typical example here.
3. One person did not accomplish this. This was part of a concerted campaign by MSF, Stop TB, and a few other organizations to let the patents expire. I'm actually kind of annoying that John Greene gets credit. Not because he doesn't deserve any credit but because MSF and other such organizations deserve much more. Anyway, eventually J+J allowed to procure generic versions of the drug in certain countries. It did not ultimately surrender the patent.
If you really want to do this the play would be to go ask MSF or other organizations what drugs they spend the most money on and then go to places like J+J and get them to agree to supply such drugs at cost to such organizations. And then possibly set up a production pipeline depending on whether they supply it themselves or simply give you the right to produce it. A good mission but not a simple one or really something that can be done without the confluence of influence, social connections, medical knowledge, and non-profit connections.
Pressuring them to give up their patents might have bad long term effects. The negative effects of being asked to give up the small potential profit of selling into certain countries while maintaining their full rights seems much less likely to have bad effects. If they feel the deal is bad they can simply leave it. And to be honest it's not like they're making a lot of money off TB drugs in Tanzania or wherever anyway. The goodwill they get from the charity is probably worth more than the potential profit (and if it isn't they can say no).
4. How is this superior to the already existing technique of sentence matching where you have two pages with one to one sentences and explanations for why they're different?
Anyway, I've already got an AI (well, a wrapper) that will chat with you in a foreign language and correct your mistakes when you reply to it. So do numerous language learning services. It speaks like an LLM because that's what it is. But it's still good for developing vocabulary and being corrected when you make mistakes. I haven't tried having it produce mixed sentences but I could take a look at it. But I'm dubious what value it provides above and beyond pre-existing language learning chatbots.
I think the value comes from being "forced" to read the foreign (or partially foreign) text in order to understand the story. A side-by-side interlinear comparison doesn't do that. It's like the difference between watching a foreign film with subtitles and without, or between taking a language class and going to live in the foreign country.
That would replicate the effect of a purely foreign-language book, which there are already plenty of. It wouldn't replicate what Scott is suggesting, which is a book that starts in English and gradually increases the proportion of foreign vocab/grammar as it goes along.
5. It's not hard to record sub-second differences. It'd be hard to sync them in real time. But you can just store test results locally and then upload them at the end. It's not that hard to make a site that helps you generate IATs either. It'd just be some CRUD infrastructure. But what would it be used for? My fear for this one is that it gets developed and it basically becomes a novelty project.
7. The sequence here is very wrong. First off, pick a medium. You have to start with one as your niche. If you're not a trained architect or a GC it's not going to be buildings. But that's fine. Furniture, as you suggest, works. Begin designing for it and either find a production team or start doing it on your own in a workshop. Then begin offering it for sale. Assuming you want to seize the commanding heights of culture make something truly special, adopt a luxury style, and charge high prices.
This will mean you won't get very many sales just from putting a store online. But you can get around this by getting into galleries and shows of various kinds which means a large amount of working the social scene around design hubs like LA or NYC (or Milan/Paris/London/Tokyo...) This will both give you the prestige to get some of those high end clients and will allow you to get a certain amount of super rich or famous clients who will spend large amounts of money on custom work. Their patronage and money in turn makes it easier to get into those fashion shows, which will also make you more famous and desirable, in a virtuous cycle. Eventually you will attract imitators by which the style will be propagated to the masses. And eventually you sell out to one of the luxury conglomerates.
If you want an organization then you just need to find designers, architects, etc with the appropriate styles and provide them studio space, commissions, etc.
I think making furniture like that (relatively) affordable (vs IKEA) might actually be harder than making buildings like that (relatively) affordable (vs modern steel+glass etc).
If your goal is to make money then affordability is the way to go. Walmart is something like 10x the size of LVMH. If your goal is to command the heights of culture then you want to go into the luxury market.
As to the difficulty: it depends on what you're willing to compromise. You can make mid tier furniture about as good as luxury stuff because the difference between a $10,000 couch and a $1,000 couch is probably more brand names and paying for prestige extras (like full handcrafting in Italy) rather than simple materials or processes. Though of course you're right that mass producing at a reasonable price point can be harder than making one offs like a house often is.
Arts and Crafts was meant to be a widespread movement to create skills and push back against industrialization. This is instead the career ladder of various kinds of luxury designers (architects, fashion designers, etc). Though they certainly use the kind of skills they'd get in such classes at the basis. Most designers have to have enough skills to make their own designs. The goal here is to get the thing mass produced eventually. Though sometimes handcrafted in Italy or wherever to charge a premium.
8. You know, I'm increasingly convinced this is just some kind of weird local knowledge. I feel like my government is pretty responsive but this is because I know who to reach out to or where to show up for public hearings or whatever. Anyone else could do this if they had that same knowledge but most people... just don't bother, I guess? It's weird. Government is really important. And local governments especially. And it's not really that hard to access.
I think the issue is that people want to outsource the work but also hate principal-agent problems. But mostly complain instead of doing anything about. Basically, if you have such access the incentive is to monetize it or serve as a specialized intermediary instead of putting it out to the general public. Both for venal reasons and because, to be honest, most people you teach don't bother to follow through. Also, most of it isn't learned from a book but from a series of experiences.
Anyway, to answer:
> Presumably the first step is convincing a member of Congress or the administrative state. How do you do this?
Step one is getting into a room with them. Step two is just normal persuasion. Step two is the harder part. Step 3 is even harder: getting them to prioritize it.
> you should get articles in newspapers, sign petitions, and hold some protests.
Eh, maybe? What you really need to convince them of is one of two things: either that it's correct (either in a moral or technical sense) or that it will win them votes. Ideally both. Keep in mind they have their own ideas of what wins/loses votes and what's right/wrong. Protests or whatever are just an honest signal of #2.
> Is there a way to avoid this? Is this your Congressman’s problem, or your problem?
It's your job to make it a battle leadership chooses to fight and to smooth it as much as possible for them. This gets into the process of whipping. Your job as an interest group is to convince leadership and then make the whipping process as easy as possible. The easier it is the less whipping that needs to be done and so the more likely leadership is to do it.
> If you want to convince the administrative state to make/repeal some regulation, do you write a letter to the appropriate official? How do you know who that is? Do they care about letters? Do they care how many protests you’ve organized?
The administrative state is regulation bound. You can convince them but only through strict procedures. Comment periods, briefs, etc. Politicians get to take initiative but bureaucrats generally don't. They act according to the rules or follow orders. They specifically do not want you convincing individual bureaucrats and to instead deal with the institution. They don't care how many protests you've organized but their bosses might.
Anyway, serious question: if EA is really so full with money and talent and wants to do some good why doesn't it just get someone appointed ambassador to some poor African country? It's not like there's a lot of competition or that anyone would object to the ambassador running around trying to get charity done. A lot of them are supposed to be conduits for aid there anyway. And it's a good chance to grow connections among elites and know who's trustworthy etc.
This is a very good comment and I heartily agree. Government tends to be pretty opaque, but if you put the effort in to knowing who is who and what they're doing, getting into a room to talk to them is hardly impossible.
Re: 8 - the answer is highly variable depending on the precise situation.
For example, during the Turnbull and Morrison governments, there was a lot of policy inertia. The government didn't have a lot of vision or purpose and was consumed with its own internal squabbles. Stuff percolated up through the public service but it wasn't really anything far-reaching or ambitious. The best avenue to change was to get a politician on side to fight for your issue and really make a stink about it.
But with the Albanese government I have been surprised to discover that getting a politician on side to yell about your issue - while obviously still really nice to have of course - is not so necessary. They have initiated a lot of substantial legislative changes and a bunch of big reviews and most of these processes are open to public comment. So you can get a surprising amount of progress by engaging with these processes. You send in a 5 page submission saying "hey your exposure draft is great but there are these 4 problems with it and we think they could be alleviated in this way and also we think it would be great to also address this related issue that your current bill doesn't look at". And sometimes you convince them.
So these are very different situations in the same country and political system. And perhaps as the Albanese government ages more policy inertia will set in. The situation may be different again in other countries. But in all cases a level of specific knowledge is needed about the system, issue, and political pressures that certain actors face.
For someone in Scott's particular situation, one tactic I would recommend is identifying the specific person you need to get the change made, and writing public posts and going on podcasts saying "it would be excellent and a testament to their wisdom if person X did Y". It's important to highlight Person X by name because Person X almost certainly uses a media monitoring service that alerts them about anything that gets said about them in the media, and prominent blogs and podcasts are very much a part of that. These people are often shockingly vain and notice when they get specific attention - Person X is among the top 0.01% of people interested in Person-X-related content. So by using their name in public you get a shortcut to put your argument in front of their eyes.
Just saw this from the quests and requests follow up email. I'd love to contribute and help. I have some time. My email is everydayemails2@gmail.com and will follow up from there if there is still energy to do something on (8) On A Primer About Political Change
My experience using diglot weaves when teaching Latin is that the few foreign words are so basic that it's pointless. I would love to find something more advanced, as Scott describes it.
>His particular big victory was convincing some pharma companies not to enforce patents for their anti-tuberculosis drugs in developing countries. How did one person accomplish this?
Importantly, he did not accomplish this by himself. He's been mildly obsessed with tuberculosis for the past few years and has been writing a non-fiction book on it. He has a lot of contacts with and advice from groups like Doctors without Borders, so he had a behind the scenes campaign of experts helping alongside the public campaign of all his followers.
If you want to do something like this again, I recommend just trying to contact him directly through an email and ask how you can help with similar efforts. I understand you have a lot of pretty influential contacts yourself and maybe you and John could help network the EA community with the anti-tubercolosis community more tightly or something.
The best contact would probably be emarshall@penguinrandomhouse.com for his press/publicity email or maybe just tweeting at him.
As a dutch speaker idea number 4 seems ideal to start of with dutch. Since it is already really close to the English language. I might contact some dutch and english teacher here in the Netherlands.
I was thinking the same thing, but then I wondered if this fuzzy gradual change would result in me being able to read both English and Dutch, but unable to distinctly speak either because they are so entangled in my brain. Or would my years of speaking English keep all of that language model on a separate brain shelf and I would be able to distinguish them? Very interesting.
Maybe the difference should be visually highlighted to help you separate the mix?
I would say that your English should be safe in any case (my first and second languages are not contaminated by the third and fourth, but when I try to remember a word in the latter two, sometimes I first remember a word from the wrong one)
“If you want to convince the administrative state to make/repeal some regulation, do you write a letter to the appropriate official? How do you know who that is? Do they care about letters? Do they care how many protests you’ve organized?” Not stupid questions. At all. Better use of time would be to figure out a better mechanism for getting the will of the people enacted. There is currently zero incentive for elected officials to take account of what people actually want. Much less the administrative state. Or make noise, because that’s all you can do at the moment. Although I’m anti socialist because it’s another centralized power scheme, perhaps it’s time to look at little s soviet type groups. The great grass roots revolution that happened in Russia was utterly crushed, but before that happened local groups got together to govern locally. Maybe it didn’t really work, idk, but what we need is less about how to navigate the current landscape and more creative thinking about how to do it differently. Along with all the possible pitfalls. I’m not talking about a new ideology, but a hard as nails look at how to distribute power. Right now your vote is just a blank check. It’s a very weak signal that’s routinely ignored. Not only does it have little to do with direct democracy, but it isn’t representative democracy either. If your government doesn’t have to care about what you want, neither writing letters nor screaming at the top of your lungs will do a damn thing. How do we make the administrative state accountable? Is it even possible or is something new necessary?
Bringing the US House of Representatives back up to one rep per 30,000 citizens, meaning a bit over eleven thousand federal legislators, might be a step in the right direction. Fewer constituents per politician would mean more time for each of them (and more reason to care about the marginal vote), while too many peers to know them all personally might make it harder to strangle reasonable policies with ideological purity-testing.
I wish someone would repeat the Implicit Association Test, but with the order switched (black/good first). I believe the test is actually measuring how long it takes to retrain your brain to quickly categorize two unrelated images.
Every IAT paper I'm aware of, including Greenwald, McGee, & Schwartz (1998) where the test was first introduced, randomizes the order of conditions. This is standard practice in any psychometric testing.
Here's the relevant quote from the paper (p. 1467):
"The two IAT measures obtained for each subject were analyzed in a design that contained five procedural variables, listed here and described more fully in the Procedure section: (a) order of the two target-concept discriminations (flowers vs. insects first or instruments vs. weapons first), (b) order of compatibility conditions within each IAT (evaluatively compatible combination of discriminations before or after noncompatible combination), (c) response key assigned to pleasant items (left or right), (d) category set sizes for discriminations (5 items or 25 items per category), and (e) interval between response and next item presentation for the combined task ( 100,400, or 700 ms). The first four of these were two-level between-subjects variables that were administered factorially, such that 2 subjects received each of the 16 possible combinations; the last was a three-level within-subjects variation. "
(b) is what you're getting at, and it was randomized such that half of the participants did the tasks in each possible order (compatible-then-incompatible vs. incompatible-then-compatible).
There was a difference between these two groups (the effect is a bit larger if you do the compatible task first), but this difference is small compared to the effect of condition (incompatible is always slower), regardless of order.
It's not surprising to me that this difference exists - my interpretation is that if you're exposed to the harder condition first, then when you get to the easy condition your brain is already in "sometimes these are hard, I should be careful" mode and you go more slowly. If you do the easy condition first, you blaze through it faster because you haven't yet been exposed to the tricky ones where your intuitive response can lead you astray, and only slow down when you get to the hard ones.
More generally: If there is some potential stupid procedural flaw you can think of in 5 minutes that would introduce a confound to a paper, it's worth checking whether the authors of the paper also thought of it and accounted for it. We're used to shitting on research psychology in these parts, but you can't just assume that every psych paper made every error you can think of that it was possible for them to make.
You should talk to Samuel Hughes (I'm sure you know him from Twitter: https://twitter.com/scp_hughes) about #7, in part because he is also quite au fait with some of the distributed answers to #8, and is already working on this question. He was the researcher for the UK's Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, which was sort of like a consensus-based committee attempt to make progress on this question.
Though I have to say that I think 'classical architecture' and 'traditional architecture' are probably the wrong framing. What we want is popular architecture (which they are a type of, but not the only type of): https://worksinprogress.co/issue/making-architecture-easy
"3. Things like John Green’s anti-tuberculosis campaign"
I would like for you to consider carefully what this does to R&D incentives - if this would be a medium to long term negative for the cause of innovation and development of solutions for developing country problems.
"3. Things like John Green’s anti-tuberculosis campaign"
I would like for you to consider carefully what this does to R&D incentives - if this would be a medium to long term negative for the cause of innovation and development of solutions for developing country problems.
And plink is software you can use to calculate scores based on genotype.
That being said, this is still pretty tricky to get right, and I think there is substantial room for improvement in terms of open-source polygenic scoring.
I'm an EEG expert and re #1: To get a clear answer to this question you would need a large sample size, probably larger than the initial experiment (~N= 80), especially if performed with consumer grade EEG systems that have lower signal to noise ratio. Also, presenting stimuli at the ms precision required by this experiment, at a participant specific alpha frequency is not trivial. One possibility to ensure the success of this replication would be to team up with the #EEGManyLabs project, a group of researchers teaming up to replicate high profile EEG experiments.
Looking at the article, at least the flickering is supposed to force the alignment of the person's rythm, so it is a prepared stimulus with millisecond precision, not something that needs realtime updates based on EEG. And if the crucial part is just figuring out the frequency, as a signal-processing task this can tolerate quite a bit of noise.
All these avoidance of hard issues does not help a failed reproduction to be a meaningful outcome, though…
I think getting to a millisecond timing is not all that difficult. An off-the-shelf microcontroller board (e.g. RasPi Zero, Arduino) should be sufficient for that, no need for FPGAs.
However, I have not the first clue about EEG. My idea would be to use one of these ~10$ breakout boards for one channel ECG (yes, I know) chips, wire them up to the analog digital converter input of the microcontroller, put both electrodes on my head somewhere (under my naive assumption that the main difference between EEG and ECG is simply where the electrodes are placed on the body) and plot the resulting signal, hoping that I see something which looks like alpha waves.
Then perhaps run a Fourier transform on the signal in real time, figure out the principal frequency and phase of the wave and turn on the stimulus with whatever phase-delay is appropriate.
Good news is that apparently you don't even need to measure the phase, and FFT can be done as a separate preprocessing phase. Bad news is that you need the same rythm — not necessarily nicely related to 100Hz or 120Hz — for flickering and the first appearance of the task image (so, high-speed diaphragm? not sure how cheap you can go with them, though). Annoying news is that the interesting stuff is to go from there to tasks beyond split-second image classification.
From your comment it doesn't sound like you are interested in actively participating in the project. But I would still like to have your email address just in case — to potentially have a email conversation about the issues outlined in your comment if they arise.
"The trouble with French is that there are far too few English words in it. Miles Kington – the critic, columnist, and creator of Franglais – puts that right. His magnificent new language can be understood by almost anyone who failed GCSE French. If you passed GCSE French it could be tricky, but do try anyway."
"Four years ago I started a column in Punch called Let’s Parler Franglais. It wasn’t meant to be a column, just a jokey language lesson called “Dans le Taxi” featuring a taxi-driver who spouted such French phrases as ‘Blimey, le traffic est dodgy…il y a un tailback a flaming Marble Arch… c’est une liberte diabolique… non, c’est murder…’
Somewhat to my surprise, it caught on. People kept coming up to me (they still do) saying this was exactly how they spoke French, and how clever I was to reproduce it. Worse still, they came up to me and talked Franglais to me: ‘Votre column est spot on, monsieur; continuez avec le bon work…’ Which was embarrassing for me, as I can’t reply in Franglais; I daren’t usually admit it, as it seems so un-English, but I actually find it easier to talk French. Not much, but a bit."
Re: 7, I'm a landscape architect in the Washington DC area and would be happy to consult with anyone pursuing this quest. I have familiarity with design review (and the approvals process) at the municipal and county level, building code, the public response part of the design process, value engineering, etc., and can help get someone started navigating all that. These things vary by municipality, state, and market, but I can help you figure out where to start. Most of my relevant experience is in multifamily housing (apartments/condos/townhomes) and commercial (stores, restaurants, shopping centers, strip malls). I also have experience in single family homes and parks but I think those are less of a focal area for this hypothetical foundation.
You'd really want to get an architect and building contractor on board ASAP, and probably also a land use attorney, since I'm a landscape and land planning professional and not an architecture expert. But I might be able to help you get started.
Email me at why0hat at Gmail dot com if you want to talk!
There actually is already an organization that promotes classical architecture in government buildings, at least, the National Civic Art Society: https://www.civicart.org.
I doubt I have the connections or expertise to head up any kind of broader promotion of traditional architecture, but I’d be more than happy to assist with such an initiative, which seems a very worthy and achievable one.
Something like a "freemium" model might be better - charge fees for specific actions which would otherwise be taken to excess, while leaving the typical path to a healthy relationship as frictionless as reasonably possible, so participants can feel clever by figuring it out.
Maybe even update the fee structure based on data from the service's ongoing operation. At first, simple stuff like discouraging unsolicited dick pics, or use of the word "bitch" in private messages to someone whose profile doesn't clearly state they're into that kind of thing, but then as a database of confirmed outcomes (and corresponding communication histories) accumulates, subtler or more context-sensitive warning signs could be assigned proportionate costs.
#8. A good primer on political change -- written from the inside
I've been writing my own case study on the journey from being an informed citizen w/ ideas to an involved citizen who has taken an idea into a bill that's been signed into law.
I try approach the Legislature, and writing about it, with "beginner's mind," because I like learning. I started an email newsletter/blog when I began my first campaign for state office last year. It's a behind-the-scenes journal to keep constituents informed.
I've received remarkable feedback from a diverse slice of voters who tell me that they feel far more informed about how things work, and they find it very readable. Example posts are below.
I do this newsletter as an unpaid part of my job to inform Vermonters, but I'd love to turn it into a book that provides answers to your questions.
We gavel in January 3rd and run through May. I have several policy areas where I'm trying to make some change. As a first-term state legislator, I don't have a lot of influence. I'm not a 6-term veteran who chairs a powerful committee. I'm a farmer, writer, and sustainability professional.
This makes things more interesting to me because if the policies that I care about get anywhere in 2024, it'll be more based on merit than seniority. I'm sure there are useful lessons in the memoirs of retired power brokers. But I'll give you a timely and accessible chronicle on what is working and what isn't working today on the question, "What’s the strategy for turning a good idea into law?"
That's what I can offer this project. I already have a lot into it, and I have an approach, but I'd love to work with a team and to be challenged on my assumptions. I feel strongly that everything gets better with collaboration.
If you have any inkling that you feel like-minded and want to contribute useful constraints/questions, writing or other media, editing, etc. -- let's talk!
I'm not waiting for financial backing to move forward with this project, but I am looking for a financial model and source of investment to bring this content to a wider audience. I'd be grateful for any support, or pointers on finding grants.
Thanks for reading this comment. Have an awesome rest of your day!
#8 - A few dozen hours of your time? This idea sounds more like a Ph.D. thesis topic. It would take more than a few dozen hours to research existing literature to determine whether something already exists.
#7 is literally my "if I were a billionaire" fantasy. My skills are: ability to make academic arguments for why modernist architecture is bad (I've published a few). I don't have any practical skills, but would happily sign on as in-house polemicist.
Re: #5: probably the initial prototype should be «dumb» in terms of content, e.g. you just upload lists of words and bunches of images for each category, then entering which mixes of categories you want to show. Also, as the topic is already marred as culture-war content, maybe downloadable archive to open locally in the browser or unpack as a static part of your website is safer…
No matter how you do it, if it is done on the user's computer, you probably cannot disentangle the delays introduced by the technical stack, and reaction time. Hopefully local delays will be relatively stable… but that probably makes only differences of times measurable, not ratios.
Re #8: I briefly dated someone who is very involved in political activism scenes, and according to her the model that is super popular right now is called the "momentum model": https://www.momentumcommunity.org/momentum-model, original book here http://thisisanuprising.org/. Although this might be more on the "social change" (i.e., get society to shift on controversial issues) rather than targeted political change for ideas that are already mostly accepted.
I came from tech and now work in climate politics at the state level, running a think tank. I've spent the last couple of years piecing together how a bill actually becomes a law.
Some highlights:
- It’s about power, not persuasion.
- Beyond electoral campaigns, there's a parallel (and poorly documented) world of issue campaigns. Getting someone elected is necessary to pass a law, but often not sufficient. If said law is controversial, you then need to push them.
- Within these campaigns, there’s a playbook for building and exercising power, with two tracks: money and people. Legislation is written by advocates and trade groups, rarely by legislative staff. This is especially true at the state level.
- Legislators care about who is asking for something, not what they’re asking for.
- Theres a sharp line between c3 and c4 activities.
- There’s an inside game (lobbying) and an outside game (protests). Effective campaigns often combine both.
- Speakers decide which bills move, not individual legislators. They often become the chokepoints, and therefore the targets, of issue campaigns.
- Strategy often hinges on whether the bill is public and controversial, or not.
- That said, the best lens to think about strategy is whether an activity generates favorable legacy media coverage.
- In terms of tactics, petitions go in the trash, phone calls only matter to the extent they’re attributed to known organization with the power to reach constituents. Protests matter if they get coverage at key times in the legislative and electoral cycle.
- Evidence matters, but not for persuasion. (See point #1)
- For regulations, it is necessary but not sufficient to submit comments. Bureaucrats ultimately answer to elected executives. (See point #1)
- Contrary to popular belief, politics is not irrational. Politicians, especially the effective ones, largely act in accordance with the incentives shaped by their position within the political system. The trick to getting policy passed is understanding this logic. And the common theme is usually: raise the political costs of not passing your policy, and raise the rewards of doing so.
Happy to flesh out and connect these (somewhat simplified) maxims.
RE #1: I have only skimmed the study, but it looks to me like they only looked at the comparative advantage that flickering has on learning depending on whether it is synchronized with alpha oscilations or not. So synchronized flicker gives you an advantage over unsynchronized flicker. But, if you really want to boost learning in normal people (Scott, I guess this is what you are aiming at?), shouldnt your comparison group be learning of normal stimuli (i.e., ones that are not flickering at all)? I seriously doubt that the synchronized flicker gives you an advantage over no-flicker. But maybe they have done that and I just overlooked it. And if not, I would look for that in the new project (and would recomend a normal EEG, not a consumer one, this will be super hard, as has already been mentioned).
7 is a really good idea. It doesn't even have to be classical architecture being advocated for; just something that isn't an eyesore. Call it ABUA: the Anti-Butt#@$% Ugly Architecture Foundation. I will serve in a low-effort role on the board of trustees.
John Green + The Stop TB Partnership’s campaign against Johnson & Johnson is very similar to how EA animal groups like The Humane League (disclaimer: I used to work there) have run their corporate campaigns, although they’ve been successful without celebrity support for the most part - instead relying on grassroots support and funding.
I think corporate campaigns should work in basically any industry where (1) corporate reputation matters; and (2) corporate decision-making diverges from popular opinion. I’m a little nervous about doing this against pharma companies making drugs for neglected diseases since it could disincentivize them from making new drugs for that class of diseases (where the financial upside is already pretty low to begin with), but I am excited about some other opportunities.
Specifically, I’ve been working on a brand/web platform that I’m hoping to use for corporate campaigns in support of AI safety (mostly asking for smaller incremental concessions from AI labs - like stricter pre-deployment evaluations or greater investment in safety research). It’s still very young and pretty… homemade, and we haven’t begun our first campaign quite yet (waiting to build up more support), but If you’d like to check it out, it’s www.themidasproject.com
> For example, maybe we should start by getting someone to produce the sort of Art Nouveau furniture everyone wistfully lists on their Pinterest before grudgingly accepting reality and buying IKEA.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but my understanding is that you can buy this kind of thing, it's just absurdly expensive since it's bespoke (i.e., everyone has unique interests and you need to have custom furniture made). I know Goldman bankers, etc., who throw $40k at custom furniture and can basically have whatever they want built but rich people don't actually want weird bespoke things, they want things that show high status.
tl;dr revealed preferences suggests to me that few people actually want this. I would love to see evidence otherwise on REVEALED preferences.
Everyone has unique interests, but IKEA has compromised for Scandinavian modernist furniture and found a few basic models that they can sell at scale. I would like to see someone try this for Art Nouveau.
It feels like the order of compromises is different, unlike the arvhitecture case: they seem to have picked well what is best compatible with the desired scale of manufacturingg and logistics, then figured out how it is called, And it seems hard to find something more manufacturing-friendly.
If you want something at the prices of merely five times IKEA (sorry, loss of scale is expensive), and scalably — not just finding a local hobbyist carpenter who agree to take a commission — I guess you will end up defining as your signature aesthetics something that is actually necessary to make shipping easier. Dunno, a panel may be asymmetrical in its own, but there has to be a matching curve on another panel?
How do we get in contact with the person doing this project? Are they just reading the comments?
Anyway, I am fluent in German and English I would be happy to do this kind of translation for a book and maybe eventually a short story. Just contact me if interested.
Re: #4 There's good evidence (for education research values of "good evidence") that extensive reading is an effective way to learn another language so this is not crazy from the outset. I also see a lot of overlap with projects like Destinos or French in Action (someone needs to remake these for the algorithm web!) and you might be able to draw on some of the theory behind them to help.
I do question whether this would be a useful method for most people who want to be able to listen and speak another language. It seems like it would be a good half of a language learning program, but only half.
#8. This book exists. It's called Organizing for Social Change and is put out by a lefty organizer training group called MidWest Academy. Of course, the tactics can also be used by conservatives and libertarians. It's very practical!
"As far as I know, proponents of classical architecture don’t have an aegis organization the same way charter city proponents have CCI or pro-progress types have Roots of Progress."
The academic center of the traditional architecture movement is the University of Notre Dame: https://architecture.nd.edu/
"Some of it is cost, some of it is regulation, and some of it is elite opinion."
Neither cost nor regulation is an important contributor to the problem. Elite opinion, especially in architecture schools, is by far the most important factor.
Regarding cost:
A) exterior ornament is a less important driver of building cost than structural and mechanical building systems. Those latter items scale more or less linearly with building size. So the main determinants of a building's cost are its location (since construction labor costs vary by region), its function (which drive the structural and mechanical code requirements) and its floor area. The use of limestone cornices rather than glass curtain walls is much less important than these factors.
B) Modernist detailing is deceptively expensive, so the apparent simplicity doesn't actually save money. And I'm talking about normal modernist buildings here, and not even touching the crazy Frank Gehry-tier "starchitect" buildings like MIT's Stata Center, which tend to be fiendishly difficult to build, expensive, and prone to defects.
Regarding regulation:
The building industry is highly regulated, but the most of the regulation deals with building use and size (zoning) and structure, fire protection, electrical safety, etc. (life safety). These regulations have considerable influence on what can be built and how much it costs, but they have virtually no impact on the decision to go with Midcentury Modern rather than Georgian Classical.
Actually, in the specific jurisdictions where regulation directly addresses aesthetics, the influence usually *favors* traditional design. These are jurisdictions where there are historic commissions or architectural review boards. They often require that new buildings or renovations fit in with the existing pre-WWII urban fabric. This does produce more traditional architecture (or, at least, prevents the destruction of old traditional architecture) in these specific neighborhoods.
The preferences of the faculty of most architecture schools, and therefore of most graduates of these schools, are what proliferate modernist architecture. Visit the websites of these schools, look at their galleries of student work and their academic design publications, and you will have your answer.
The “Black=bad, white=good” aspect of the IAT has always bugged me, because of the obvious confounder of the sun. Humans have a natural affinity for sunlight and fear of the dark, which is even baked into our language (eg “these are dark times” but “there’s a light at the end of the tunnel”) in a way that clearly has nothing to do with skin color.
John Green's tuberculosis thing is a perfect example of where rationalists' rabid antipathy to socialism just doesn't make sense to me. OK, you got one company to reduce the price for one drug. How does that solve any structural problem? As long as pharma companies are for-profit entities, their share price will come before the good of public health, and the problem will be replicated over and over again. If the pharmaceutical industry was publicly owned, drugs could be developed and released without patents. Either publicly owned entities could handle the manufacturing or privately own companies could do it, and with the drugs public domain, they would compete on price and drive down the cost to very little. That seems like an awfully effective form of altruism. And yet I never see anything like that in rationalist spaces. It makes very little sense from an intellectual standpoint; it does, however, make sense from a social-cultural standpoint.
> Either publicly owned entities could handle the manufacturing or privately own companies could do it, and with the drugs public domain, they would compete on price and drive down the cost to very little.
If it's all publicly owned, who would compete on price...?
"If the pharmaceutical industry was publicly owned, drugs could be developed and released without patents."
This is not in evidence. Firstly, publicly owned pharmaceutical industries do seek patents but the benefits instead accrue to their governments and which are still used to deny medicine abroad. Secondly, the assumption that publicly owned healthcare companies produce as many or as high quality drugs as private companies is simply not true. The profit motive is a load bearing part of how drug innovation happens right now. If you want to replace it I would want an ironclad plan. Especially given the track record you have to compare to is not the Nordics, which do have private pharmaceutical companies, but places like the Soviet Union or China. Which were not exactly biomedical powerhouses.
"And yet I never see anything like that in rationalist spaces. It makes very little sense from an intellectual standpoint; it does, however, make sense from a social-cultural standpoint."
I think the problem runs in the opposite direction. Socialists are often allergic to actually outlining their plans and have been since Marx's time. You could develop a rational socialism and I think that'd be well received by rationalists who generally lean left wing. But you'd first have to explain exactly how the solution would work in great detail and not deflect when people ask you to explain very minor details or to show it working in a pilot program. More generally you'd need to abandon a lot of Hegelian elements for utilitarian ones.
And I think this is for cultural reasons since many socialists are more interested in the Revolution(tm) in a millenarian sense more than actually making practical improvements to people's lives. Not all of them, of course, but it's undeniable that a lot of the movement's energy comes about overthrowing the System(also tm) and not about helping a few million poor people in Africa. The people who are really interested in incrementalism and wonky interventions to improve specific people's lives usually end up as vanilla-ish Democrats in the US in my experience. Which is where most rationalists end up.
Even granting arguendo that nationalizing the pharmaceutical industry would benefit TB patients in the developing world, how important different actions are to take depends not only on how good the world would be if you completely succeeded but also on your likelihood of success. John Green and nerdfighteria seem unlikely to bring about nationalization of major industries, but they do have a shot at pressuring pharmaceutical companies to reduce the prices of a few key drugs. Just because a systemic solution would be preferable doesn’t mean it’s wrong to pursue incremental change in the meantime.
There's already the NIH, which does drug research and sometimes patents the drugs it comes up with. It takes about $1 billion and a lot of infrastructure/lawyers/experts to get a drug through the FDA, so even when the NIH develops a drug, it usually hands it to a pharma company under some agreement. I support trying to lower the $1 billion barrier so that the NIH can push through more of its own drugs, and I've funded grants to this effect.
I don't think you care that much about expanding publicly funded drug research - people could easily advocate for more funding for this, but I've never seen anyone try to make it into a big political issue. I think you want to ban, or expropriate, privately funded drug research. I'm against that, for reasons I described at https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/07/reverse-voxsplaining-brand-name-drugs/
More generically, I notice you keep commenting here, going into some area you know nothing about, saying that the answer is obviously socialism, and that the only reason anyone disagrees with you is that "rationalists" are stupid and evil and biased against socialism. I find this pretty annoying and am pretty close to banning you. Not for your opinion but just for your constant insistence that anything I say you don't like represents "the rationalist movement", which is some group that apparently thinks about these issues a lot and is 100% focused on fighting socialism. I guarantee you the couple hundred rationalists are focusing most of their time on AI and aren't plotting how to discredit Marxism, and I wish you would stop trying to collective-punish the movement for any time I disagree with you.
Scott at some point you're going to have to deal with the fact that the product you've engaged with here for decades has proven vastly more effective at creating a cult of personality around you, primarily among a very particular strata of impressionable and sad men, than it ever has for any intellectual purpose. And perhaps you should engage your legendary critical thinking facilities to ponder if that's true BECAUSE THAT WAS WHAT YOU ALWAYS REALLY WANTED IN THE FIRST PLACE.
When absolutely everything that you write more firmly ensconces you in your role as Nerd King, can you really blame me for thinking that that's what you're really after?
I really like reading you, even when I disagree with you, because you can take people to task while also being compassionate. But this comment is neither true, nor necessary, nor kind, and honestly I expect better from you.
Freddie, imagine if I kept commenting on your blog with "Freddie writes articles about pop music, proving that socialism is about hating Taylor Swift". No matter what you wrote, I harped on the "Socialists hate Taylor Swift!" message.
You might have objections like:
- Even though you write posts about pop music that aren't completely worshipful, a big part of your point is that we need to think in terms more subtle than just "anyone who doesn't ultra-love pop hates Taylor Swift".
- Even if you personally loathed Taylor Swift, you aren't the only representative of socialism and it's unfair to apply this critique to all socialists.
- Even if a bunch of socialist Substackers all hated Taylor Swift, this is a boring contingent fact, and "socialism" is still about economic issues, from which Taylor Swift can only be a distraction.
- If someone was constantly posting "Freddie's output proves socialists hate Taylor Swift!" even when they were corrected on these points, you might worry it was an attempt to rile people up by tarring socialists with a position that makes lots of people mad, or at least to make it impossible to talk about important issues by keeping everyone stuck in the Controversial Outrage Bait Gutter.
This is how I feel about you applying any of my economic opinions to "rationalism". There are a dozen other rationalists you don't read, because they only talk about actual rationalist-relevant ideas like AI. But that doesn't mean you can assume whatever I say is the face of the movement.
What testable predictions does the "wanted to be nerd king" theory make which meaningfully diverge from "wanted to make the world a better place, succeeded within limited reach, resulting patch of 'better' accidentally attracted people with similar goals and definitions" ?
This seems like a great issue for you to pitch that vision on, Freddie. I think if there's a group of folks who could be persuaded by writing a clear argument, it's going to be rationalists. The vast bulk of self-proclaimed socialists seem to have a such a poor grasp of economics that it's difficult to take them seriously. OTOH, someone such as yourself who recognizes that competition and private industry actually can push prices down would be a GREAT person to argue that knowledge itself is a Public Good (in the technical sense), and should be publicly funded. Because honestly, all the other socialists seem to think that if we could just get something like our public school system, THEN we'd have good healthcare, which seems like an absolute fucking disaster to me.
As for the language thing, https://prismatext.com/ has been advertising at me a lot lately. I'd wondered if they got the idea from you or independently re-invented it. Haven't tried them, but am considering it.
It's also something that people (myself included) independently re-invent constantly. Basically I had the same idea as Scott, and then they advertised to me, and I was like "oh here's someone actually doing it. Maybe I'll just invest with them.
I have tried it out with Latin and it seems to be working nicely.
As for the dating site, I've been thinking a useful feature would be that users who are overburdened by incoming requests can establish "quests" to message them. Anything from "solve this captcha" to "slay a dragon in this embedded video game" to "write a python one-line that ...". All need to be machine-checkable, though maybe gpt allows that to be pretty sophisticated.
It establishes a sense of epicness, filters down messages to the overwhelmed, and lets people who do message signal that their message is worth reading (and maybe something about their competence). And it lets users control their experience based on their status within the dating market without hardcoding anything gender.
People you've messaged or interest-checked are immune from the requirement, and you can specify a match percentage that is as well.
My immediate reaction: how long until someone sets up a challenge «click this button _or_ pass this nontrivial test relevant to my hobby, which was tricky to set up» to inverse the direction of competence-signal.
From a development security point of view, having to securely run arbitrary user written code will be hard. Especially when the users expect a huge range of programing languages, and enough flexability to build in dragon video games.
And you just know someone is going to use it as a games platform. A person with a profile called "message_me_to_play_cndy_crsh". And copyright infringement phonecalls from the candy crush lawyers. And then someone puts popup adds in the game. Or bitcoin mining software where it only accepts after a million hashes.
Although you might make this work by finding some open source "learn to code" website and blatantly copying. Someone somewhere will have done a lot of the work to securely run user generated code.
Making this, with multiple choice quizzes only, might work. That's simple enough to not let anyone really mess you around.
Fully customizable tests for every user would be a nightmare, and probably also a lot of needlessly duplicated effort on the user end. Multiple-choice questions, though, have serious problems with signal-to-noise ratio.
How about a middle ground? Most users assemble a "quest" from standard modules with limited customizability. New modules have to go through an elaborate approval process involving actual human QA testers and lawyers, but then become available to everyone, with a reward to the creator (proportional to popularity) as compensation for the inconvenience.
Following up on implausible-sounding yet empirically validated results usually just results in regression to the mean, but when it doesn't, sometimes major theories get overturned and opportunities for drastic improvement at relatively low cost become available.
Re #4, I like the idea of the language features being explained *before* you learn the new vocabulary. I don't speak Japanese, but I imagine you could also explain this way the informal and formal version of words ("my dad" vs "Your Mr. Father"), or the counting words (five cats = "cat of five animals", but five elephants = "elephant of five heads"). Also, idioms. That's basically like reading a translation made by someone whose knowledge of English is mostly limited to the vocabulary.
But I suspect that it would require a quite long text, if you want to introduce word by word based on context alone.
How would you do the grammatical genderᵐ for languagesᵐ that have it? I think a possible solutionⁿ could be to use superscriptᵐ to indicate the genderᵐ of each nounⁿ (e.g. "n" for neutral, "m" for masculine, "f" for feminine). To perceive the informationᶠ always, but not in a mannerᵐ that ruins readingⁿ. (I tried to annotate this paragraphᵐ according to Slovak.)
Maybe a part of this could be done automatically. Have a human translate the text from the original to "broken English", but then have a computer randomly replace some English words with original ones, and if you move the mouse cursor above the word (in case you cannot figure it out from context, or you want to check that you got it right) it would show the English word. Like when you have spoilers in text. And gradually increase the frequency of untranslated words. That way, when you run out of text, you could read the same chapters second time, with different words untranslated.
I'm currently working with a small team on the dating site. Alyssa had an excellent tweet, I'm in contact with her, and she recently retweeted my bid to get more team-members on board. (https://twitter.com/freeshreeda/status/1719118204297966003)
I also think I understand the problem pretty well as it was the research topic of my choice for a recent fellowship with Ethereum Foundation (summerofprotocols.com). Happy to chat through the problem and/or share my research with people in private.
We're looking for more frontend and design support. Also donations to help us cover infra costs. We're keenly aware that the tech is not going to be the big thing — it's the network of daters that joins. We think we can do a better job of marketing such a product than things like twitterdatingapp.com (which we think is good as an MVP and product but bad at branding).
DM me on Twitter (@freeshreeda) or email me (shreedashreeda at gmail dot com) if interested!
If you're accepting free ideas: Don't make browsing profiles for a date the core interaction point but matchmaking. Do all the normal profile things of long text description, questionnaires, pictures, etc. Even allow people to browse profiles looking for a match.
Then setup a special user capability to suggest matches between profiles they browse. In any online community there's always power users, "whales" in the online gaming parlance, who spend ridiculous amounts of time on well designed apps. Outsource the work of matchmaking to them for entertainment value/monetary compensation. A somewhat neutral third party will work to obviate misrepresenting yourself (or at least change what you misrepresent on) and serve as an incentivized party to the match going well. Maybe integrate with network effect websites (social media mostly) so matchmakers that have links to both parties get a "super match"?
Monetize it by having people put money in escrow as they sign up and anytime they go on a matchmaker's date, pay out the escrow amount to the matchmaker, minus some amount for app upkeep (I admit this is probably the weakest part of the proposal since its based on humans not lying to save money, but i consider profitability disgusting so come up with something better.)
Seems like the incentives are aligned much better than profile browsing, it would allow matchmakers to do "side-hustle" style work which seems to be so popular among the Instagram crowd, and would create a cadre of people with incentives to scale the app's network.
It's pretty good. I like this not being the central product / brand point of the product. I think the manifold or manifest or whatever it is is getting that part wrong.
I love this -- haven't seen this suggestion before. Not sure it's viable (it's not clear to me that people's partner preferenes are super-legible from their profiles), but it's a great idea
if they're expecting the profile to be seen more by potential matchmakers than potential partners, that'd probably shift the incentives around what they choose to make legible.
What I would advocate is the ability to only initiate one conversation per day.
The reason swiping apps took off is that women don't want to get spammed with messages the moment they join an app. To prevent this, apps started requiring both parties to indicate interest before anyone could message. The problem is that this incentivizes superficial evaluations. Why take the time to read someone's profile if you're probably not going to match anyway? The winning move is to rate as many profiles as possible as quickly as possible. Most apps won't even let you write a decent profile and cut you off after a couple of paragraphs.
My proposal is that you ditch the swiping system altogether and limit people to sending one opening message per day (with unlimited messaging once there is a response). This incentivizes viewing lots of profiles and choosing the person you most want to connect with. If you're a shallow person, you can still choose based on appearance, but if you value personality more, you can choose based on profile. This incentivizes reading profiles and, crucially, incentivizes writing good profiles. It also gives people an opportunity to give personalized information in an opening message that they wouldn't necessarily include in their public profile. I'd also include a "save for later" option where you can bookmark a profile to message tomorrow.
From a business perspective, this also works because (a) even if you start with a small user base, people can still probably find a handful of profiles they like, so they won't run out of profiles like they do on other apps; and (b) it keeps people coming back every day. Mobile games use this model and it seems to get people coming back. You could also charge people to initiate extra conversations. If the price is right, it's still a credible signal of interest.
Other thoughts:
if you want to keep gender ratios roughly equal, why not just do that directly? Just limit the amount of active hetero men to 130% or so of the number of active women interested in men.
definitely do the old OkCupid thing of having lots of questions and, importantly, allowing people to choose for themselves which questions to weight highly (and allowing them to submit their own questions). I've seen lots of complaints about dating apps, and universally people are like "I wish old OkCupid was still around"
please have a web interface! One of the reasons profiles and messages suck these days is because apps make you type them on your phone. Let people use real keyboards!
give people the option to do a 3D body-scan. Phones can do this easily now. You don't want this to be mandatory, but it would be neat to give people the option to credibly display a 3D model of their body to potential matches.
something that would be an absolute killer app, though I'm not sure if the tech is there yet, is the option to have an AI set up a date for you. Just tell it when you're available, how far you're willing to travel, and what types of places you're willing to go, and it can contact other people who've opted in to the system and set up a date with minimal effort on both people's parts. You just tell it "set me up a date for Friday evening" and then it does the rest. It shows you a location, time, and profile of your date, and you just click yes or no.
I have my own opinion regarding spamming, which is that the current system is actually bad for both parties because women feel swamped but men feel like they are swiping into the void. My initial reaction is to divide users into seekers (who swipe on profiles) and choosers (who select from people who swiped on them) depending on their gender and gender preference. Women would be universal seekers that can swipe on everyone, while men are universal choosers in that anyone can swipe on them. This replicates a more natural environment where the girl "hints" to the guy that their approach won't be rejected and then the guy makes the opening. This has a bootstrapping issue, but it can build network effects by using recommender systems on seeker choices by tracking metrics such as chooser response rate, conversation initiation and frequency, and reporting of date count and quality, which could eventually solve the other issue women often find of "no quality men available".
To elaborate, I feel that fears of the AI girlfriend future are overblown, because there really is enormous potential for AI matchmakers assuming that the bootstrapping and incentive issues are solved.
A lot of this has to do with incorporating skeuomorphic design into the dating apps. Aside from recreating the hint -> approach system, you can have the app "wingman" profiles by having an LLM describe why they are recommending any particular profile. Similarly, it can act as a friend to emotionally dump on or by providing basic relationship counselling, which has the benefit of generating training data at the same time for which profiles to recommend. If you do it right, rather than using different apps (Tinder for hookups, Hinge for long-term, etc), you could actually have the user change what they are looking for (short/long, monog/poly), and the app should be able to recommend good profiles based on others with similar profiles who have made similar switches.
Additional consideration for Questions: Make it clear to whoever writes the questions, especially if they are user-submitted, that questions should be about the person being asked, and not about their perfect match. This could probably be done as easily as giving a preview page with both sides of the question before submitting.
I really hated having to slog through poorly-framed questions, where instead of a useful question like:
"How many fingers do you have?"
[ ] More than one
[O] One
[ ] None
(Indicating you have one finger.)
Your ideal partner would answer:
[X] More than one
[X] One
[X] None
(Indicating you don't care how many your ideal partner has.)
...
You got practically worthless questions like:
"How many fingers does your ideal partner have?"
[O] More than one
[ ] One
[ ] None
(You don't really care, but you can only select one option and more-than-one is the most common so sure why not.)
Your ideal partner would answer:
[ ] More than one
[X] One
[ ] None
(Suggestive of the truth that you only have one finger, but now matches you highest with people who have a weird fetish for one-fingered people, and crucially, does not downgrade matches with people who specifically do not want one-fingered dates at a higher rate than people who, like you, just checked the first option by default.)
Just one persepective: There is a fairly new German Dating App called Blind Mate that has spread around quite a bit in my friend group. The idea: Your friends fill out your questions, and they search for matches for you. It incentivises engagement with a point system. i think it's cool because it adds this social component. I have more fun swiping for friends than swiping for myself. I think it also levels the male/female right-swipe ratio somewhat, since you can have male and female friends swiping for you.
The app has a nice advert effect in that I got incentivised to get friends of mine on it, since more friends mean more swipes (the number of swipes you can do a day is limited). These friends then started using it themselves.
I've never seen an advert for it, it was just in the list of apps in the playstore and looked interestign, as I was searching for more niche apps.
Just wanted to give this as an example of a recent app that got off the ground through a decent idea :)
Doesn't Manifold basically accomplish something like this? (Others bet on matches instead.)
I don't know how much other people want to be objectified / seen as a "product" themselves. I think much of the current dating culture of having your friends swipe for you is coming from a place of cope / swipe fatigue / boredom / unseriousness.
mhm, I doubt that something as complicated as manifold will ever become popular, among non-rationalists.
I personally don't share that impression of unseriousness letting your friends swipe for you. I agree swipe fatigue is actually an issue, but I think that is tackled by friend-swipes somewhat. I don't react as emotional if swiping for friends and find it thus less tiring. If I swipe for myself and find someone that I really would like to match and then it doesn't happen, it's a negative emotional reaction from me, contributing to swipe fatigue.
I thought a fair amount about how to get ore users (especially women) on an App like that. I really would love to see this succeed! Here are some of my thoughts, maybe they are helpful.
1) Partner with events: Get some kind of code if you are on a certain event that lets people match with others on this event. E.g. a summercamp, a concert, a tantric healing workshop or so. Especially women might be interested in poeple going to similar events as they are, since men cannot easily spam attending all these events. Also it's a good filter for similar interest, and you might meet up at the event without a lot of hassle. Partnering with certain events might spread it into niches that helps expand the app.
2) Introduce some kind of social aspect that incentivises people to get friends on the app as well. I explain this idea in an example a bit more in a separate comment.
3) Definitely make it appealing design wise, the mechanism, the interface, etc. I think especially women care for that. A lot of these alternative dating apps look a bit autistic, and some are put off by that. Even from the theme and name, I would rather choose something holistic/wholesome than tech focused. If the algorithm is clever, this will spread amongst men regardless whether it's a big focus theme-wise.
4) I think big cities are a good place to start with promotion and marketing. I actually searched for niche apps, since I live in a big city (Berlin), and am not competitive on mainstream dating apps, where the pool is just too large and the top percentage you have to break to get matches is too small. This effect might appeal more to men than to women. But remember that the value of a new user is proportional to the value of the users present, given that they are in the same location.
5) Don't make it overwhelming to start using the app with too many questions to fill out etc. I sometimes just wanted to explore what using the app feels like and there was a barrier of answering many hard questions about everything and that ended up turning me off. Rather, make the entry really easy and give the option to continuously expand your profile with more information. Maybe add some gamification that incentivises this + match making.
6) I think that the donations based model can actually have some unique draws. E.g., most apps are annoying because they constantly aim to bait you into spending money on them by restricting features you really want to use. I would love to donate something to the app, if I don't get the feeling that I'm being suckered. Possibly allow for human matchmaking and the option to tip the person (and the app) if they did a good job? So people who are a bit bad at presenting themselves online can get the help from someone socially versed (I think esp. women might enjoy this) to set up their profile and match them. There might be social niches around certain people that are very good at this.
7) Creative guerilla marketing in big cities can be quite the boost. Sometimes random stickers that advertised dating apps caught my attention. This is probably not as expensive, just hire some people to put these stickers at places where cool/young people hang out.
8) Getting endorsements from "queer" spaces might be helpful. I am adjacent to that bubble and not only do they seem to constantly dating (and talking about it), in my impression the queer community gives off vibes that make women feel safer. Probably this is because it just follows a not so heterosexual dynamic of them feeling as prey. Maybe have some shtick of being especially queer friendly in some way that allows you to be advertised in these spaces. I think most apps already try to do that, the opinion of someone in these spaces might be more helpful.
Hope that helps!
Feel free to reach out to me if you want to discuss any of these points more.
I'd potentially be interested in implementing #2 (PGS scores). I have previously applied educational attainment PGS scores to 1k genomes data, though I'm not a geneticist (I'm a data scientist/software engineer). My sense is that getting this up and running for 23andme data would be pretty easy, but I'm somewhat less clear about the data currently available from embryo testing companies (so I would need to look into that).
Perhaps including other PGS aside from edu attainment, e.g. for autism, could be useful as well. Also, I notice someone else raised concerns about within-group pop strat (fine-grained ancestry) confounding in the existing PGS scores, but I think that's a somewhat over-rated concern given the PCA controls that are generally included (a more likely concern would be bias from genetic nuture).
1) It might be interesting to explore a pricing model like "Free, except if you continue dating for a year, you pay $250; if you get married, you pay $1000." While obviously hard to enforce, I think this aligns the incentives for the app and for the users towards creating good matches that last. $1000 is a lot to pay up front, but a small amount to pay if I've found the love of my life.
2) I am a person who is allergic to dogs and cats and can never date someone who lives with one or the other. This is currently an impossible ask in the current dating market, let alone on dating apps where you can't filter by those. I would honestly pay for petfree dating.
3) I would suggest launching in a specific market first. I believe Hinge did this? That way you need fewer total users for the app to be functional for those users..
Commented below but we're working with a small team to work on something like this. I agree about incentive alignment in principle but hard to enforce. Is there a specific market you recommend? The issue with certain markets like "TPOT" is that they're way too small and give others who might want to join a bit of an ick.
I'm not sure what you mean by the last sentence. I meant a market area like Boston or Chicago.
Re: incentive alignment, I believe even a single-digit percentage of users paying (and a nudge one year after users stop using the app) would be a viable goal. Whether this alone can pay for the app's development is an open question, of course!
Enforcement might be the wrong way to think about it. Lots of people willingly pay for stuff they could easily get away with taking for free, if doing so is reasonably convenient and they feel like they've been treated fairly.
If you want a low-effort way to coerce freeloaders, though, could simply threaten to send a message about fact that they haven't paid to whoever your algorithm thinks is on the other end of that relationship, insinuating that it shows lack of sincere commitment. DeBeers raked in plenty of cash through similar emotional blackmail without even bothering to personalize. Wouldn't work if both parties are in perfect agreement about the decision and reasoning behind it, but in that case you're most likely trying to squeeze blood from a turnip regardless.
I'd be interested in #2, but I'm not in a good position to do this on my own (because I'm a CS/economics/data science student with no genomics experience whatsoever). However, I think my programming and statistics experience may be useful on the project. Anyone else want to collaborate with me on this?
Great list - I would love to help take on #2! Previously done some self-directed work on a generic PGS upload & analysis website project, hence moderately familiar with some of the components that go into this, though I would definitely want support / advice from seasoned academic bioinformaticians in the wider GWAS world. I'd actually kept thinking recently about how one would get more direct IQ - genotype data (as opposed to EA) at scale for a better "selector", so to me it's funny timing that you mentioned it!
I would also be interested in hearing if you have any good ideas about how to get more phenotype-genotype pairs for intelligence. You can reach me at morewronger@gmail.com
Dating explicit sites are awful. The best site to facilitate dating that I've seen is a French site called onvasortir.com. It's not actually for dating but more like an open meetup.com. I toyed with the idea of making an ovs like site for North America but I can't stand web development.
This makes me wonder - what if there were a dating site where instead of browsing profiles, you proposed dates and people could opt into the date? You'd say, I want to go to X place at X time, and someone could see it on a map (if they're within your sex/gender/age range) and if they're interested they can say, let's do this. That might be an interesting hybrid between the two ideas.
Given discussion elsewhere about a matchmaker-centric arrangement, perhaps there could be a setup where a lot of analysis and sorting happens behind the scenes, but neither party to the date learns anything substantial about the other until they meet in person - just time, place, and some sort of (possibly smartphone-based) recognition token.
I think I have pretty good insight on why all new buildings look like smooth blobs. I'm a design student, have spent 100's of hours studying form development. When I look at the AI generated frank gehry my first reaction is "wow, that's a pretty cool building". It seems like spending 100's of hours studying form development and such perhaps makes you think that really sophisticated blobs are the way to go. This is a problem because most people have not spent the time training their brains to recognize really sophisticated blobs and prefer classic architecture.
Over the past 100 years or so architects have gone from rich dudes who were unusually good at drawing and had basically the same taste as everyone else to design students who have spent 1000 hours trying to draw increasingly sophisticated blobs to score a chance at getting into a top architecture firm, and no longer have the same aesthetic taste as everyone else. Architects also gradually changed from being service people to being artists, who think they know more then their clients and impose their preferred artistic vision on whatever projects they work on.
Even if architects now have increasingly differing aesthetic tastes from everyone else, why gravitate towards sophisticated blobs? it could be that it's a basic quirk of human psychology that you prefer more basic shapes if you think about it for an unusual amount of time. Alternatively, this could be basically a trapped prior issue. Architects are all taught by architects, once 51% of architecture teachers prefer sophisticated blobs, you get a death spiral.
As to how you could get to 51% of architects preferring modern styles, it's probably a combination of economic incentives and projects shifting from client led to architect led. Classic architecture requires 100's of skilled crafts people for the elaborate bricklaying, engraving, etc. Architects are trained in form development not bricklaying, so the buildings they design are going to gravitate towards being dominated by one or two pleasing forms, not the 1000's of small details that compose classic cathedrals.
My different guess was that when you seen a small model of a modern architecture creation from above, it looks nice, but it sucks if you are a small human in front of it. While instead old buildings tried to look nice to people beneath them. What do you think about this hypothesis?
Strongly agree, this seems basically in line with what I was thinking about. The bulk of the artistic work shifted from skilled craftsman working at a human scale on the building itself to a few architects standing above a scale model.
Tom Wolfe wrote a good book called "From Bauhaus to Our House" covering the history of why all new buildings look like smooth blobs. My interpretation, given his history plus what I know of the rest of art history, is that it's just one more case of an artistic medium being destroyed by the modernist demand to burn everything down, start from scratch, never make anything that the public likes, and never use any elements in an artwork which were effective in the past (because they're "played out", "bourgeois", etc.) We saw the same thing in painting, sculpture, orchestral composition, and fiction.
In architecture, this manifested as the doctrine that a new architecture must be made that is for the proletariat: cheap to produce, and lacking all bourgeois affectations. "Bourgeois affectations" meant anything nice, because only the bourgeois like nice things. For instance, eaves to keep the rain off you when you're standing in front of your door are nice; therefore, no eaves. Sloped roofs that shed rain and snow are nice; therefore, no sloped roofs, no matter how many buildings in northern climates collapse.
He did not cover the loss of understanding of materials and structural engineering among architects, which had been the core of architecture in the 13th century CE, but had vanished by the time modernists were making concrete buildings that crack, break, or fall down in the 1940s.
This seems like a rather cynical interpretation of art history. Maybe I am just being naive, but I am skeptical that architects were sitting around thinking about how to make buildings worse. The Bauhaus school had a well documented epistemology which did not include "take away nice things" (although what I am referencing mostly addressed their pedagogical style so). That being said, they were accused of being communists so they might have wanted to take away nice things. Thanks for the book recommendation
It never begins as "take away nice things", but with the demand to "make it new", which always turns out to mean throw out the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years and start over from scratch, scrupulously avoiding anything that looks like anything that came before. This was done explicitly and intentionally in banning harmony from 20th century orchestral music, banning beauty and representation from painting, and banning sentiment, suspension of disbelief, entertainment, and happy endings from fiction. Operationally, this is indistinguishable from "take away all the nice things."
In literature, the idea was articulated early by Ezra Pound, and quickly devastated poetry; but some valuable elements of fiction held out long past the 1920s, because the masses pay for fiction and want nice things. More individual story components were thrown out one by one over decades, perhaps starting with story structure and plot (think /Ulysses/, and anything by Pynchon), until we ended up with eg the 20th-century New Yorker / literary magazine short story, which must have no plot, no crisis, no action, no cognitive challenge, no resolution, no compelling characters, and no theme other than the dreariness of life. There were many attempts to replace the old story elements with something else, e.g., disruption in Shklovsky, ironic reworking of a myth in /Ulysses/, collage in “The Waste Land”, word games in /Finnegan's Wake/, randomness in William Burroughs, shock in the beat poets, meta-textual references in Borges and Nabokov, places as characters in Calvino, montage in magical realism, and irony everywhere all the time; but none of these ever caught on with the public.
I think the OP’s comment implicitly answers the arguments made here. While Phil argues that artists hate beauty and don’t like nice things, Tristan’s post actually tries to explain *why* tastes of artists who have spent 1000s of hours invested in various design philosophies may differ from the lay person–their core audience–instead of just assuming that it’s because artists literally hate the general public and its cultural traditions.
These claims imply a breathtaking level of conspiracy in all manners of social movements that are on face false because of their jaw-dropping universality. Any artistic movements is just part of one swatch of a tapestry containing incredible diverse art made across a global scale. Many artists dedicated to their movement can appreciate the work of others outside it, and given the cliche anti-authority position that many artists take–few would deign to “ban” or force all other artists to comply with their style.
Obviously no one banned harmony from 20th century orchestral music. No one has the power to do something like this, and even if they did, they clearly failed: there is so much great harmonic orchestral music from the 20th century from composers like Copeland and others that this… cannot be argued in good faith? You will certainly also find beauty and representation in all eras of painting, and sentiment, suspension of disbelief, entertainment, and happy endings from fiction books written through this very year.
I'm not "arguing" that artists hate beauty. I'm recounting the historical fact that many of the most-important painters and musical composers of the early 20th century explicitly called for discarding what had been done before them. This was not a case of them developing refined tastes; it was a case of revolutionary ardor which demanded all things be made new. Other artists disagreed; but on the whole, the destructionists won.
You can still find beautiful paintings, and stories with happy endings; but if you read the theory that rules the academy today, you will find the most-influential theorists renounced beauty, and the most-influential critics and magazine editors today renounce sentiment and happy endings.
Even if this were true, I think my original thesis stands. I do not believe that architects are making ugly buildings on purpose. I have talked to many of them, I think they try hard to make beautiful things, they just have a different sense of beauty for the previously mentioned reasons.
Monumental Labs looks neat. The robots carve the statues out most of the way, and then human artists finish it with the fine details. This seems to me to be an excellent application of technology: the robots appear to be automating the boring work that apprentices would have done in days of old. I can imagine this greatly increasing the productivity of any particular talented sculptor.
I wonder if there's an interesting economic story here: in the past, elaborate and beautiful architecture was one of the few ways that the wealthy could signal their wealth/importance or honour a deity, and there was a large, affordable supply of high- and low-skilled labour to create it.
Now, demand is lower because (among other things?) the wealthy have more options to achieve similar ends, so the the market has fallen apart. But the demand is still there from the inhabitants and tourists that enjoy them, albeit at a lower price, so perhaps some form of AI-aided supply can meet the price to make it possible again?
The architectural and sculpture designs that these robots use seem to me like an unusually well suited use-case for generative AI: a) there is a massive dataset of 'prior art', b) it is elaborate and time-consuming to do by hand, c) the required skills are likely not widely available anymore, and d) there is still plenty of unexplored possibility-space available from simply mixing styles (e.g. similar to the many architectural revival styles).
In any case if anyone is putting together folks interested in 7. I'd be happy to be included!
On #4, I'm a bit of a language head myself, and I don't think it's more efficient than the standard way of learning a language. Honestly, syntax rules and untranslatable language particles are the easiest things to learn - you can do it in, like, a week. The hard things to penetrate in a language are overall sentence architecture relating to sense (this is where variance in the ability of pro translators comes into play) and vocabulary (this is mostly practice). The former stands above simple syntax because, especially in a narrative work (or conversation), you need a general context for how the language orders and responds to information in the abstract. Also, your example uses the same sentence over and over, where the find and replace is clear, but in a long (and especially a culturally important work, which tend to be complex) you might stutter just as much as you would learning grammar and starter vocab and just reading the full thing in the language. The real problem I think with popular language learning is that it's tailored to people who A. aren't particularly serious and B. want results straight away. The tendency of focusing on ways tourists communicate wastes a lot of time.
It's essentially grammar, but in comparing two languages there are some emergent factors regarding linguistic sense and focus that I think get missed with this method. For instance: essential vs accidental attributes and use of ser/estar in spanish, the french use of gerunds mostly to express simultaneity of action between two verbs, the placement of location descriptions in mandarin chinese sentenced based on whether the verb is static (before the verb) or dynamic (after the verb). Especially regarding something like mandarin where sentences are full units that tend to order logically from known to unknown/received information, I don't think these architectural qualities are clear with his method. If anything, you spend less time in practice interpeting them.
I've looked into doing this myself. I think the project as currently formulated is valuable, but unlikely to accelerate research.
Here are my current unorganized thoughts:
1. The raw data for making EA polygenic predictors is locked behind various institutional barriers (i.e. you need to be a tenured professor to even ask for UK biobank access), so open-source people are limited to using summary stats of the latest EA GWAS's. But even the summary stats aren't being released in full for the latest EA GWAS's, case in point being EA4, which releases only the top 10,000 SNP betas as far as I remember in their PGS model, which is also likely where you got the (incorrect?) 25% variance explained from (EA4 paper says, "explains 12–16% of EA variance."). 3-5 points of IQ gain seems like an optimistic calculation for open-source because of this, and the fact that there's frequently problems with implantation/viability).
2. I think using said GWAS summary stats for your own PGS is already implemented at pgscatalog.org. There seems to be a workflow for scoring your own genotype data using the available GWAS's in the catalog. EA is available here, but due to reasons stated above, the avilable PGS weights aren't very good. Of course, this is far from layman-usable, so making an interface would be helpful I think (in particular, I think a slider adjusting how much you value various traits would be useful).
3. An even more high-value project might be to collect high-quality genotype-IQ data independently (1 million data points is an estimate of what's needed), or find contacts in existing biobanks amenable to sharing their data/listening to suggestions of what phenotypes to measure (asking directly for IQ would be difficult, but even adding a few mildly g-loaded items could provide a large increase in signal as opposed to just EA).
After saying all that, if anyone is planning on working on #2, I'd be willing to provide any help I can, although I'm not a specialist in this area. Contact me at kakyo083@gmail.com (not my personal email - i'd prefer to remain at least somewhat anonymous - so it might take a bit for me to read anything).
I thought that in EA4, they had a full PGS model with >10k SNPs which explains 12-16%, after which they released the top 10k SNP betas which in total explain less than 12-16%. If I'm reading you correctly, are you saying that a model using the 10k SNPs has a variance explained of 12-16%? I skimmed back through the EA4 paper and their best result, 17%, comes from this: "We found that a PGI generated from ~2.5 million pruned common SNPs using the software SBayesR (ref. 22) is more predictive than our LDpred PGI. It explains 17.0% of the variance in EduYears..."
As for higher variance explained figures, Scott said 25% in reference to individual EA, which is inaccurate as far as I know, although 25% would make sense for SNP heritability.
As far as 4k, I was just rounding the 3,952 genome-wide significant SNPS. But actually I just double-checked the paper, and the PGS from those lead SNPs only explained 7% - 9.1% (not 12-16% as I had thought, which did likely involve a larger set of SNPs via LDpred). Sorry about that!
Here's a quote: "A PGI constructed using only genome-wide-significant SNPs has an incremental R2 of 9.1% in Add Health and 7.0% in HRS"
What genome upload services do people know of (esp open source or open source adjacent)? I of course am aware of promethease.com for cheap reports, but I can only assume there are some interesting platforms that analyze specialty information from a genome.
#4 - I have a vague memory of reading a language-learning book like this, many years ago. But I can't remember the non-English language involved. (Also, people seem to hate having 汉字 in the middle of English sentences ... but if there is enough self-selection maybe it will work.)
#8 - as I see it, there are basically three approaches for political change in America these days. For one approach, you need a seven-figure lobbying budget. For the second approach, you need a copy of Saul Alinsky's book "Rules for Radicals". And the third approach requires a lot of lawyers.
> “Educational attainment” (EA) ... and IQ correlate well enough that it’s rarely worth examining them separately.
Is that really true, especially in the context of finding polygenic predictors? This seem dubious to me. In particular, EA seems like it would be more subject to environmental effects than IQ. There is enough noise in finding massively polygenic predictors that it seems like you really wouldn't want to inject more noise by using such a proxy. There is an increased risk of losing or mistaking signal.
My grouch here is that this is a crude measure of "a PhD is better than a master's; a master's is better than an undergraduate degree; a degree is better than high school; high school is better than dropping on" and so on, and yes, broadly that's true.
It's when you get into "a degree is a degree" that you hit trouble, because I don't think most people on here would accept that "a degree in English Lit is the same as a degree in Electrical Engineering", but on the crude measure of EA both are equally valid. So if you want a Smart Baby, you may end up with "great at English Lit" but not "going to get a high paying job as a quant" or whatever and I think when people are maximising for IQ this way, they intend (whether conscious of it or not) "my kid will be successful in life, which means earning tons of money, which means they need to be smart".
You can be smart and poor, you can be "only high school but made a fortune with a motor dealership" and so on:
"Diane Hendricks dreamed of going to the city and wearing a suit. Then she got pregnant and gave birth one month before her 18th birthday. She had to finish her high school studies at home. Three years later, she met and married a contractor who was a high school dropout. Together, they founded roofing distributor ABC Supply (he died in 2007). Today she is now ranked 122 among The Forbes 400, worth $4.9 billion."
But IQ tests have a verbal and a non-verbal component -- sort of like the American SAT, which gives a math score and a verbal score. Of course scores for the 2 kinds of smarts are fairly highly correlated, but not so highly correlated it makes sense to think of them as measures of the same thing. And people high on verbal skills *are* smart. You pick it up quickly when you talk with them. They grasp what you say quickly. They are good at expressing complex ideas and making subtle distinctions. If you give them something to read about a novel and complicated subject, say the structure of the Icelantic language or how perspective is represented in Japanese art they will be pretty quick to take in the info. If they are managers they will communicate well with employees. If they're in sales they'll be pretty sharp about how to word the ads. Etc. It's probably true that verbal smarts without math & spacial smarts are less likely to lead to wealth than math smarts without verbal smarts, but verbal smarts are a real thing. YOU have a lot of verbal smarts. Surely you get that.
I dunno about that, polygenic predictors are hard enough to identify without having a blurry measure of what they're predicting. Maybe identifying predictors of intelligence via a search for predictors of educational attainment is sort of like wanting directions to New York, but asking google maps for directions to the nearest really big city. If you're near New York anyhow that will often get you to New York, but some of the time google might decide a city that's only pretty big on your mental scale counts as a big city, and send you to fucking Hartford.
Related to #7 (classical architecture), there are regulatory and cost reasons for building ugly concrete blocks. In a nutshell, it's easy to prove that your building won't fall down if it uses "standard" modern materials and designs. There's off-the-shelf software for that kind of thing.
Anyone interested in this, I'd recommend looking up the work of John Ochsendorf. He's an MIT researcher who develops methods and algorithms for making masonry buildings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfAYSra5JbA
Our civilization used to have the implicit knowledge of how to make very strong and durable shapes based on simple physical laws (e.g. catenary arches and vaults). The trend of modern architecture goes in the opposite direction, leaving the heavy lifting up to incredibly strong materials arranged in simple to industrialize but not particularly optimal shapes.
Just to pitch my idea for a dating app that I would probably never build (I do need a summer job if someone wants to spend 8K getting me to spend my summer on it), but in case people are interested in discussing such designs:
I generally am dubious of dating apps, and tend to think that dating happens more via social networking than the artificial environment. I also think that people are more likely to accept something recommended by a friend, and their standards for friends are lower than their friends' standards for themselves.
So my pitch is: do larger bios (hinge style), but you can't like people yourself, you can only recommend profiles to friends. So basically you and a friend go through and send eachother people; you can directly accept a recommendation (which then puts you in the person you liked friends' queues). You could perhaps also opt to chat with someone before referring them to a friend (showing them the friend you were thinking about referring them to) for pre-screening.
I think that the idea would have a pretty good chance of failing instantly, but I think that it gets you closer to the way that real-world dating often works
On dating apps: the mechanism design should include a way to VIP-track people who read profiles carefully, write thoughtful messages, behave well on dates, and treat their relationships responsibly (i.e. don’t ghost). Those are the folks users want to meet and hear from, and they’re rendered illegible/non-credible when legacy apps dilute them into an ocean of “peers” who fail the criteria above. I wonder if the “good user” status could be crowdsourced by collecting multiple-choice feedback on messages and scheduled/completed dates. A successful design here would offer some hope to the highest-character AMABs in particular, who are presently devalued, dismissed, and abused by their prospects with an almost universal consistency, despite stepping up in every way at once and offering them what the platform is supposed to deliver.
I thought Steve Hsu's company offered something very close to 2 for IVF couples.. But, why the damn obsession with EA? Why not try to predict lifetime happiness/satisfaction. It's likely to be less heavily selected for and make a much bigger difference in life quality!
I don't think Steve's company does intelligence in particular for political reasons. Even if it did, that would be the closed-source version of the thing I want to open source.
I haven't seen good studies showing that life satisfaction is genetic. If it was, I think it would be a good target, although it would be mostly internal rather than having positive externalities for the rest of society (unless it did - I'm actually not sure how to think about that).
Re: satisfaction I presume what you'd actually be eliciting is the generic component of happiness set point. But worst case scenario you just end up pulling out some other signal (like being conscientious or smart or whatever) that indirectly leads to a good life.
I don't remember if they released that screening (I think you may be right) but I'm pretty sure Steve wrote a paper describing how they were able to use ML to predict EA and has a number of YouTube videos discussing how he got it to work. I suspect those offer a pretty good blueprint to get this thing working.
I suspect that the big barrier is access to a large collection of records for an open-source style project. I fear that any database will want some kind of corporate form to reassure them about privacy of records etc.
--
I'd add that I'm a mathematician who worked for a bit at google on machine learning related stuff (tho my expertise lies in logic) and someone else lines up the data part of the project lined I'd be willing to contribute.
Putting in a vote here, as I do on many of these threads, for selecting for low propensity for violence and high empathy. Have been reading the research on heritability of these traits, and it seems promising. It seems to me that increasing the number of people with either of both of these traits would lead to better quality of life for humankind. It would, for instance, reduce the chance of elected leaders being monsters, and of situations like Israel-Palestine developing to the point that there's no fixing them.
I'd add the whole way this works is by finding genes that indirectly contribute to some outcome by unknown means. Unless you believe that nothing about your innate features affects lifetime happiness you should be able to find a signal (even if it's just via avoiding chronic pain or being pretty).
So it seems strictly more desierable to optimize for that if you can get the data.
Isn't it enough to believe that it is easier to affect the usual issues with measuring happiness (anxious to be seen complaining or whatever) than the worth-altering part?
What about coming at it from the other direction, and selecting against risk of depression? I know many extremely smart people, not all of them my psychotherapy patients, whose smarts have mostly gone to waste because they are chronically unhappy, anhedonic, self-critical, self-doubting, anxious and unmotivated -- in other words depressed. If you reduced the population level of depression not only would you have happier human beings, you'd have more available IQ points -- because there wouldn't be so many smart people wearing lead boots.
Fortunately, depression risk is something you can already select against! Genomic Prediction includes risk of depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in their health index weighted by the absolute risk of each in the embryo and the reduction in quality-adjusted lifespan associated with each disorder.
They also give line-item reports for each disease, so you can even re-weight them using your own personal beliefs about the importance of each disorder if you wish.
When I was in training some people at the psych hospital where I worked did a modest-sized but impressive study of the traits of first degree relatives of people with bipolar illness. Those who did not have the disorder themselves were markedly higher in creativity -- and by that I don't mean they were artistic, I mean they were original and fluent in their thinking. They could think of more uses for a brick in 5 mins. than other subjects could. And in their hobbies and work they got higher ratings for originality from judges blind to their status -- even if their business was owning a drug store, the relatives of bipolars were more likely to come up with some original twist on how to do that well.
I don't know whether their findings have held up. But if so, we should maybe think twice about reducing now much of the genes for bipolar are in the population. Finding better treatment for those who have the disorder might make more sense.
I have a friend with bipolar in his family, and he is the wittiest, funniest person I ever met. He starts riffing, and takes the subject in all kinds of directions you'd never think to take it, and connects it with things you'd never think to connect it to but it's apt. And the one-liners!
Yeah, this is more or less why I think we should just throw all the traits we can into the polygenic index. It seems very likely to me that there is some genetic overlap between the sets, but that not every gene that increases creativity increases bipolar or vice-versa.
Ideally whatever selector we use would balance those two traits against one another, which would disproporionately select for creativity genes that don't increase bipolar risk and against bipolar disk genes that don't increase creativity.
The problem is biobanks don't want to do the research for this. There is shockingly little research into personality in the field of genetics. The best predictors for the big five personality traits explain like 1 or 2% of the variance.
I think the big 5 traits are too general. Seems to me you'd get better heritability selecting for smaller things that are clearly important contributors to someone's proneness to a certain kind of good or bad behavior. Here's a well-thought-of-test for "Cognitive Empathy"--ability to accurately perceive other's emotional state.
Read something yesterday about its heritability. Can't remember what the figure was, but it was not tiny. (And by the way, scores of this test are a bit correlated with IQ, but not very.)
What about selecting against violence and for empathy? These tweaks seem much more likely to help with, say, the Israel-Palestine situation than a few extra IQ points. As for measuring violence and empathy, there is a very well-respected test of what's called Cognitive Empathy -- the ability to accurately read other's feelings (separate from resonating to them, as one does in emotional empathy). It's called the Eyes Test, and you can actually take it on Amazon for some reason. https://s3.amazonaws.com/he-assets-prod/interactives/233_reading_the_mind_through_eyes/Launch.html
Like lots of things, it correlates with intelligence, but the correlation is actually very modest.
Hmm, interesting. Though while I like the idea of selecting for empathy I'm much less sold on the idea of selecting for non-violence. I mean, it seems like the most obvious ways you might be less likely to be violent could be via some negative traits like lower ambition.
Also, I strongly suspect that proclivity for not engaging in criminal violence might well anti-correlate with not engaging in war style violence (eg ppl who are especially willing to sacrifice themselves for their tribe might be more likely to do war).
Well, in the study I linked to, they weren't targeting violence precisely. They were targeting what they called "callous-unemotional behavior" -- basically, not being a bit bothered by harming others. You could call it sociopathy. So these are people who as adults would not be distressed by scamming a grandmother out of her life savings or by knocking out somebody's teeth. Seems like a good measure to me. If your measure of violence or sociopathy is conviction for crimes you'll have a fair number of people in the mix whose crimes were victimless or at least not particularly callous, plus some who stole or whatever out of sheer desperation. Also, somebody callous would not be willing to sacrifice themselves to for their tribe, so we keep those people out of the pool too.
Neither of the 2 traits they were measuring in kids the measures that predicted callous-unemotional behaviors when older seem bad by themselves. Non-affiliativeness --OK, so introverts. Lack of fear: Chuck Yeager was unable to feel fear. Would have taken longer to break the sound barrier without a fearless pilot. There's a famous female rock climber and wingsuit jumper I've been reading about who can't feel fear, and she has a brother who's the same, and is an ER physician.
Ok, yah I agree that might be a desierable thing to select for.
My concern though is that I'm not convinced all parents would *want* to select for that. Once you release that data what if sociopathic parents then select for sociopathic kids?
Well, that's a daunting thought. I have no idea what sociopathic parents' feelings would be about building kids who have their traits. I have seen a number of sociopaths in my work, but the thing about sociopaths is that they are unable or unwilling to disclose their actual thoughts and feelings about anything to you. I don't think they even grasp the concept of sharing their inner life. All their communication is in the service of manipulating the listener, via lies, etc, to think or do certain things that will be to the sociopath's advantage.
It does seem like it would be possible to study this -- though of course not by asking sociopathd whether they want fearless, unaffiliative kids who will grow up to be callous-unemotional adults. You'd have to observe them, or have people who know them well rate them on various scales. This isn't the kind of thing where it makes sense to shoot from the hip and decide against selecting against sociopathic traits -- one needs data! Just did a quick Google Scholar of "sociopathic parents offspring" and saw several links about the abusiveness of sociopathic parents towards their children -- including higher than the baseline rate of sexual abuse. It may be that these people lack the feeling of connection with their kids that makes people hope their kids will be a chip off the old block.
… and if you want a failure mode for selection for empathy, more similar people are easier to empathise to — what will better empathy with in-group imply once there is a toxoplasma drill against the outgroup?
It depends a bit on what you mean by ability to empathize. I was assuming it meant something like the ability to empathize with people who were more different from oneself but you make a good point that looking at strength of empathy could be very dangerous.
I think it is a difference-to-strength function, so you increase strength somewhere; even if it only happens at relatively large differences, you might increase sharpness at some threshold. Or you can extend the range just enough to empathise with entire ingroup excluding approximately all the outgroup.
In any case empathy works best for perceptions people share, and there are cases where perceptions are just alien. Say, when your set point for temperature is radically different, I don't think empathy to unimaginable feelings of the other person (how could anyone be too cold / too hot in here??) is more promising that sympathetic attempts at negotiations.
There are at least 2 kinds of empathy. One is called Cognitive Empathy, and it's the ability to accurately identify what other people are feeling. The Eyes test I linked to earlier is a good measure of that. But knowing how someone else is feeling is different from resonating to it . Resonating is called Emotional Empathy:
You feel a version of what the person is feeling. Unless you have trouble with personal boundaries, resonating to someone's feelings is different from being taken over by their feeling and acting in line with it. You can experience an inner version of somebody's anger without buying into their read of the infuriating incident and their belief that they should take revenge on the person they're angry at.
I think it's a mistake to conflate old architecture with what people want - beauty. The false dichotomy between beautiful classical architecture and ugly modern architecture is false because Modernism is not the only possible way to move forward in architecture.
Academic Modernist art wants to go beyond beauty, question beauty, and so on, but is this the only thing new art could do? If you listen to amateur music and see amateur art, there are tons of beautiful new things. Just avoid the academy and ignore 20th century philosophy (ew).
Look at Chinese Instagram and make a building like that.
I agree it's possible to do new things beautifully; I think "classical" is a good rallying flag for this but I hope it eventually turns into new styles merging the best of old and new (I think Gaudi did a good job of that while he was alive).
Here's my idea for a dating site. Tinder ranks people based on "desirability," but doesn't show users the data, it's only for internal matchmaking. What people could see their own (but not other peoples') desirability score? This would help mitigate one of the main problem's with modern dating: the tendency to one's own attractiveness.
You'd sign up for the website and, before being allowed to send messages, would be required to answer twenty "which of these two profiles is more desirable?" questions. If a person continues to use the site, they'd have to continue to rank two or three profiles every week or so.
This would suffer from the problem of people using the site "just for the fun of" ranking people without actually intending to date. You could mitigate this by making people pay a nominal fee to use the site, requiring identity verification, and deemphasizing the ratings of people who do not send or respond to messages. You could also limit the number of total rankings people make, so the ratings don't wind up being dominated by a few people who spent years on the site.
I think a lot of people would go "This stupid freakin' site, what do they mean I'm 12 out of 20? I'm a 20 *at least*!" rather than accept what they consider low desirability score (unless you've very depressed and go "yeah, 6 out of 20, I didn't expect anything better, I know I'm useless trash").
I was actually trying to replicate the results for polygenic scores on IQ, because I had a pet theory that polygenic scores weren't being calculated well, and naturally the first step to checking that would be replicating what already exists. I couldn't find a public dataset anywhere though. I switched to looking for one for polygenic scores and any variable of interest, but it seems like everything available is gated and requires academic credentials. If anyone has those credentials and would be willing to share some datasets, or knows where I can find some public ones, I would be interested in trying this.
It's not as good as having access to the raw data, but my guess is it's enough to form a halfway decent predictor if you throw in some finemapping using their linkage disequilibrium info.
On 8: I have worked for ~13 years in various levels of federal politics and been involved with both congressional and executive changes. When I worked as a congressional staffer my office was ranked the most effective legislative office by a (sort of not that rigorous, but not entirely fake) project by political scientists at UVA and Vanderbilt. I’ve also worked in the think tank world. Would be interested in collaborating on this primer if anyone else wants to work on it together.
Where do you live? I hate phone/video calls, but if you're in the Bay it might be worth me meeting you and interviewing you to try to get what you know into a writeable format.
I’m in Chicago. Agree on hating phone/video calls. I don’t have any plans to be in the Bay in the near future. I can answer some of the questions you posed and provide other questions and answers for areas you missed via email, which I saw you left in response to another comment on 8. One meta comment: policy change is typically chaotic, non-linear, and relationship based. A primer may help parties navigate the chaos effectively, but provide limited utility for the relationship building aspect.
Just saw this from the quests and requests follow up email. I'd love to contribute and help. I have some time. My email is everydayemails2@gmail.com and will follow up from there if there is still energy to do something on (8) On A Primer About Political Change
Re: #4, "The Avion My Uncle Flew" by Cyrus Fisher is exactly this. It's a good story anyway, and my son learned a lot of French; the final three pages are French-only. The drawback is that he could only read French by the end, not pronounce it, but it's a really good way to learn the basics without any mental block of "oh, it's a foreign language, it'll be hard and boring."
Just to add the encouragement that #4 is a really good idea, it works, and I don't know why it isn't standard practice, especially for languages that share an alphabet!
#4 seems like a variant on graded readers, except instead of mangling Language A until it sort of matches Language B, it's just a book/story (or series of books and stories more often) that starts at incredibly basic Language B and just progressively increases the complexity.
It's useful, but not some silver bullet for language acquisition: I think fundamentally it just takes a lot more time than reading a single chapter to advance your understanding of a language to a new level.
Like, I'm reading Harry Potter in Japanese and it's about the right level for me: challenging but doable, and I'm most of the way through the first book and it's... still challenging but doable. The idea that I could read the first chapter and then the second chapter could 'turn up the difficulty', just doesn't seem realistic: I'd read some number of chapters, then hit a wall.
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Maybe an advantage of this solution is that the stories could be more interesting: a problem with graded readers is that the low-level grammar (and the usual audience of children) means that the content is just not very interesting at low levels, so maybe being able to use Deathnote as your reading material and not "The Ant and the Grasshopper" is an advantage.
... but I think the disadvantages is that the content has to be custom produced for each pair of languages, and the limits of "making language A look like language B" in a way that's still remotely understandable, and ultimately it may not be teaching you the actual target language as much as it's teaching you how to read the A-structured-like-B hybrid language.
If anyone is thinking of tackling #3, I'd be interested in chatting. I founded a startup that is doing a small amount of antibiotic development outside our main focus. More antibiotics are an unalloyed good, and I think the patent extension mechanisms are generally bad, but probably there are some very important choices to be made in how this campaign is structured and what it targets.
@scott - at the very least I could maybe help with judging entries on this one or connecting applicants to some existing antibiotic funding/advocacy campaigns
In order to better my Chinese, I tried reading "The Legend of the Condor Heroes". My English version was very close to the original in the sense that it seemed to have been translated sentence by sentence with no attempt to rearrange the structure. Sadly, the result was merely that it came out as very stiff and unwieldy prose. So stiff, that I finally stopped reading it a bit into the second volume.
However, the structure of written chinese is also very different from English. I wonder if I could make something like #4 work translating between Danish and English. Many Danish words and phrases just sound like archaic anglo-saxon so maybe...
Also, I think part of the problem with translating Chinese works into English is that they tend to be stuffed full of cultural allusions that you just won't get unless you're aware of the originals.
So if me, an English speaker, is reading a translation that goes "Our hero went to sit under a magnolia tree and looked like a shadow in snow", I'd probably go "pretty image" and move on, whereas a native reader would be "oh man, that's a direct reference to these three famous poems, that famous anecdote about Historical Figure, and a paraphrase of an entirely different story!" (I've had a minor bit of that when reading what is a very stiff and unwieldly translation into English, then somebody explains all the cultural references I'm missing and how it is much more fluid and poetic in the original language rather than the literal English translation).
Think of it the other way round; someone is reading a translation into Chinese of an English story, they don't know anything about Greek mythology, and when they read the equivalent of "The heroine wore a corset like that of Venus", they go "Huh, okay, no idea who that is but okay" and have no idea of the whole "Girdle of Aphrodite" and the magical attractiveness it bestows:
Ed West might be up for getting involved with the architecture one. It would be a very nice fit with his Canon Club that he's just started. https://substack.com/@edwest
How much of the implicit bias is due to training? You start off asking people to keep in mind four things: white and black, good and bad, then assign them to keys like A and L so that makes six things.
People then make it through a round of "white is good is A" and "black is bad is L".
Then you switch it around. So how much of the "if you pause that means BIAS" conclusion is because of bias, and how much is "black is L no wait now black is A"? I'm one of the fumble-fingers who would be "which one again is white this round?"
I am going to ask the obvious question about did they get the same pauses for all second rounds, or *only* for 'black'? Because if people can be just as fast for "white is L" then yeah, it's bias, but if they're pausing over "is white A or L now? which one is good word or bad word?" then I think it's because of training in the first round that "white is A, black is L".
Have they done any IAT tests with "black is good is A" and "white is bad is L" in the first round for comparison?
I'm pretty sure they randomize which condition you get first.
(I say "pretty sure" because I'm not going to re-read the papers now, but this is standard in psychology and it would utterly shock me if ten years of IAT research failed to do this very basic and universally recommended thing; I would be willing to bet at 100:1 odds that they do this routinely.)
Thanks, so it's not training to associate "Black with L" that slows people down.
(It would still slow me down because I have no reflexes, but given the replication crisis in social studies, I figured it wouldn't be any harm to check that the obvious stupid question had not been already asked).
I just tried the IAT Scott has linked and it says the order is randomized. It also has pre-rounds, but it did not specify clearly if those rounds are just for training yourself, or if they also do some more sophisticated adjustment to compute the result (I guess just the former).
I wish I could try this, I really do, but I fear it'll be "plain cold boiled potatoes with some salt and nothing else" instead of "mashed with butter and cream, or fried with onions, or..." all the other delicious but fattening ways I eat spuds.
Also do you only eat a certain amount of potatoes at a sitting? Trying to figure out 'how many grams is this, is it a small potato or a medium one?' is another way of torpedoing any diets because I tend to eyeball it as "well these are three small potatoes" and then it turns out I've exceeded my carb limit by A LOT.
"Everyone seems to agree: No dairy. Maybe this doesn’t matter, but on the off chance this is really important for some reason, please avoid all dairy products."
(sigh) Yes, that would be the sticking-point for me. No pandy? (Boiled potato mashed with a little salt and milk; mostly, at least in my family, a child's meal to coax a fussy eater but you can go very elaborate in other versions). No colcannon? No champ? No lovely floury Golden Wonders or Kerr's Pinks drenched in butter?
"If you know why one of these ideas is actually really stupid and won’t work / shouldn’t be tried, please comment about that too."
Finally. My time has come. I can be contrarian, except only in the realm of this blog, because actually, my language acquisition opinions are extremely mainstream and common within language acquisition research and methodology.
Number 4 is really stupid and shouldn't be tried, but it might work. One might ask, if it might work, why not try it? Because we've pretty much figured out optimal language learning, the same way we've figured out optimal weight loss. Language learning is hard the way weight loss is hard, but that you may find some weird method to lose weight better than a fad diet, or learn a language better than the waste of time general language classes are, that's not the bar that should be set.
The optimal path to learning a language is just extended exposure, but more specifically, extended exposure just at the edge of understanding. Rearranging the word order isn't at the edge of anything, and I say that as somebody who really likes literal translations like that for trying to understand idioms and euphemisms. Gradually rearranging the word order is something very close to a waste of time. It might be detrimental, because what you want to avoid is mental translating, and what rearranging the word order would do is make you expect mental translating to carry you to the end. Plus early reading is generally a bad idea because it tends to make it difficult to pronounce things properly. That is, your mental idea of what things sound like forms the basis of your reading, so when your mental idea of how to pronounce things is wrong, your reading will just reinforce that and it will be harder to unlearn later. Reading early is only for certain practical applications, for example, if you have no concern for speaking and are trying to land a translating job.
Anyway, to use Death Note as an example, you would get further just watching Death Note without any subtitles, and reading an extremely basic grammar guide. By extremely basic, I mean a guide that is no more than five pages that simply explains basic word order, the regular conjugations, and some common particles. You'd need this only because you're watching Death Note and presumably you don't know anything about Japanese at the beginning.
A better idea might be to watch something like Peppa Pig in Japanese with no subtitles, again after reading an extremely basic grammar guide. Just keep watching, and then graduate to, I don't know, Chibi Maruko-chan, and then some mainstream slice of life like Karakai Jouzu no Tagaki-san. It really doesn't matter, so long as you can barely understand what's happening, and you're interested enough to pay attention. In some cases this means some people might want to avoid these basic suggestions I've just given, because it's more important you pay attention than you understand. Some people find children's content or slice of life to be extremely boring even in the context of learning a language they want to learn.
While doing this it's also arguably a good idea to use some spaced repetition software. Essentially, flash cards with software behind it to optimise remembering. Anki is popular and free. Ideally you'd just go through the most common 1000 words, and after than any new cards should be made by you based on what you don't understand when watching or listening to native content.
None of this is secret. There are already some language schools that use pure exposure, usually by just teaching in the target language and not allowing the use of native language within the classroom. Online, this sort of method is well known too. Millions unintentionally teach themselves English all the time because English media is ubiquitous and they want to engage with it. Even for Japanese, AJATT has been around for decades, and more modern offshoots like Refold are pretty popular.
Language classes like you see in high-school or college aren't there because we don't know a better way. I don't exactly know why they're there, but only in the sense that I don't know why school is there in general. Even teachers of these language classes know that essentially nobody is going to learn the language from their classes.
Finally, there's psychology research about this, but I think psychology isn't real so I don't bother to remember it off the top of my head. I'm sure it could be found though, the Refold guys talk about it.
Re #7: if you dislike modern architecture, consider critiquing it conceptually.
For instance, Patrick Schumacher, principal of Zaha Hadid Architects (leading makers of the monstrous postmodern blobs), is also an intellectual and an author.
His book, The Autopoesis of Architecture, explains not just his philosophy but why architecture got so insular, why architects design for other architects, not the public.
I contend that, of all the professions, architecture as practiced today is most informed by and engaged in theoretical discourse. Given your position, Scott, as a public intellectual, you could perhaps make a bigger difference with words than by commissioning buildings.
Of course, you risk being contaminated by the architectural discourse; I wouldn’t be surprised if you find a lot to like about Schumacher’s theory of design once you understand it.
When it comes to the question of political change - there's the basic "how a bill becomes law" question, but any proper account would be how to lobby efficiently and ethically. (And importantly, as long as what you want is inexpensive and without much opposition, then it's usually relatively easy, at least in the UK, to shape legislation)
(8) is something I'd like to work on, with a little help from you setting up some interviews.
As far as I can tell, a lot of (8) is already written but it's scattered between many different sources, and between many different specialties. Different people handle appealing to voters, mass activism, lobbying and intra-elite activism, mass litigation strategies, and so on (this is far from exhaustive).
The real hole here is that there's no good, trustworthy, reliable, and *current* book to tie together the trustworthy sources, go over the basics of how political change can be accomplished and how the process works, and offer a sober but actionable set of strategies and courses of action.
I'd like to discuss details with you over Twitter DMs (I'm @surcomplicated) or email (DM me and I'll trade emails with you if you want) but what you could really do for me is set me up with a few interview subjects to make sure I get the details of their sides of things right. Different people handle issue polling than handle litigation than handle intra-elite activism and lobbying than handle protesting in the streets and so on. The job here is fundamentally to take expert knowledge in these (in practice) separate specialties and weave it together into a general primer on how you change things, and while there's plenty of written expert material on these specialties interviews can paper over any holes that remain.
Just saw this from the quests and requests follow up email. I'd love to contribute and help. I have some time. My email is everydayemails2@gmail.com and will follow up from there if there is still energy to do something on (8) On A Primer About Political Change
> but maybe you could fix it by having separate “excited to date this person” and “willing to try dating this person if they were excited about dating me” levels of box-tick.
This type of design hack (when done *in extreme moderation*, to avoid feature/complexity creep) is still underrated, so I'm singling it out here.
It's why I'm highly glad LW added a separate "agree/disagree" button on comments, and later added a (Hidden-by-default! Collapsible/expandable!) palette of like 40 other reacts.
As for the .7 'Poll after poll shows that Americans prefer classical art and architecture, here used as a catchall term for styles that old-fashioned, ornate, symmetrical, elegant, etc - eg neo-classical, Gothic revival, Art Nouveau, Art Deco', I think it is because you have few original examples. As a European, in the Old Continent I find the exact opposite trend: there is a real generalised fetish for American modernist architecture and Swedish minimalism (in the latter case, I think it is because it is intrinsic to satisfying the impulse to create that IKEA gives people by having their lousy furniture assembled). I have to say that the trend has always bothered me, being a devotee of 13th to 17th century aesthetics and having a 13-year background in art, as well as being a professional painter. I would really be interested in participating - albeit from the other side of the ocean -, perhaps designing decorations and paintings, if they were required. If anyone else is interested, I would be available
Given your background you maybe hang out with people who don’t reflect the average European. I also live in Europe and I don’t know any one who has a fetish for American Modernist architecture. I think the average European likes “old fashioned“ architecture just like Americans.
I associate Scandinavian minimalism mostly with interior design.
I understand the issue people have with modern especially post WWII architecture but the other side of the coin is that modern designs in a “traditional“ style can seem kitschy.
Killing 5 and 6 with one stone, why not just make an implicit bias dating site? Swiping on various facial, body, or profile descriptions/tags in a never ending implicit bias test. Discover universal and niche biases and pair users based on that. Or maybe implicit bias as captcha?
BTW, does anyone have a good reference article or link (not a whole book) on the correlation between IQ scores and other intelligence assessment tests and educational achievement? I've been looking into it, and it's proving harder to find a scholarly source than it should be.
The language learning idea sounds really interesting. I don't think GPT would be good at it but I can imagine some techniques which might not be completely awful at producing the desired output. (I'm an NLP researcher doing a mediocre job at learning a language right now).
I have some advice for anyone interested in tackling #2:
On https://pan.ukbb.broadinstitute.org/ there's a phenotype catalog, among which is fluid intelligence. There's like ~6800 SNPs significantly associated with it in the database. I believe you can actually download this set of SNPs!
The file is almost 2GB, so you need to put it into a database like SQLite and run commands to figure out stuff about it. Also, I bellieve the data all comes from a meta-analysis of fluid intellligence, which didn't use clumping alogirhtms to reduce false positives.
What I mean by this is that variants physically close on the genome will often be quite strongly correlated with one another, meaning one may mistakenly think that a particular variant is causing an observed difference in phenotype values when the real effect is cause by a neighboring variant.
It's possible one could obtain a data set of which variants are correlated with each other and use that to reduce the number of false positives.
You would then only need a relatively small validation set; perhaps 1000 genotypes + phenotypes, to validate the predictor.
We might be able to source this from the SSC community itself: get a bunch of people to take a standard IQ test or something and see what percentage of variance we could explain with the constructed predictor.
I am hesitant to take on this project myself because I have other projects I am already working on, but if anyone with a decent background in statistics or computational biology or just programming is interested in taking this on, feel free to reach out to me. I can put you in contact with some others who are interested in working on this. My email is morewronger@gmail.com.
In regards to the post, I also have one general comment:
> EA and IQ correlate well enough that it’s rarely worth examining them separately.
I take your general point that EA is a better-than-nothing proxy for intelligence if you have no other phenotype, but I don't belive to be true in general. If it were, we would expect both traits to be equally hertiable, which they are not (intelligence is substantially more hertiable than educational attainment). We would also expect both to show the same degree of "genetic nurture" effects, which is a way of saying that the genes of the parents have a large influence on the educational attainment of the child. But that's not what we see: there is significantly more genetic nurture involved in educational attainment than intelligence.
You can see further evidence that these phenotypes are not the same in studies like this one from Malanchini et al., who isolate specific genes that contribute to educational attainment: "We found that genetic effects associated with cognitive skills accounted for between 21% and 36% of the total variance in academic achievement"
Researchers have used educational attainment as a more politically acceptable proxy for intelligence in the past, but GWAS are now reaching scales at which these two traits diverge.
It’s clearly a bad idea to use a blurry stand-in for the thing you actually want to measure, intelligence. Seeing which genes affect intelligence is hard enough without the Gaussian blur!
Regarding the language-tutorial book; if it was web based you could just mouse-over a word and have it be explained using a tooltip which drew from a central database of definitions or explanations. That would be much more convenient and immersive.
Has anyone found a way to leverage lidocaine insensitivity in people with ADHD into a workable diagnostic test for ADHD? Could we make such a test objective by measuring galvanic skin response before and after administration?
Re. #6, as a long-time software developer I suspect the software part is actually the easiest, and the relevant pieces (website, authentication, reliable long-term storage, backups, redundancy, statistical algorithms for various measures of correlation between data sets, and so on) have already been solved in different areas many times over. The tricky parts are the "business rules".
Take privacy: a dating site needs a lot more strict and user-friendly control over who gets to see what about you than something like Facebook. If everybody can see everything about everybody else, I suspect only people who are extremely extrovert will want to use it, severely limiting the user base. Conversely, if you shield everybody maximally from everybody else, it's going to be really difficult to learn enough to make the leap into real life, selecting only for people willing to spend a lot of time fighting the platform to be able to do what they actually came for. People have different thresholds for what they're comfortable sharing with different groups, and you very quickly get into multi-dimensional matrices of permissions.
Or payments: who pays what, when, and how? If you make everything free the place is going to be all bots, all the time, so that's out. But as soon as you charge for any specific thing, it completely changes the incentive structure. Do you charge a simple monthly fee? Then people are incentivised to try to contact as many potential others as possible. If you instead charge per contact, the incentive flips completely to contacting very few people. This may sound like a good thing, since people will be more careful with whom they contact, but the network effects could be devastating: you might get an extremely sharp L-curve of a small handful of people with profiles tailored for mass appeal getting inundated with requests, while more casual users very rarely get any. A large fraction of people looking to be contacted would get very little attention, and would probably leave soon.
Of course, this is just barely scratching the surface. Even if you could ask 10,000 users (or 100 developers) of 2011's OkCupid why it was great I suspect you'd probably get a pretty useless dataset, because incentives are so complex and sensitive to details.
How about having price-per-message adjusted dynamically, based on some LLM's prediction of whether it's more likely to lead to success or a burnt bridge? Start by training it to recognize the difference between basic civility and overt harassment or trolling, then refine with data on actual relationship outcomes as it becomes available.
Recipient gets a portion of whatever the algorithm charged the sender, as "store credit" usable for their own messages, other in-app purchases, or even counted toward monthly fee, if there is one. Sorting incoming messages by how much you're being paid to read them might separate the wheat from the chaff for those with too many admirers, while searching users by predicted receptiveness to a particular message could solve the "looking to be contacted" problem.
I'm ashamed to say I downloaded a huge PDF of it from a Russian ebook website. But hopefully, publicizing it here will partly atone for my sins!
On the topic of online dating sites (#6), I wonder if there could be any mileage in one with a sort of "peek-a-boo" portrait system, whereby a profile viewer initially sees the viewee's portrait either blurred or mostly blocked, and the viewer has to click on choices from a pre-configured list of what they consider to be their own good points, to progressively reveal a sharper or more complete portrait if their chosen good points match the preferences of the viewee.
I suggest the viewee's preferences would not be shown either, because after all in real life when meeting a stranger for the first time one doesn't know these to start with. The viewee could choose a style of portrait concealment as part of their profile, e.g. foliage, clouds, blur, array of small squares that would (if all went well for the viewer) gradually show more of the portrait.
The viewer's choices for a given viewee would have to be irrevocable, because otherwise they could obviously experiment and likely eventually come up with a favourable but insincere selection. Also, a bad choice (relative to the viewee's preferences) would be retrograde in that it would re-blur or cover more of the portrait!
In other words, rather than skimming through profile pics one after another, left, left, right, left, etc, making instant snap judgements based pretty much solely on appearance, they have to work a bit harder to see a sharp and fairly complete image of the person of potential interest, and this can be attained only if their preferences match or are complementary.
Such a system would obviously be uncongenial to impatient users with the attention span of a goldfish. But that in itself might be an advantage, in discouraging casual superficial users. Also, having to work somewhat to be "rewarded" with a clear profile image might have some beneficial psychological effect, such as maybe more incentive to message the person of interest.
But the flip side is that this effort, in fixing the viewee's portrait more firmly in the mind, could also give obsessives and potential stalkers extra commitment and determination to contact them.
As #4 mostly with word ordering begins, would it be fun, it in German to do. So can you effortlessly German word ordering learn. But I ask myself, if word ordering really the challengingest feature of a language is?
I’m very skeptical that you can learn a language without aggressive vocabulary memorisation- grammar and word order can be difficult but if you don’t know the vocabulary you won’t even have the context to apply it.
I recall from looking into commercialization of various psychological tools everything tends to be copyrighted in every way imaginable. That causes, for example, commercially available HR tools to be even worse than they have to be.
Usually it's done via owning exact questions and scoring mechanism, since you can't (?) own an experiment design. It tends to be a big deal because it's the specific test that gets validated and using anything else can't claim any power coming from those validation.
It is very hard for me to guess which parts of IAT are owned by Harvard or Project Implicit. Surely they own specific words/images used in their experiment, exact instructions and implementation of the scoring algorithm. But do they own name IAT? What else is there to even own?
The IAT itself is quite easily doable and, as Kosinski taught us, people will share any psychological results you give them, but the legal uncertainty is kind of scary.
Something like #4 already exists (language teaching via books that gradually substitute in more words from the target language).
I used to get Facebook ads for it. The books were directed at children, which does limit how far they could take someone. The example given was for learning Spanish. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the company.
Architecture hobbyist here! I believe the dichotomy between styles such as classical, art deco, and art nouveau versus modernist, minimalist, and brutalist doesn’t quite capture the essence of good or bad architecture. I think I understand why people feel aversion to the brutalist/minimal/modern architecture. I may have crossed some weird aesthetic exposure and our aesthetic sensitivities won’t ever align. But I wonder if actually going and and seeing some sites in-person may change how one may attempt to define the essence of good/bad architecture. So here is my list:
I highly recommend visiting Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation in Marseille, France. It’s one of my favorite buildings. It’s a site that includes colorful internal streets, shops, double-height living rooms, and a striking concrete roof garden with kids playground, a theater stage, and a swimming pool.
Other modern and brutalist buildings I loved. (I believe that photographs seldom do justice to architecture. Instead of Google searching, save them on Google Map for an in-person visit)
* Convent La Tourette by Le Corbusier in Lyon, France (tour)
* CopenHill by BIG in Copenhagen, Denmark (go skiing in winter)
* The Barbican Centre in London, UK (go to exhibit/theater)
* Casa de Musica by OMA in Porto, Portugal (go to a concert or take the tour)
* Arcosanti by Paolo Soleri, 1h North of Phoenix, AZ (stay there, details on their site)
* Lobe Block, Berlin, Germany (go for a yoga or get food at the the canteen)
* Casa Gillardi by Louis Barragan, Mexico City (tour)
Is there any way to buy insurance that would indemnify me in the event that my prenup doesn't accomplish what it says on the tin? Or more generally, is there anyone insuring people against damages that occur due to bad governments failing to enforce contracts?
Problem with that is the insurance is, itself, based on a contract which the government might then choose not to enforce - or actively prohibit - as part of doubling down on their previous decision.
If uncertainty about the legal/financial risks of getting married reduce marriages by 2% and births by 1% then the government gets a ~1% gdp boost in ~40 years just by allowing this kind of insurance to exist. Prediction markets could perhaps be used to hedge any legal risks that traditional insurance companies are unable or unwilling to underwrite.
Re: #7, the beautifying architecture proposal, I'm a visual artist with a focus on architecture and specifically architectural detailing (though not an actual architect, to be clear) who has thought quite a bit on what a modern design style for the ornamentation of a modern classical architecture would look like. Happy to share examples/create demos of what it would look like, or just talk with people who are looking beautifying architecture this way.
#7 made me recall the origins of Art Deco, which was oddly a specific push by a guild, the Société des Artistes Décorateurs who very intentionally promoted decorative arts, it was not a totally organic and natural emerging preference for ornamentation.
+1 to number 8. Political change is accompanied by a bunch of idiosyncratic features like the single issue rule. so once you get a lobbyist to support your boutique cause of, say, increasing funding for law libraries, your next step is to simply propose a bill for funding law libraries.
Haha, no, that would never get traction.
Your next move is to sit and wait for a bill on a vaguely related topic, such as on educational funding, the legal profession, or maybe inner city youth programs or something you can just squint and draw a connection to. Then you push like crazy to get your bit added to the larger bill and hope you tied your trailer to a star.
These are not stupid questions at all, the system is full of absurd corners like this and I too want this collected in a book somewhere.
This is notably complicated by the various forms of political change in the country, to include lawmaking and executive orders, but also the quiet dominance of administrative rulemaking. A proper treatment would balance the impact of all of these.
I don't think your questions are stupid at all, I think you have a great instinct for the non-obvious corners in lots of areas, including here. My dream version of this book would include a series of interviews, one with a professional lobbyist, one with a congressional staffer, one with an administrative law judge or maybe someone who has run a notice and comment process for an executive agency, one with a lawyer who has had to interpret EOs maybe in the intel community or adjacent, a longtime DC journalist, then some coverage or state and local lawmaking and where they fit in. My book's corpulent title would be something like "The civics they never taught you: The unwieldy billion and one paths to making new laws in America (and why none of them really work but maybe that's mostly ok)."
I would love to quit my job and go on an interview tour but I have a family to support and lack any reputation that would land me any of these interviews. How do you hire somebody to write a book to spec?
#4, the language learning idea, is bad. Sometimes you’ll have too few foreign words and you’ll waste time not learning much. Sometimes you’ll have too many foreign words and you’ll have trouble figuring out what they actually mean.
The real deal is the Listening-Reading method. You listen to an audiobook in the foreign language and you follow the written version of the same text in your native language. 100% of what you hear is foreign and 100% is comprehensible. It also teaches you the hardest skill, listening comprehension.
Also what’s underrated is just memorizing a lot of words, and spaced repetition is the best way of doing that.
I just installed a strobe light app and flashed it at different frequencies at nutrition labels and tried to read them. Super easy at 12hz and very hard with 5,6,7,8,9,10,11,13,14, or 15!!!
Pretty sure number 8 is a moving target - by default, people who are already in power don't want political change to be easy, since that could be a threat to their position, so whenever an effective, generalizable strategy starts to be become widely known, they set up specialized countermeasures.
Number 7 wouldn't solve the underlying problem of the incentive structure of free market capitalism. Beautiful cities are a common good which the capitalists will happily burn for more profits. We would need a state intervention, something like a pigouvian tax on ugly buildings (which could fund a pigouvian subsidy for beautiful buildings) to give them an incentive to start caring about it.
How would you determine who gets the subsidy and who the tax? Obviously a commission would be immediately bribed so a vote by the residents of the city is the best I can come up with.
I want to correct my mistake and rewrite what i wished.
„I just want You and Me (WE) cooperate together to be happy any way You wish. We are for You and You are for We. Let’s have fun together and experience whatever feeling we want.
Together We Are Complete.
We can make new rules and new exceptions.
We will decide later.
We know what We want.
We will do it.”
This is my only and true wish.
All rest is commentary.
❤️
(If You don’t understad it just read further. This is my wish after all :)
Re: the language learning idea, in my personal experience (with Latin) this is something teachers incorporate a lot already, if not actually in the particular way you suggest. When teaching indirect statement (for instance, reported speech), teachers will often encourage you to translate literally in your head and then rework it into good English next. So 'secuturos se ducem responderunt' would be literally translated as 'they replied themselves to be about to follow the leader' which becomes 'they replied that they would follow the leader'. I can't speak for Japanese or other languages more difficult for Anglos than Latin, but I suspect that the book iteration idea could never be more than a peripheral element of language learning. Picking up different word orders and structures is surely the least time-intensive part of learning any new language, even a tricky one like Japanese, what there really is no substitute for is knuckling down and learning your vocab etc.
I'm maybe biased here, because as someone who had a relatively 'traditional' education in Latin, and, though not to the same standard, French, I am a fully bought and paid member of the grammar-memorisation-industrial complex.
Does anyone find it morally questionable to support embryo pre-selection based on predicted IQ scores? I certainly do, especially if one considers the robust correlation between IQ scores and race! But even if you don't agree with my moral intuition, since the relationship of IQ and happiness is mediated by SES, social security systems seem to play a huge role https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/can-intelligence-buy-you-happiness/
I'm unclear on how differences in IQ scores between races is relevant to embryo selection. The child is going to be the same race as the parents regardless of which embryo you select.
I am not an expert in this, but I have seen many times that the studies on this type of "training-based improvement" to IQ usually don't replicate, or are equivalent to training on an IQ test.
I can't think of many examples of an intervention improving the g factor other than those which address nutritional deficiencies or eliminate exposure to pollutants like lead. I guess the closest thing might be pharmaceutical interventions, but those only work for some people.
It's a just another step from iq-based selection of embryos on a family level to a race-based selection on a broader level. Especially since the average differences on iq between black and whites are 15! points, not just 3-5 as mentioned in the post above. Even thought the importance of iq across different domains may be correct, iq-based embryo selection is a road to hell.
"It's a just another step from iq-based selection of embryos on a family level to a race-based selection on a broader level"
Well, it's a pretty big step, though, right? In fact it's a series of big steps of different kinds to go from de-selecting embryos who lack a certain characteristic to de-selecting living adults who lack it. How do we deselect those with lower IQ's? Kill them? Sterilize them? You think *that's* just a step away? We currently do not sterilize even people with disabilities that produce an IQ of 30, or murderers, or child molesters, or people who are chronically psychotic. We execute a tiny percent of murderers. but overall kill very few, and do not kill any of the other undesirables.
Also if our goal was to raise the average population IQ, wouldn't we be likely to do it in the most effective way, i.e. test families for IQ, then kill or sterilize those family lines who average low? Black IQs may be lower on average than white, but there are plenty of below-average whites and above-average blacks.
Your worry doesn't seem much more plausible than worrying that if we select embryos for thinness we'll start executing fat people.
Edit: Here's a better analogy. So far, the thing the medical establishment and probably much of the public cares most about is cancer risk, and that's what the companies that do the screening are looking for genetic signs of. OK, so did you know that non-Hispanic whites are diagnosed with cancer at a slightly higher rate than non-Hispanic blacks? (Fewer whites die of cancer, probably because of earlier diagnosis and better care, but more develop cancer.). In fact, the ratio of white cancer risk to black cancer risk is almost identical to the IQ ratio -- about 5% higher if you accept the figure mentioned in an earlier post here.
"It's a just another step from iq-based selection of embryos on a family level to a race-based selection on a broader level. ." So do you think that it's just another step from cancer risk-based selection of embryos on a family level to a race-based selection on another level? (https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/disparities.html). Are we likely to do to whites, to reduce population cancer risk, whatever it is you think we might do to blacks to reduce population low-IQ risk?
Elsewhere in this thread I suggest that a better target in embryo selection would be resistance to depression. Many people's actualization of their smarts is greatly reduced by depression. Even if your goal is to improve the productivity and scientific advancement of the population I think you'd get more benefit from reducing depression than from increasing IQ.
Sorry for being kind of late to respond to this. Low depression risk is already used as part of the selection criteria, at least by Genomic Prediction.
In fact, you can make better general mental health (lower risk of depression, bipolar, schizophrenia) a part of your selection criteria.
I don't know of an intervention to improve IQ either, but there sure are a lot of smart people whose smarts mostly go to waste because of mental illness. I think depression is the worst offender. It's less gravely disabling than schizophrenia, but. makes up for that by being far more common. I think either better depression treatment or embryo selection for resistance to depression would raise the effective IQ of the population quite a lot.
If the embryos being selected among are siblings, it would be very unusual for them to be of different races, much less socioeconomic status. Killing or forcibly sterilizing non-fetal humans on the basis of race - or, y'know, *at all* - is already broadly illegal, and to the extent that those laws aren't being followed, I seriously doubt that hindering tangentially-related medical research would be the most efficient solution.
#5 Really excites me because it was similar to something I worked on for myself a while ago, though it was more like a super-CBT/affirmation tool: a game where you try to choose the positive fill in the blank answer quickly, theoretially training you to have more positive automatic thoughts.
The "theoretically" their is obviously doing a lot of work, but I usually felt a bit better after playing it.
This post motivated me to brush it off and get it working again:
This is a pure-front-end-web-app with all the sentences hard-coded. I don't see any issue with getting accurate timing: the timing could be done client side (as others have said) and I really think even a web-app like this would be high-fidelity enough for human-scale interactions. The only issue is security. I don't think you could make a web-app that's secure against someone cheating if they really wanted to. If we're measuring biases people might be trying to hide, this would be an issue. The solution would be to make a native app of some sort. I'd probably use one of the tools which lets you build native apps for iPhone and Android.
As others have stated, a CRUD for creating the tests wouldn't be hard, though we'd have to think about how exactly the configurability would work. And then there would be adding identification and authorization, which I would probably implement with AWS Cognito.
AI integration would be an interesting feature, both for generating images and for creating phrases or gathering a certain class of words ("Give me a bunch of phrases that are reflective of crime").
#5: I'm quite interested in the Automatic Implicit Association Generator, but am starting a big personal project and won't have time to add another one. But if anyone does work on this, I have a lot of ideas -- would be happy to pass them all on to you, and to consult if there's some way I can be useful (I'm a psychologist).
On #4 I agree with most comments here that it's a little unworkable due to one book not being nearly enough time to learn a language, but how about a translation slider? Put a bar on every web page that gradually translates it from one language to another, starting with word order, then swapping out the most common words, and eventually the tricky ones too. For instance:
0% I have eaten my dinner
30% I have my dinner eaten
60% Ich habe mein evening-food eaten
100% Ich habe mein Abendessen gegessen
That way you could learn your target language by reading _anything_ written in _either_ language, simply by sliding the bar to where you're currently comfortable. I'm not sure how much more work on machine translation would be required to create arbitrary combinations of two languages, but it seems reasonably doable (albeit with occasional screw-ups).
On #7 if you're interested in this then one of the best things you can do is support Donald Trump. He issued an executive order in 2020 decreeing that Federal buildings should be built in a neoclassical style https://www.npr.org/2020/12/21/948926995/keep-it-classical-says-trump-order-on-federal-architecture while Biden immediately rescinded it upon taking office and as far as I know no buildings were actually built under this order.
But of course this shows the real problem, traditional forms of architecture are currently oik-coded, you have little chance of convincing the sorts of peope who actually make decisions about zillion-dollar projects to look like oiks. Your best shot might actually be local governments, because surely there's a town out there somewhere whose city government needs a new town hall or public library, has a bit of money to spend, and is willing to take the pro-oik side in the culture war.
So I'm having kids using embryos (first implantation likely next year), and my doctors tell me that it's not actually possible to get an embryo's genotype: there isn't really enough genetic material to see the whole genome, just part of it, with existing technology. Yet I continue to see this sort of "genotype selection" stuff from people I trust, like Scott. Does anyone know how to resolve this? Are my doctors wrong?
EDIT: To clarify, I'm told that you can't take very much of an embryo's cells away from it to analyze without putting it in danger. They mostly take from cells that will become the placenta. With such a small sample of cells, it's not really possible for current technology to get a whole genome snapshot. Is this true?
According to article, you can't safely take enough cells from an embryo to determine the whole genome, but you can determine it pretty accurately by taking the partial info you get from the embryo itself and using it in combination with parents' genomes. "The advance depends on fully sequencing both parents’ DNA and “reconstructing” an embryo’s genome with the help of those data."
"The researchers had a handy way to see whether their reconstruction was accurate: Check the couples’ babies. They collected cheek swab samples from the babies and sequenced their full genome, just as they’d done with the parents. They then compared that “true sequence” with the reconstructed genome for the embryo from which the child originated. The comparison revealed, essentially, a match: For a 3-day-old embryo, at least 96% of the reconstructed genome aligned with the inherited gene variants in the corresponding baby; for a 5-day-old embryo, it was at least 98%. (Because much of the human genome is the same across all people, the researchers focused on the DNA variability that made the parents, and their babies, unique.)"
This article is 18 mos. old, so technology may have advanced a bit since then. Anyhow, upshot is that it's possible, but you have to use this method, which at least at the time of the article was the invention of the experimenters and not used anywhere else.
Yeah, this is old. Orchid Health just released a whole genome sequencing product for embryos a few months ago.
The predictors right now use mostly SNP data so IMO the main benefit is screening against really rare de novo mutations that can cause serious developmental issues. I think the prevalence of the ones they can screen for is like 0.3% though
So how is Orchid Health doing whole genome sequencing. Are they using the clever and laborious-sounding method described in the paper? It would be possible to tell from their description on their site, right?, because site would say that part of the process is sequencing the parents' genomes too. Or is Orchid using another method? And, excuse the basic questions -- this is not my field: Are full exome sequencing or a cross-genome selection of SNP's the same thing as whole genome sequencing? I just looked up both and staggered through some technical info, and it sounds to me like neither is. However, I suppose one or both could be as good for all practical purposes as a whole genome sequencing. *Is* one or the other just as good for practical purposes? And what I mean by practical purposes is is that one could use it to screen for anything: So if it had just been determined that there are 5 spots on the genome that together predict a propensity for extreme violence, it would be possible to tell how many of the 5 an embryo had.
I don't know that many details about how their sequencing process works (and indeed I suspect such information is private since it forms part of their core IP), but I do know they are able to do whole genome sequencing perhaps 3-7 cells.
I don't believe Orchid requires sequencing of the parents but I should double check on that.
> Are full exome sequencing or a cross-genome selection of SNP's the same thing as whole genome sequencing?
Full exome sequencing is when you sequence the subset of the genome that codes for proteins.
A SNP array (one of the most common methods of sequencing used by 23&Me, UK Biobank and others) is when you look at the places in the genome that most commonly differ between people regardless of whether they code for a protein. A pretty standard SNP array will look at about 500k - 1 mil points on the genome which where at least 1% of some reference population has a different letter or sequence at that spot.
And whole genome sequencing is when you read the value of every single spot in the genome (or at least nearly all of them. I think there are still some highly repetitive regions that standard WGS doesn't measure).
> However, I suppose one or both could be as good for all practical purposes as a whole genome sequencing
For the purposes of embryo selection the main difference is whole genome sequencing can catch some rare de novo mutations (meaning mutations that don't come from the mother or father). These de novos are responsible for a significant portion of developmental disorders. I believe the absolute prevalence of serious genetic conditions that can be caught with Orchid's testing is <1%, though I don't know the exact number.
But as far as polygenic risk scores go, SNP arrays are just as good as whole genome sequencing.
If you're interested in this for the purpose of IVF, I actually have an advisory service. You can email me are morewronger@gmail.com if you'd like to use it. I've got info about the quality of IVF clinics as well as more about testing.
No, I'm not planning on doing IVF. I have a grown daughter and am done with having babies. I just got curious about the topic. Something else I'm curious about, if you haven't run out of patience, is how you get genetic material rfom embryos prior to implanting them in the woman. Looked up number of cells in human embryos, and after 72 hrs. they have 7-10 cells. And I think that's about the point where they are implanted. How can it be safe to trash even 1 cell -- that's 10-15% of the embryo! Is it that the cells are completely undifferentiated at that point, 7-10 identical cells, so deleting one does not take anything unique from the embryo, just decreases its mass?
Biopsies are usually taken after 5 days not 3. At that time embryos typically have around 100 cells. Roughly 5 are removed from the outer layer of the embryo called the trophectoderm. That part later becomes the placenta.
But yes, the embryo seems to be able to completely replace these missing cells, which is pretty remarkable.
I think this is false, Orchid Health offers full exome sequencing for embryos and some other companies like LifeView do a good cross-genome selection of SNPs. See https://www.orchidhealth.com/ .
(EDIT: Just read Eremolalos' comment, maybe that explains the discrepancy?)
I would be worried about throwing a lot of money at the architecture problem. Survey results are notoriously unreliable judges of what people actually want; they often require great care and precision in the wording of the question to avoid biasing results. I feel like something like "classical art" is especially vulnerable to this sort of thing: it might well be that people are responding that they like the idea of it, as opposed to the thing itself. The "successful tourist attraction" reasoning is similarly tenuous: lots of things are much better to visit than to live/work in.
As for the "how to political change" document, I would be very interested in that. It's my understanding that they key is to effectively lobby, and to consistently show up. Reaching out to some current or ex-lobbyists might be an effective strategy.
I can't see that anyone else has flagged this, but #4 sounds quite like the method used by Joseph Jacotot, as described by Jacques Rancière in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Basically, Jacotot was a celebrated lecturer who had to flee France for political reasons. He found refuge in Louvain where there were many students who wanted to learn from him. The problem was that he didn't know Flemish and many of the students didn't know French. He ended up assigning the students a bilingual version of the utopian novel Les aventures de Télémaque by François Fénelon. He asked them to read it through over and over again until they understood the French text without the accompanying translation. Then he asked them to write an essay about the book in French. Apparently, the essays were good: "He had given no explanation to his 'students' on the first elements of the language. He had not explained spelling or conjugations to them. They had looked for the French words that corresponded to words they knew and the reasons for their grammatical endings by themselves. They had learned to put them together to make, in turn, French sentences by themselves: sentences whose spelling and grammar became more and more exact as they progressed through the book; but, above all, sentences of writers and not of schoolchildren." Sounds like a proof of concept!
A notion for a dating site: match people with similar styles of arguing. This may work better than matching people who agree with each other, or at least should be included.
#1 is very unlikely to hold up in my opinion, sorry.
The main result as shown in figure 2 of the paper (the graph included in the blog post) compares three groups. I downloaded the processed data from the Apollo repository and was able to reproduce exactly the results reported by the authors. However, these results rely entirely on omitting the fourth group, which was the control group.
In figure 2, we see that the "T-Match" group had a learning rate of about 0.03; the "T-Nonmatch" group had a learning rate of about 0.00, and the "P-match" group had a learning rate of about 0.01. In the supplementary figure S2.1 we find the control group and we can see that it had a learning rate of about 0.01.
Because the control group data were omitted also from the file that I used to replicate the analysis, I was not able to try it while including the control group. (The description of the control group in the methods section is unclear, but as best as I can tell the experiment was designed with 2x2 factors for 4 groups and should be analysed accordingly.)
This kind of research has enormous analytical flexibility. There are many ways to operationalise learning in the data from this experiment. The results were weak, with one of the main comparisons showing a p-value of 0.045 - just barely below the conventional threshold of 0.05. The preexisting analytical flexibility, nonstandard analysis, and barely statistically significant p-value would already cause me to bet heavily against reproducibility of the reported results. Additionally, the research was not preregisterred and it was also heavily underpowered with 20 participants per cell.
I suggest that a first step for anyone wanting to dig deeper into this would be to request the raw data and re-run the analyses while including the control group. Other robustness checks would also be indicated, including different ways to operationalise the main outcome of learning. But in my opinion even that would likely be a waste of everybody's time.
My background: I am a researcher in neuroscience and metascience, involved in the EEGManyLabs project already mentioned by another commenter, and I co-lead the EEGManyPipelines project, which is a large-scale big team science project on analytical robustness of EEG data.
I was listening to a podcast for learning French, and one of the ideas that stood out was - don't memorize vocabulary lists, speed up your learning by learning phrases and sentences and deploying them immediately.
I wondered if we can do something similar with this translation approach, except we use an LLM model to generate each paragraph from one language to the other, slowly adding in phrases and sentences. I suspect the syntax > grammar > vocabulary > full translation approach is too difficult for beginners because of people's propensity to want to get it right vs wanting to understand what is changing. Plus you're adding in 3 steps where the translation is incorrect between the two correct versions in the two languages, giving more chances to people to fixate on some erroneous approach in the middle. ChatGPT/etc will need a lot more training to get those nuances right.
I think it would need to start with simple sentences at first, and simpler books, but I think it could work very well as a way of learning.
The cat in the hat. El Gato en El sombrero... oof. I tried doing it and it's difficult to do it one sentence or even one word at a time. my spanish is very basic, in any case...
the sun did not shine. it was too wet to play. so we sat in the house. all that cold, cold, wet day.
my version - El sol no (estaba soleado?), fue muy lluvioso para jugar, sentamos en la casa, Todo El dia tan frio, frio y mojada.
chatgpt - El sol no brillaba. Estaba demasiado húmedo para jugar. Así que nos sentamos en la casa. Todo ese frío, frío, día húmedo.
It's older, but a good book that already exists for your "primer for political change" topic is Robert Heinlein's _Take Back Your Government!: A Practical Handbook for the Private Citizen Who Wants Democracy to Work_. It's at least a good general place to start even if something more adapted to the current social media age is needed now.
Ugh I've never liked Hindu (Indian?) architecture. The highly textured/crenulated surfaces always make the buildings seem more like growths than structures IMO. And not in a good "organic, natural" sense - more like a grotesque fungal, tumorlike sense. The walls seem more excreted than engineered. The Hindu temple pictured above, for example, looks more like a giant termite mound than a human building to me. Which is a shame because otherwise it's an impressive building.
I have an alternative dating app idea that I've been mulling over for a while. I think it's good but don't have the bandwidth/skills to implement. If anyone wants to collaborate or take elements of this I would be down!
The app would be called Friend of a Friend, and it would involve getting your friends to matchmake for you. You (the singleton*) would make a basic profile. Your matchmaker friend would talk to you about what you're looking for. Then, the matchmaker would go on the app, which would hook into their social media, probably mostly facebook but could be others as well. They would look for other matchmakers, and see if they are representing someone you could potentially be compatible with (based on the basic profile). Then, they would talk to the other matchmaker about whether, knowing both parties, they think you'd be compatible. If so, they set you up on the date. After the date, they ask you how it went, and adjust their strategy for the future if necessary.
The idea is that, if you're not lucky enough to have found a partner in your immediate friend group or among acquaintances, you shouldn't be relegated to just go fish. You should search within your extended social network. The matchmakers are vehicles for this extension. But, they are also a layer of safety and dignity for the singleton. It's creepy to be matched with someone you know on a dating app (early tinder tried this I think). But if someone else is setting you up, I think most people would consider that okay. The matchmakers could ask questions of each other that are awkward to ask yourself (why is this person still single? what's their income? how autistic are they?) and quickly suss out incompatibilities. Plus, because this person is from your extended social network, and you know you will be asked about the date, and some version of what you said can get back to the person you went on a date with, you are less likely to ghost, dismiss out of hand, or just generally treat them as disposable. To top it off, you will have someone who is talking through the process with you. Dating sucks and no one should have to do it alone.
Objections:
- what's in it for the matchmaker? I envision a reward agreed upon by the singleton and matchmaker upon marriage to a person they were set up with. Could be money, a wedding speech, the name of their firstborn, whatever they decide. This could be mediated through the app, or not. In general, I find my married friends to be very interested in my dating life, and they say they would love to participate. I had a friend volunteer and take over my hinge for a few months with nothing in it for her. Some people do love matchmaking.
- wouldn't this result in very few, or zero, dates? You could have many matchmaker friends. I also envision a mechanic where the matchmaker gets access to other matchmakers once removed on the friend network, or twice etc. This could cost extra (the singleton would foot the bill ofc). But also, having fewer but higher value dates is kind of the point.
- wouldn't you need a looot of people to sign up before this yielded any matches? Yes. This is the biggest issue in my view. I think it could be aleviated if people from some large social group (errr rationalists? EAs?) were the first adopters, so there would likely be several ppl within the same network.
If anyone wants to work with me on this let me know! Or some version of this that you think is better. Or constructive criticism is also welcome. I have basic programing skills but not app dev skills, so may not be super helpful in this regard. I also do not have influence with 1000's of women. My only asset is being a woman. Maybe they're more likely to listen to me than to a man. I've got a few somewhat well-connected acquaintances though.
*I recognize that not all people who are looking for dates are single. But, I needed a word. Also, not all people who want more money are starving, but maybe the starving ones should get priority :P
ps. Basically instead of drawing inspiration from 2011 OKC, I'm drawing inspiration from Indian arranged marriages. But with friends instead of parents, and the power of social media networks instead of the village yenta.
pps. There could also be a mechanic where some people who are very well-connected become a matchmaker for a lot of people, like a yenta. They could charge to represent you.
idea runs contrary to the best known -way to learn language, which is immersion, with your brain working in multiple modalities at once (speaking, listening, reading, writing, and explicit lessons in vocabulary and grammar rules). Basically you want the most signal-rich stream of training data, not a stream that contains only one feature like word order.
The reason that most adults don't do immersion is that it's painful: it gives you culture shock, curtails the autonomy you expect as an adult, and might require changing your residence.
For this reason, I don't expect immersion to become more popular. But I do think that a whole-language approach is closer to immersion than your idea, and hence more likely to work fast.
Nobody knows or cares what NOTA is, so instead of promoting "Coalition to Modify NOTA", promote "Tax Credits for Kidney Donors" or something equally quick at getting the message across.
We're working on #8! Our team at Rise (https://risenow.us/) has passed 69 laws for rape survivors and we've coached others to pass 19 laws for their own communities. We're working on a workbook to open-source our blueprint for change to help other people get involved in the legislative process and pass their own laws. Let's connect! Send us a note: info@risenow.us
I believe the biggest source of 20-dollar bills on the ground, w.r.t. stranger-dating mechanics, is to apply solid economics to the matching. E.g., creating artificial scarcity (you only get contact info for one or two people a week, tops), and solving scarcities with bidding (doesn't have to be real money; the scarce pipeline of actual contacts makes bidding with time important too).
I have other applications of econ, but won't share out of information hazard, and playing coy. 📞me?
More on the point, there are all sorts of reasons 4 wouldn't work. Scarcity of the corpus (one chapter of a regular book is not terribly much), differences in grammatical features (for instance, if I were to make this from Russian to English, I don't even really know what I would _use_ as the Russian translation for article), and, frankly and most importantly, the target audiences just aren't children anymore, the acquisition mechanisms we use as small children are closed by the time we can read something like that, period - the grammar will not be _acquired_, only _learned_, using Weeve's terminology. (I am not impressed with Weeve's approach, either, but note that they don't seem to be doing _quite_ the same.) Grammar-memorization-complex is good, actually, if you want to be able to speak so that you don't sound like Hagrid.
To expand on this a bit, everyone acts like learning a language is learning its words, whereas where languages are both incredibly similar and incredibly different is grammar. It is trivial to replace first with premiere and ass with derriere, but you'll still be speaking English not French. It is far less trivial to obey, say, French Person-Case Constraint (and I expect many of you won't even know what this is...).
Hi Scott - I'm Phil from www.prismatext.com, which has been mentioned above a few times already re: your language learning idea above.
Our offering is very similar to what you've described, and we've actually tested what you outlined exactly before as well. We're currently working with over 30 publishers and aiming to add a new range of features and practice options in coming months.
We'd love to chat further if you're interested! Please shoot us a note if so:
#7: Asked my wife (Elsbeth Geldhof: http://www.linkedin.com/in/elsbeth-geldhof, a heritage professional and historical conservator what she thought. Her response follows
> Two thoughts:
> 1) The Institute for Classical Architecture (https://www.classicist.org/) is doing exactly this - so support this institution and help them develop and expand, rather than putting funds and energy and expertise into establishing a second ICA. Also initiatives such as the National Campaign for the Historic Building Trades (https://historictrades.org/) are tapping into building knowledge and expertise that is connected to Classical Architecture among other architectural building typologies and styles. If you feel really strongly about this, then support those institutions, they are doing great work and they need the support to continue doing this and make a movement and a difference.
> 2) The USA and many of their citizens like Classical Architecture so much, because the USA was founded as a fresh, new nation following what was at the time thought to be the highest standard of political infrastructure: the Classical Greek World. Thomas Jefferson cs went on a Grand Tour of Europe to study the classical and neo-classical architecture, to literally give shape to those ideals. Which resulted in all those lovely neo-classical state and government buildings.
> Instead of Classical Architecture in the USA (that is already studied extensively by excellent institutions, see above) - why not expand one's taste and knowledge and help the education, preservation and support of heritage in general in the states? Including difficult or uncomfortable narratives that are connected to this heritage. There are numerous, numerous, numerous wonderful architectural and industrial heritage gems waiting to be studied, preserved, cared for and loved. And better even, why not start with supporting a couple of the major statewide or national preservation institutions that are exactly doing that?
> I am happy to help find people heritage organizations that they didn't know about yet and might want to support and be involved with. Anyone interested can contact me via my linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/elsbeth-geldhof and I am happy to help.
There's fortunately an open-source polygenic risk score calculator for many GWAS studies, including various intelligence studies, already available (I've used it on myself, friends, and family members). It's easiest to use when run locally via command line but the academic group that makes it has a website that isn't super friendly and the interpretation isn't super straight forward. Impute.me used to be free and open-source until the founder decided to make it a company/closed-source (the WayBackMachine could perhaps find the old Github repo it was in).
I'd be willing to whip up the academic command line tool into a more user-friendly website if you don't need it super fast (I'm currently spending most of my time right now studying the MCAT to apply for medical school). I do want to advise though about some of the potential dangers of using such a tool to promote the wide spread use of embryo selection because there are some robust epigenetic differences that can be detected between artificially reproduced children and naturally conceived children that can potentially predispose such children to chronic diseases. My suspicion is that an easily accessible polygenic tool would probably be more useful on a societal level (i.e. people without reproductive issues) to use in a dating app, or to facilitate mate selection in "natural surrogacy" (i.e. when sperm donors have natural sex with surrogate mothers).
Re. "1. Replicate brain entrainment learning results." -- That study sounds very similar conceptually to Ngo, Martinetz, Born, & Moelle 2013, "Auditory closed-loop stimulation of the sleep slow oscillation enhances memory", Neuron 78:545-553. It also used an EEG to sync up with the subject's brain waves, though with the "sleep slow oscillation" (< 1Hz) instead of the alpha wave. It stimulated with sound rather than light, and while asleep rather than while awake. The average measured "retention score" in the stimulus group was 22; the average in the sham group was 12.
Regarding the architecture thing. I think Scott incorrectly uses "older". What we are talking about is not "older" vs "newer", but "ornamental" vs. "Form follows function." I look forward to seeing new forms of ornamental architecture. What's so wonderful about nouveau/deco is how it is simultaneously modern and ornamental.
See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yT22RcWrxZcXyGjsA/how-to-have-polygenically-screened-children for why I think this is predictive enough to be valuable now.
I think "may promote eugenic ideologies" is a kind of an unfair boo light, see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck for the sketch of an argument.
I'd like to hear you explain why it's a bad thing.
I'd hazard a guess that Emil isn't a big fan of certain (racial) demographics being sterilized/killed against their will.
That seems to be a very different thing from embryo selection.
But it's undeniably part of eugenic ideologies (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/eugenics), whose promotion is the thing he described as the aforementioned 'bad thing'.
I do deny that individual selection promotes top-down sterilization. Scott cited this as an example of the "worst argument in the world" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world
Good for you, that has nothing to do with what we wrote though. Not sure if you’re trolling or if English is a second language but just in case it’s the latter, when someone writes:
“using IQ and EA genetic predictors for embryo selection may promote eugenic ideologies (which I hope I don't need to explain why that may be a bad thing).”
the “that” refers to the sentence as a whole (“using IQ and EA genetic predictors for embryo selection may promote eugenic ideologies”) not just the “using IQ and EA genetic predictors for embryo selection” part.
This is so irrelevant. If you go in with your partner to select which embryo gets implanted then ALL those embryos have the same racial makeup so this application doesn't affect this in the slightest.
That someone else who believes bad things believes something doesn't make it bad.
Whatever critique you have about the effectiveness of PGS for EA, you must acknowledge that it's better than chance at predicting EA, even among non-European groups.
One could similarly argue that not wanting to help women make the most informed reproductive choice possible could promote anti-choice ideologies. What concern is "eugenics" if it means better informed reproductive choices that are consensual and improve human wellbeing?
"Better than chance" isn't the same thing as "would ever be action guiding". If Emil above is to be believed, the <<15% of the variance explained between embryos from a couple is unlikely to overwhelm information about the relative healthspans of candidate embryos. I'm open to quantitative arguments showing that the probability that embryo choice would be affected by this information -- given reasonable assumptions about number of embryos to choose and relative weights assigned to healthspan and intelligence -- is sufficiently high to justify the project, but the point is that the argument has to be made, and "better than chance" doesn't cut it
My point is in response to the critique that it is bad/worthless/unethical to even try to use this information. Whether using EA will be more important than health information is a second question that relies on certain assumptions about what makes a good life as well as expectations about the future. I expect some diseases to be basically cured in the next half century, and so I see selection on the basis of psychological characteristics as more worthwhile. Of course, it invovles certain trade offs, and I would not totally dismiss longevity. Investigating the possible returns is worthwhile, and in an instance in which two embryos have similar estimated lifespans, EA could serve as a tie breaker. It's not really an one or the other type situation.
welp, I've independently read 40-80% genetic causality estimates for educational attainment.
And anyway, even if it's 25%, that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. Information > no information.
Re: it is eugenics, yes, but it's not unethical. You *do* have to explain why it is bad.
Re: unique difficulties for this problem - just because something is difficult, doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.
EA being heritable at 40-80% doesn't mean that we actually have predictors to estimate EA to that accuracy.
"Information > no information" is only true if there's enough content in the information to guide choices between embryos, and there isn't in current best EA PGSs
Imagine I give you 6 siblings. You must estimate who has the highest EA. I have a piece of paper in an envelope with their EA PGSs. Would you throw the envelope away? Obviously, not. It would help inform your choice.
In the case of embryos, you can imagine that you value health 5x as much as EA and traits like that. STILL, you would want to know EA because it can help inform your choice even if the variance explained by the PGS is low. For example, imagine you see the healthiest embryo but the EA PGS is extremely extremely low. Should you disregard that information? I think now. You are at risk of having a psychologically impaired child. If you think there is a low risk of that, you can weigh that risk to factor into your decision. Throwing out information is not useful.
Educational Attainment as a proxy for IQ.
So if I have an undergraduate degree in Gender Studies I'm Officially Smart, am I?
When I consider the amount of "pshhh, stupid dumb liberal arts degrees" sniping that goes on here, clearly only Real Eggheads Do Real Degrees That Are Hard Science is the measure everyone means for educational attainment and IQ.
But go right ahead guys, select your future Queering Glaciers Via Indigenous Ways Of Knowing degree students with this great new tool, what could possibly go wrong?
This is a very obnoxious response.
Not all highly educated people have the traits of gender studies majors. Selecting for EA will be generally good, even if not all highly educated people have good ideas. Extremely high levels of intelligence would, in my view, move us away from stuff like gender theory.
A curious question might be whether EA is a better or worse proxy than how rich you are. Scott himself gives one way the two are conflated in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-match-school-and-student-rank; coming from the other side, commenters in this very substack have in the past unironically suggested that we skip the research bit and just straight up pay rich people to donate to sperm banks, because in a just world there must obviously be correlation between how rich one is and heritable qualities people might desire for their children.
EA as a proxy for IQ is a blunt instrument. Back when getting a college degree was unusual and mostly for the very smart but poor, or for the sons of the gentry, then having a degree = smart/well-off tracked.
Nowadays, there's a push for 'everyone must go to college'. By brute EA measurement, using the kinds of questions used in sample tests and studies: "high school dropout? College graduate? PhD? Etc", means that a degree is a degree is the same, be it a BA in Gender, Sexuality and Queer Studies from Evergreen State College or a BSc in Statistics from Harvard.
Of course people will refine that down to "this university is better than that university" and "this course is better than that course" but if you're selecting embryos, you're not selecting "STEM degree versus Arts degree".
Jeff Bezos is smart; he graduated from Princeton with a BSc in Engineering. What did he make his fortune from? Selling things online. If you're selecting for "EA = success in life", again, you have no idea where the locus for "will become a billionaire" versus "will remain poor as church mouse but does fascinating research into beetle wings" is located when you're checking the genes.
It's the same problem as AI - what you *think* you're asking for, and what you *get* out of it, are not necessarily the same things.
When you write of heritability within families do you just mean the proportion of variance within that family explained by genetic variance?
This might not be correct, but considering the case of intra-offspring variance (which seems relevant in this case) and taking heritability to mean narrow-sense heritability, I think we can take the intra-offspring additive genetic variance to be half the total additive variance (i.e., the Mendelian sampling variance) and so, uncharitably assuming all other variances remain as large as in the general population, we can take a intra-offspring heritability of $\frac{h^2}{2-h^2}$ (i.e. where $\frac{h^2}{2-h^2}$ is the proportion of intra-offspring variance explained by additive genetic variance).
Given the apparently quite large heritabilities of educational achievement and scores on IQ tests, the intra-sibling values remain substantial. The relative sizes of the heritabilities are bounded below by 1/2 – even in the worst case, the intra-sibling heritability is at least half the population heritability.
Actually, I am not sure I quite understood what you meant, when you say that the heritability drops substantially within families, do you just mean the SNP estimates of heritability?
Not to mention the costs and risks associated with IVF/PGT and resulting pregnancies and the disparities in access it would exacerbate because it most certainly would not be covered by insurance.
Let's say a bunch of what you find is pure confounders. Ok, so what? It's effectively random noise so it shouldn't hurt or harm either way.
These are some terrible ideas which will result in massive deadweight loss.
If we had examples of people fleeing capitalist countries for communist ones, you might have a point about avoiding each extreme, but net population movement is instead always from communist to capitalist ones.
Arbitrary wealth cap would only provoke elaborate holding-company schemes, dividing everything up into chunks just below the cap and obfuscating ultimate ownership - that sort of thing already happens, even with far less extreme incentive gradients. Georgist land value tax and UBI is a far better solution.
I probably can't help directly, but I would happily throw (a middle-class amount of) money at encouraging it.
Hello! DM me @freeshreeda / email shreedashreeda at gmail dot com!!! I have a team working on an MVP right now. Happy to share details :)
Donations def welcome as well
Did you read what Scott said? Unwise to compete with us at manifold.love 😛
More seriously — happy to chat and trade ideas. Especially interested in the marketing aspect.
Sure let's chat. Shoot me a message
It would be unwise if we were *primarily* building for rationalists, which we're not. Our thesis is we need a bigger cross-section of subcultures for a meaningful enough seed market to beat the cold start problem. Though incentive design is an important factor in designing dating products (that modern dating apps fail to fulfill), it won't work for branding either, i.e. gives a lot of people the ick.
Nice. Sent you a message!
Of course. Our marketing won't center on prediction markets.
Our biggest insight is actually having a public directory of profiles. It sounds like it wouldn't work because people value privacy, but that's not actually true, or not completely true anyway.
I can also help, and it is an area of interest for the company I'm forming (the goal of the company is to create services whose metric for success is people feeling closer to friends/family, and feeling more satisfied and contented at the end of using the service for any extended period of time).
Hello! DM me @freeshreeda / email shreedashreeda at gmail dot com!!! I have a team working on an MVP right now. Happy to share details :)
I'd love to work on this too!
Hello! DM me @freeshreeda / email shreedashreeda at gmail dot com!!! I have a team working on an MVP right now. Happy to share details :)
Commented on the master thread with some details but would absolutely love your help!
I used 2011 OKC. It was full of women looking for single men near them...for new friends. After a week of messaging, you'd ask someone out and they'd say "uuuuhhhhhhhhh, that's really fast, I dunno, I'm uncomfortable, you're weird for asking." The longform text thing was just used by women to list their ever-growing sexualities and gender identities. And all this was before the Geek Blood War.
I also used 2011 OKC (okay it was probably more like 2013). The long form text definitely wasn't just for queer identity lists, and I successfully got a nerdy girlfriend out of it. No offense, but based on the tone of your comment, I suspect you just failed the vibe check with most of these "week of messaging" and they just weren't interested. Dating as a man just sucks, but OKC at least sucked less for having conversation starters.
There was A Geek Blood War? Who won, and what were the spoils?
I've met a wife and two partners on OKCupid. The last was maybe 4-5 years ago.
Yes, it was really, really grindy. And OKC has gone downhill since then. But as dating sites go, it was better than any other site I've used. (Which, perhaps, isn't saying much, I admit.)
Some thoughts:
Cluster people. If you're in the bottom 20% (exact cluster sizes aren't important), you only see other users in the bottom 20%. Clustering is performed by evaluating the ratio of messages sent, to the ratio of messages responded to (plus some minimum threshold of messages, and possibly additionally some minimum level of "effort invested", as measured by, for example, matching questions answered), and is separated by gender. This discourages mass-messaging people, and encourages women to message men (as otherwise they're left in the default cluster). Also plausibly helps set people's expectations more reasonably.
Simultaneously, limit the number of new conversations per day; 5 is probably a good target.
If the goal is to avoid becoming yet another Dating App: open-source the project. Possibly host it in a P2P network; if so, encrypt everything at the user level.
This sounds like a great idea, but it also sounds like you'd need a lot of people to make it work. The big challenge is getting the first few hundred people (ideally playing off of some kind of existing connection. Facebook started out on college campuses, for example.)
I'd love to see an open source generic connection matching app. It doesn't have to be just for dating. I worked a very long while back for MyMuse which was like a dating site but for artistic collaboration. It didn't seem to go anywhere, but it had prepared a nice hard launch. ... I kindof wonder why it foundered, but suspect it was for technical reasons.
The URL is still up and claims to be 'by invitation only.' So... maybe it eventually launched?
Clustering could still create a problem of best-within-a-cluster getting overwhelmed. If you're going to limit who can contact who, better fix would be to have a slightly different range for each user - can't proactively contact someone more than one standard deviation away, for example.
Hello! I'm building manifold.love. Reach out to me at james@manifold.markets
Happy to hear suggestions, but especially interested in solving the marketing problem of getting more users for our site if anyone has any thoughts.
I could help out anyone taking #1.
I don’t have the bandwidth to do it myself, but a lot of experience analyzing EEG data and could help out with analysis or connect to people who could.
One idea would also be to reach out to the folks at MUSE (https://choosemuse.com) and ask them if they’re willing to help with infrastructure and even finding somebody to do this.
I also have a lot of professional experience working with EEG data, and possibly access to hardware. Happy to collaborate on this, and organize efforts if needed.
I would be interested in helping out with this project. My experience with EEG only comes from a university intro class but recently I've been looking for projects where I could delve deeper into it. With some guidance, I'd be happy to take up any work throughout this project.
Are there any consumer grade EEG devices (MUSE?) that a person can use to determine their own alpha brain rhythm? I'm interested doing a little citizen science on my own, but I'm not entirely clear on whether MUSE presents you with the data you need to extrapolate that.
In principle MUSE can measure alpha; https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.02.466989v1.full
In practice you have to hack the device. The default app itself doesn’t offer that information.
For EEG bands/caps, consider:
https://zeto-inc.com/ or
https://ceribell.com/
Hey Jona, I'm taking lead on the EEG project: check out Scott Alexander's announcement on Open Thread #304 (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-304)
Could you please give me your email so I can get in touch with you? Perhaps the easiest way to do so is simply dropping me a short email to the email address provided in my intro google doc (linked by Scott in the OT#304 announcement, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SGwxQ_vdIkzM1ppVcpNxgqYnXTDNerPFgyWLBQzFa1g/edit?usp=sharing )
Hi Sasha,
I went through the entire thread and request/funding page, and it seems that everything you are looking for just can be found at Neiry.
https://neiry.ru/
https://startupbubble.news/startup-showcase-neiry-revolutionizing-neurotech-for-a-better-future/
- They produce their own EEG devices, which are more advanced than MUSE's.
- They provide data through an API for your own experiments, and they have an impressive lab with a superior R&D track record with top scientists.
- They are open and actually offer collaboration in the form of an Accelerator. They actually publicly call and encourage scientists/engineers to play with their devices/data, build your own product based on what they developed so far.
They might provide you with both data and hardware to boost your research and attempts to build something with their help.
Just check them out.
Also, their founder, Alexandr Panov, is an amazing guy and is open to requests from any interested and talented researchers. I highly recommend getting in touch with him, his TG channel is
https://t.me/itakblet
Hey, thanks for the link! Definitely looks interesting and I subscribed to the telegram channel but their EEG system seems to record the data only from 4 electrodes and not the ones we want (the ones we want for entrainment are in the back of the head)
Hey,
I'm not an expert in this field, so I might miss something here. But since I've been following them for a few years, it seems absolutely worth it to get in contact with them for a few reasons:
They might have other devices or prototypes of devices not currently announced on their website or ready for retail, as they've spent years on hardware.
Regarding the zones to interact on the back of the head: again, I suggest contacting them directly. Through communication, you might change your opinion on which electrodes you need. They might supply you with some new data, or they might even have a data library that will help you with your research, etc.
As a bottom line, it seems you've made a whole way down to Scott's announcements and funding, so at least talking with the company who is your focus directly is something more than worth doing.
Best of luck with it anyway.
Yeah, I agree that there is very little downside and a lot of upside in reaching out, so I'll almost certainly will do it! Thanks for the links!
re: 4. My crazy idea for language teaching
I've recently bumped into the idea at one Giacomo Miceli's website:
https://www.jamez.it/project/the-adventures-di-pinocchio/
I've written him to ask about the prospects but never got an answer. His other finished projects suggest he is up the challenge skillwise, I suppose labour is the only thing left to invest. Perhaps if you wrote him as well he would be more inclined to follow through.
This looks amazing. If Giacomo Miceli is currently an Italian teacher or tutor, it would be interesting to get his thoughts on using this type of text as a teaching tool. Could it replace standard grammar/drills/memorization? Or is it more of a supplement?
I was also fascinated by it. He is nothing of this sort, however. From his site's bio:
"Giacomo Miceli is a creative coder, entrepreneur and computer scientist originally from Rome, Italy. Currently viator maximus in the Orion Arm, he enjoys visual exploration and semantic amazement. He doesn’t enjoy writing in the third person."
Anyhow, I think any input could replace all of those, though memorization and learning explicit grammar rules helps.
Hi Mark - Giacomo here. Thanks for mentioning my project here. I never got your message, please send it again.
About the language teaching idea -- it doesn't work practically. It would only work if you had thousands and thousands of pages because, especially in the beginning, in-context learning takes a lot of content to make sense.
It did make for a pretty book though.
If anyone is interested, I think sentence-level and word level contextual translation, both audio and textual, could go a long way. I haven't done a survey of the app landscape recently, but back when I wrote this in 2016 there was nothing of the like. https://www.jamez.it/blog/2016/12/30/idea-for-a-frictionless-bilingual-reader-my-way/
I agree. I think it's one thing to figure out the meaning of a word where it's substituted in a context that makes it easy (where it carries little Shannon information), but this decoding is short of learning the word proper, which would likely still be unfamiliar when encountered in a surprising context.
Still, it could work, but as you say, the text would have to be long. Even if it was not any long text but one engineered to facilitate the process, still it would be very long.
There's a kind of natural instance of this process, spanning generation rather than one individual's life. I suppose the transition from Old through Middle to Modern English was akin to this. At the edges you have languages whose speakers would not understand each other, but along the way was a gradient of speakers who understood their contemporaries.
My message was rather short, I might as well stick it here:
Awesome projects that you are working on.
Will The Adventures Di Pinocchio be available to the public by any means at any time? I'd be very interested.
Indeed, semantic drift is all around us, always!
Thank you for your kind words. I'm (slowly) setting up a shop on my website to sell, among other things, that book. I'll shoot you a message once it's ready.
Please do!
Hi Giacomo, I would also love to buy your Pinocchio book! If it ever happens (I read you only now start setting up a shop) I would immediatley place an order. It resonates exactly with how I talk italo-english with a friend.
Hi elnicc, did you send me an email by any chance? Your username looks familiar. Short version - I'm collecting email addresses of people interested that I can notify once everything is up and running. Write me on jamez at jamez dot it.
I used to encourage my English students to pick up a book they loved in their home language, preferably from their early teens, and read it in English translation. Read it aloud. Ignore words you don't know, don't look them up. You already know the story well, know the characters and what is going to happen, so do your best reading for enjoyment. These days, you can listen to popular novels, so it's easy to to practice listening and reading, self correction.
I think you may have an incorrect understanding of how time consuming software engineering is. 😁 Your estimates remind me of estimates made by junior engineers who imagine everything will go perfectly on the first try and they will not run into any problems.
Sadly, the reality is that if you want an actual production piece of software (meaning something that is packaged up and can actually be used by real people, not just your dev buddies) it takes orders of magnitude longer than the "happy path" estimate. 😢
To be fair, building a website used to be a weekend's work 15-20 years ago. I distinctly remember how easy it was to toss together some HTML designs and javascript into a few PHP pages and have a functioning website. The modern web is many things but it is not quick to develop for I will agree there.
As for the "reusable piece of software" I think plenty of people in a community like this are willing to go through *some* technical steps for a good piece of software. Heck, see most stable diffusion installs. The open source EA project could for example be more "dev buddy" leaning.
My point is I agree on the website ones, less so on the discrete algorithm ones.
> building a website used to be a weekend's work 15-20 years ago
With the advent of web 2.0, the definition of ”website” largely changed from ”text file” to ”dynamic application with a backing db.” You can still make a static site in a couple hours, but that’s usually not what’s being asked for.
For clarity to anyone following along, the initial publishing of this article had more specific numbers for the programming tasks. The current revision is a bit more vague, which helps significantly. 😄
I was imagining that the psychological test would be something that you could distribute to people (maybe online) and they would be able to use it, or have a website where people can easily generate tests. However, I suppose maybe the target audience is a few highly motivated people running psychology experiments who are willing to put in some elbow grease in order to get things up and running.
> With the advent of web 2.0, the definition of ”website” largely changed from ”text file” to ”dynamic application with a backing db.” You can still make a static site in a couple hours, but that’s usually not what’s being asked for.
PHP could do dynamic content and access the DB. I was not describing a static site. While you are right the change of the definition of website from text page to dynamic application is part of the issue. The text file days were not necessarily that static, static is a different thing.
Maybe it should have been said outright — 20 years ago we talked about an explicit category of advanced users, people who wouldn't want to learn the exact strictures necessary for many-many-thousands-of-lines programming, but were willing to read and understand ten pages of relevant text at once before trying the software, if given a compelling reason. They also could be convinced to ignore the visuals when the functionality matched their needs and reliabilty were acceptable.
If the target audience is «Scott Alexander's writing is not too long» intersected with «annoyed that ACX Substack is more modern-Web than SSC», maybe it is a good idea to target the estimates given and cut down the mission creep?
Pro-tip: the tools to quickly create websites still exist. Contrary to common belief, not every website must be designed to scale to millions of concurrent users, run on AWS, be based on bloated JS libraries, have a microservice architecture and be backed by a NoSQL database.
Even the latest browsers with their fancy JS engines and GPU support will still be able to render https://blog.fefe.de/ quite well.
That looks super conservative to me? Let's look at the dating site one -> 100s of hours and thousands for hosting cost?
With free-tier cloud services you don't need to pay _any_ cloud costs. 100s of hours for a software engineer? You can build a pretty involved website with that.
This would only be inflated if your engineer is a junior with no experience.
For the genetic testing for education attainment thing, I think that the main work will be figuring out the correlations and creating a simple proof of concept CLI program which just prints a few probability estimates.
I agree that this is commonly the end result of open source software developed by hobbyists (certainly for my projects). Investing time to make it usable for the masses of Windows users which are unwilling to do a git clone and follow a few lines of compilation instructions sounds a lot less rewarding.
Luckily, the transition from arcane CLI utility to website usable by anyone can be accomplished by throwing money at the problem. The results for "turn this tool into a website" seem to me way more predictable than "study correlations between genome and EdAt, and see if you can predict the latter" (which sounds more like a master thesis or something). Given that Scott clearly cares about that project, I think that he might be willing to spend a few thousand euros to create and host a single-purpose website, as well as coping with the "How a website tries to create the world of Gattaca" stories which will inevitably appear.
For the IAT, I think that building a basic version using java script is probably not all that hard for proficient web devs. Making it so that people can upload their own tests would be a bit more work, but "upload a zip file with four directories, A, not-A, B, not-B with images and word lists" seems a compromise between "the modal internet user can probably do this" and avoiding having to implement a full-blown editor with image support and everything. (The real problem with the IAT is see is hosting a site where everyone can post pictures. Someone will intentionally create tests which are offensive on purpose, so you want to have moderators or something.)
For dating websites, user interfaces are of course more central than that. But I don't think people generally go "this website is using less than four javascript libraries. I can even load it on my five year old phone. This is horrible." Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and so on all started small. The bloat will come on its own.
My impression is that part of the difficulty of creating modern websites is that they need to run on multiple platforms, including cell phones.
This is definitely a notable time sink. The easiest way is to make it work on a relatively small device, in which case it will "work" on the larger device (but just be super annoying because it wastes a huge amount of screen space). Ideally though, you would build something that properly scales up and down based on available resolution like you suggest, but this is a quite time consuming process to get right.
I gather that it can't be automated, and if it could be automated, the requirements would change soon enough that the automation wouldn't work any more.
There are definitely people who are building tools to make it easier to build responsive websites (websites that work on all resolutions), and things have improved greatly over the years. I suspect things will continue to improve, but at the moment it still takes at least some thought and effort to build a proper responsive webpage.
You can half-ass it (like most people do) and get something that works at like 2 resolutions ("phone" and "desktop"). This is notably less work than something that works at all resolutions and it is often considered "good enough". This website is an example of such a thing, it works at a few resolutions and it feels "bad" at others but not too terrible.
A laypersons's question: Is #1 somehow related to neurofeedback?
Technically different things. Neurofeedback involves giving someone a readout of their own brain activity in real-time so they can try to alter it towards a certain goal. #1 involves measuring someone's brain activity and altering the external stimuli to match it. The former is internal change, the latter is external change.
Based on how much latin and ancient greek I've picked up just from reading acoup.blog every week, and how I enjoy reading sci-fi or fantasy with passages in constructed languages, I feel like the language teaching novel is a great idea. It would require a lot of skill to do well though, not just in both languages but also a literary sensibility.
Absolutely. We have examples in fiction of intelligent systems that optimise presentation of material to enhance learning (e.g. the AI in Enders Game, or the Young Ladies Illustrated Primer from the Diamond Age). It seems that if we take what we know about learning and spaced repetition, throw in a dash of AI to make it hang together and gamification to enhance motivation, we should be able to create something really outstanding for getting people to fulfill their learning potential.
I'm keen on this too, but current life situation doesn't really allow me to work on it. It's something I hope to get to at some point, or that someone else will build it and I'll get to use it.
I am definitely interested in this sort of thing.
I'm interested and have bandwidth to work on it.
I am definitely interested in working on this. Actually I am currently trying to work on something like this for my job as a physics and math teacher.
However, I have to admit I am rather skeptical whether this would ever become a revolutionary technology. The reason for this is: There are already people creating games, movies, and various apps for the sole purpose of entertainment. 99% of these fail, for the simple reason that they are competing against other, slightly more entertaining games. If you were to make an educational system, whether it would be like a game or something like TikTok it would still have to compete against actual games and actual TikTok. With the handicap of having to be educational for real you would almost certainly lose.
Now, with my main point of skepticism stated clearly, how do one volunteer for this project?
This is an extremely good point. There are mitigating factors though - while such a system should aim to be as motivating as the best games/movies/apps, there is a level of motivation that comes from learning too that those games/movies/apps don't generally have access to. Another factor is that what counts as success - while what I envisage would aim to make profit, it wouldn't necessarily have to make profit at the level of a hits based industry, it'd be aiming at something a bit longer term. Finally, within reason I think such a system shouldn't worry too much about cloning what works - in most entertainment, too obvious a clone is something to be ashamed of and some level of pushing the boundaries is expected, but if the entertainment is only one part of the goal, I think that cloning successful mechanics is more acceptable.
Rather than "educational for real" being a handicap, a pill whose foul taste the rest of the meal is obligated to conceal, think of it as a potential spice in its own right, key ingredient for reaching an under-served demographic: people who are currently making a conscious choice to avoid TikTok and similar because, while tempted by the empty rhythms of entertainment, they want to actually be learning things.
If entertainment can survive having "offensive content" excluded, or being bound to various political agendas, it can surely also cope with a requirement to convey particular scientific knowledge. "Edutainment" got a bad name because of a principle-agent problem between the schools or parents making purchasing decisions, and the kids who'd actually end up using it.
For whatever it's worth, there has been a paper that looked into the utilization of machine learning for the optimization of flash card presentation (trading off number of repetitions with long-term retention) which another person implemented as an add-on for Anki. You feed your Anki history into it, it spits out a vector of parameters which you then put back into the add-on's config file.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3534678.3539081?cid=99660547150
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/759844606
Don't we need the chunks first, though?
Given that Wiki Walk is a pretty real cognitohazard for a large enough chunk of people for initial prototyping, like how do we construct topic-specific hypertexts to use it for good?
Some gamified wiki setup that rewards people with points and badges for contributing snippets of knowledge? But it also needs some scoring/rating system for accuracy and understandability.
Apparently even without badges people end up tracking the stats one way or another. Not simplifying things to Wikipedia's «article quality», but separating accuracy, «level», and maybe «text quality» — that sounds like a good idea.
Probably different levels could be useful, but unclear how to structure them to avoid duplication of accuracy checks…
Separating writing quality and technical-detail accuracy seems like it could be reasonably straightforward, but rather than "level" as a scalar value, I'd recommend laying it out as a directed graph of prerequisite subjects: "this explanation assumes you already know X" and "once you think you've got this figured out, see Y for more advanced aspects."
Specialists are notoriously bad at judging how many steps their specialty is from genuinely common knowledge, https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Familiarity ...but mapping out immediately adjacent parts of the tech tree seems like a much easier problem, and then those can congeal into a wider map.
Another useful feature could be explicit tagging for different degrees of epistemic rigor. Rather than categorically excluding original research, make that flow naturally from someone reaching the end of a documented prerequisite chain and realizing they know what ought to come next.
Actually, there's a thought: the sum total of a subject (say, Maths) probably shouldn't look like a long page of serial prose and pics, ie a textbook.
Is it more like a vast directed graph of info snippets?
If so, what are the nodes in this graph? Can we do better than plaintext - declare subtypes like "concepts", "techniques" and so on?
How would procedural knowledge and other non-text stuff fit into it?
Wiki walks live exactly on the non-serial nature, and yes I find them desirable.
Nodes are probably pieces of explanation, and getting granularity right is probably hell. Depending on the background, people need different amount of details, but might also prefer different points of view on the same facts…
Procedural knowledge is kind of a trap; procedural knowledge like «what is a proof and what is not» is still not easy to transfer without human feedback, but it kind of needs to be learned once… the easier to define procedural knowledge is often needs replacement anyway (e.g. guiding symbolic-algebra systems is a different skill than computing derivatives by hand, and we are not good at defining the former yet)…
So maybe «how to replace textbooks with something less linear» is an unbounded enough project not to think about the not-text-with-images part yet. Of course if there a picture can be easily made parametric and someone volunteers, that's a cool contribution, but this improvement is not aiming at the core of the non-text-stuff issue.
I often think about how computer based learning for kids has mostly been a wash in term of results, and how I'd fix it. When I see kids use the software it looks like a flash intro from 2001.
Imagine if we created a reading or Math program that was as well designed and cost as much to make as a triple-A game. How awesome would it be?
I think you need to use game dynamics to get people to learn, very high reward values for leveling up, competition with your friends. Teams to create social dynamics where you want to succeed. You'll need to use AI to understand where they are and help them achieve mastery. You need large scale to run A/B tests to see what gets kids learning faster and more reliably. There i
They were obviously not designed for that end, but regular computer games in a foreign language (the more text the merrier) already accomplish that. That's how I learned most of my English. I'm sure I'm not alone. Luckily many games today are released with localisation to major languages.
I've used YouTube shorts for that, I guess these are equivalent. They are short, loop by default and often have transliteration on the screen. When it's only marginally eluding your comprehension, after a few times you understand it completely, a few words to lookup notwithstanding.
Another key feature that distinguished 2011 OKCupid from what followed is the thumbnail display of profiles, sorted by match percentage. It enabled you to "browse" instead of being pushed into making a binary decision one random profile at a time.
Yes, this is key.
On language learning (#4) -- There are web plugins that substitute foreign vocabulary words into your webpages as you read, with a slider for how far down the vocabulary list you want to replace. Since most of the page is still in English, you pick up the meaning of the words by context. Since I mostly just want to be able to read foreign languages, and the hardest part of that is vocabulary (you can mostly just ignore word-ending changes) I find this pretty useful.
Anything usable on android?
Could you send the plugin? This seems pretty cool!
Toucan https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toucan-by-babbel-language/lokjgaehpcnlmkebpmjiofccpklbmoci is one. There are a few different ones out there.
Thanks! This looks cool.
The main issue with the language learning idea I think is that it’s fundamentally a translation learning style, which is not how polyglots tend to recommend learning languages. Instead you want to think of a language as a tool that you use on the world. Japanese is not just English but with a different vocabulary and grammar style, it’s an entirely different way of conceptually interacting with the world.
I do think this might be useful for learning more vocabulary within the same language; though. Chapter 1 uses basis vocabulary, chapter two starts replacing “good” with “excellent” and so on.
Typos and can’t edit on my phone: “basic” not “basis”
> it’s an entirely different way of conceptually interacting with the world.
It may be that, but it's not clear to me that existing teaching methods really give you any of that either. And even if you don't get it directly, most people aren't trying to be polyglots, they just want basic translational and understanding skills.
I think the low end of language learning will probably be replaced by AI tools. Anyone that isn’t committed to the massive project of learning another language will just use a quick translation tool.
> most people aren't trying to be polyglots, they just want basic translational and understanding skills
This is a false dichotomy, and the largest group slips through the cracks. Most language learners are learning a single second language, and while they don’t expect to become fluent, they do want to be able to perform basic social interactions and have simple conversations.
And this modest goal is incredibly hard to acheive. It absolutely requires the language-as-tool framing Kiefer is proposing.
I'm not so sure - if there was a way to have basic translation even without a different conceptualization of the world, I think a lot of people would use it, especially if it was easier than existing methods. Though to be honest, I'm not exactly sure what you're claiming is preventing people from having basic conversations using "just" translations. Do you mean something about the culture, like levels of formality in Japanese?
You can’t learn to play basketball from watching tape. You have to practice running, dribbling, jumping, shooting, and critically, you have to get real world feedback from your actions. Language is the same.
Ah, so even if you are able to make it to the end of the book, you aren't going to be able to speak it properly? I see what you mean.
I’m skeptical that you *would* make it to the end of the book. It would be like trying to learn a single piece of music - but never practicing scales, never improvising, never listening to new songs. If it’s any harder than three blind mice, you’ll probably never learn the song. And even if you did, it wouldn’t generalize.
We already know how to learn languages - spend hours and hours on every aspect, most importantly conversation. (This is expensive, but eg italki is really your best bet.)
If you want to accelerate language learning, that’s great. But what is missed by Scott (and Duolingo for that matter) is that you have to have some grasp of what actually works.
Given that English is my second language I can (anecdotally) affirm that using a foreign language to order some food/ask for something/etc/etc basic kindergarten stuff doesn’t require one to use another’s language conceptualisation
Basically if you speak somewhat similar language (I speak Russian, for example) natively, then it’s possible for you to have simple communications translating a phrase in your native language word-by-word. It doesn’t give you much of a conceptual understanding but definitely allows you to have all sorts of basic conversations
Also, the things that startle me in my-second-language written by my-fourth-language native speakers are traceable to vocabulary (two things being expressible by the same word aren't always even considered close in the target language…). Sure, it's all European languages, though.
Well, yeah
I happen to know some hebrew and it doesn’t seem too hard to use the same “translate everything verbatim and dgaf about syntax”, but sometimes I wonder would I be able to do so in, say, Chinese or some African languages
Sometimes translations done by non-first language speakers are technically correct, but um...
My two favourite examples of this come from old foreign language movies with subs done in English.
One was a Chinese martial arts/historical fantasy movie. The group of heroes gets beaten up by the baddies until New Guy turns up to assist them and turn the battle. Afterwards, they're injured, so he invites them back to his house for medical attention:
"Come back with me and get plastered!"
That's - not the correct phrase in this context, though I see where you're going 😁
(Get plastered, in Irish/British English, means "get drunk". I'm presuming they meant to convey he was inviting them back to get sticking plasters,* or mustard plasters**, or plaster of Paris for casts and the like for their wounds and injuries).
*https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sticking-plaster
**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustard_plaster
Second is an old Tamil language mythological/devotional movie, where the god Shiva is speaking with his spouse Parvati about how pleased he is with her devotion and his general state of contentment:
"I'm feeling groovy".
Probably very current English at the time this was being translated, but again - not what we'd use for this context.
And, I guess, the dichotomy is very real, there is a barrier between being understood and being able to phrase something in a way that’s possible for other speaker to understand verbatim.
There is no discrete threshold for that, I suppose, since you sorta gradually learn what the appropriate grammar is, etc, but it seemingly makes sense to distinguish speaking other language with extra signals (e.g. hand waves) and word-by-word translations from speaking other language while staying completely or almost completely in syntactic norms
I had five years of English classes at school, but what actually really taught me English was reading books, fanfiction and watching movies in English, all completely passive activities with no language-as-a-tool component. Yes, speaking lacked elegance and flow and I only got better at that (and oh, pronunciation! stress patterns!) when I started regularly having conversations in English, but 90% of my skill is from media consumption.
I've long wanted translations in the style that Scott describes. I think some people approach language learning as a vocabulary memorization game and the flow, style, idiosyncrasies of the language as unimportant (and sure, it is, if all you need is to get very basic points across - but it's the best part of another language!)
I think what I want to get at here is that it's less of a translation than usual translations, because they translate the stuff that gives a feel for the language and the grammar first, and the vocabulary last. It gives you sentences like you'd create in that language, but with vocabulary you're familiar with. That's taking out most of the things that are harmful at translation-focused language learning.
I agree about translation based learning being sub optimal but I have thought for a while that it should be possible to use LLMs and generative AI to come up something that actually simulates full immersion. Like imagine a star dew valley type experience, basic graphics, where you are repeatedly forced to interact with characters who speak no English. It progresses you through various contrived situations from initially just naming and pointing at objects, or actions, repeating back selections of words people offer, then recounting basic stories etc. basically simulating the process a child goes through to learn a language - sense data -> language instead of language -> language.
Something similar has already been done with no graphics at all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gostak#Interactive_fiction so I'm cautiously optimistic. Maybe something a bit more like Factorio, but with no useful option for violence? NPCs chat and trade among themselves, only way to stop them from stealing what you build involves asking politely, but fancier structures provoke stricter standards for eloquence.
Ideally, mastering complex grammar would also let you offer beneficial deals, which they'd accept when appropriate, or else give coherent, contextually-grounded reasons for refusing. That might require alarmingly agentic AI to properly implement, though.
I'd enjoy a 4-like book even if it didn't, in the strict sense, "work" for "teaching language". Actual fluency is more effort than I feel like expending (even watered-down stuff like dicking around on Duolingo takes effort), but it'd be cool to, like...be able to watch anime without subtitles. Lots of experience avenues open up even with just a passing level of interpretation.
I also wanted to point out that my Substack is something an attempt to educate people on the breadth and history of art and aesthetics, as most art /architecture magazines are very uncritical of contemporary aesthetics and art styles. Any change in this area starts with education, as “I like old architecture” or “art used to be more beautiful” is generally too vague to be actionable.
For example, here’s a guide to distinguishing Art Nouveau from Art Deco: https://onthearts.com/p/art-nouveau-vs-art-deco
That was great, thanks!
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it!
Love this and your essay on immersive vs isolated arts! You got a subscription from me :)
thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it and thanks for subscribing.
I need to get working on Part 2 of that isolated vs. integrated essay...
I have a team that is working on the dating site more or less as Scott described (for everyone, not just rationalists). I have a data science/machine learning background so we will try to take a data-driven approach to solving the social engineering problems. If you're interested in getting involved (especially re: funding) contact me at tmoldwin[at]gmail .
For us young'uns, can someone explain what OKC2011 was on how it differs from today?
It is more "okc before 2012". ;) Difference: a) it was not yet sold to a company that felt the natural need to make money out of it. b) it was used mostly on laptops/desktops, NOT on smartphones, and that has made all the difference: Writing longer texts about yourself and even more reading those of potential partners got way less comfy - same with longer letters - so people did less of that. On a big screen it is fine to see several pics of potential matches even with added data (age/place ...) . Not on a smartphone
You would write a profile several paragraphs long and publicly answer many yes/no and multiple choice questions about yourself (it was common for people to answer >100), and the website would estimate your compatibility score with everyone else based on your answers. A man would message a woman and wait for a response (didn't need to "match" with or be "liked" by her first) instead of swiping right on her and waiting for a match.
I am a data scientist, and I wanted to work on #2. However, the best datasets, e.g. the UK Biobank, are locked for "legitimate researchers" and take particular care NOT to allow this specific thing. If I tell them that I have no degree and I want to use the dataset for correlating genes with IQ, they won't even answer my email.
So what I'm getting at is - if anyone reading this is associated with a research institution and wants to make this happen (apply for access to UK Biobank), I am willing to do the data side of this for free. petar.istev@gmail.com.
I think the barrier is access to data and the size of data. Raben, Lello, Widen, and Hsu tried looking at different machine learning methods and found they performed about as good as LASSO (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-37580-5). Might be good to reach out to Steve Hsu on this, Scott. :)
Generally I agree, data is king. However, the authors of this paper only tested linear algorithms.
Others have tested deep neural nets and haven't found large gains from them. In general, there seem to be good theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that linear models are accurate for the purposes of predicting individual traits. Hsu has some papers on this.
Agree. And a lot of non-linear models wouldn't be practical. Not enough data. There are too many possible interactions.
I don't know anything about the task of analyzing genetic datasets, not even the sample size and number of covariates, but: the kind of problem you describe seems perfectly suited for Bayesian regression methods, BART (Bayesian Additive Regression Trees) in particular. It has a hierarchical prior giving more weights to main effects, less to second order interactions, and so on. As far as Very Bayesian methods go, it's quite fast and scalable. I'd expect it to perform much better than LASSO. There exists a variant of BART called DART which does variable selection with shrinkage. The only question then is if the dataset is too large for the level of optimization of current implementations, which is not that good yet. Could you tell me what are p and n, and what's the type signature of the covariates?
I think it’s 500K participants, ~3 billion base pairs which can be G,C,T, or A (edit: not that many base pairs, just SNP genotypes)
I'm afraid that is against the rules of the UK Biobank. When one applies (as a researcher at an approved institution), one states what data one wants to work with and why, and that is provided via their system, the Research Analysis Platform. Researchers are not supposed to be doing stuff which isn't what they said they would do in the application - and if the system is the same as it used to be, it's actually not possible to access data not originally requested (ie if I am researching cancer, and I don't ask for participants' educational attainment data, I won't have it in the data I am provided with for that project). The same is true for All of Us, the American database, although submitting a new plan is easier in that setup, and you don't have to specify which data you need beforehand.
Your possession of a degree is irrelevant. You need to be vouched for by a trusted system, and according to the UK Biobank website, what they want is affiliation with a bona-fide research institute which has previously conducted health-related research. Most universities across the world will count for this. But they aren't handing out personal genetic data to just anyone, and they take care to ensure that their users know not to do that as well.
And how exactly can I have an affiliation with a bone-fide research institution if I don't have a degree? I'm basically subhuman for academia and bureaucrats.
Even if I did, this specifically, the correlation between IQ and genetics, is explicitly forbidden to investigate.
That (first point) is a problem you will have to work out yourself, I'm afraid, since I don't know your situation. If you can find a research group with an interest which matches yours, and you are really committed to this project, it would be worth asking if they have space and cash to hire a data scientist. However, cash is always scarce in academia. But you might get lucky.
As to the second point, the UK Biobank publications include two which mention heritability of IQ/educational attainment, so I think you may be exaggerating somewhat, but it isn't my field:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166432818302419
https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2020.20040462
Anyway, what you are talking about is not a simple thing, it's a full-fledged project. I would guess it would take a year at minimum, with support. If you have never worked with human genetic data before, and I'm guessing from your post that you haven't, don't underestimate how annoying biology is.
Also, the reason these datasets are closely guarded is because data are not free. Are you, personally, willing to stick your genome online to let anyone play with it? If so, good on you - that's pretty impressive (and if you haven't already, please check out the relevent local big database and volunteer). If not, then you are in the same boat as the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who have contributed their data to the various big health databases around the world. They are promised privacy and due care. That means doublechecking all those who want to work with the data, and if you want access to that very personal information, you have to pay the dues.
Or start working with mice. They don't care about privacy. But the connection between EA and genetics would be rather harder work in mice, I suspect!
Good comment.
You're absolutely correct on all of these.
However, I still feel pretty confident that this is a very doable project, and not a year-long endeavour.
Let me modify my offer: if anyone reading this is associated with a research institution and wants to make this happen, I am willing to do the data side of this for free.
Have you done the estimates for how much of the variance in EA you could explain with the biobank's 500k sample? Hsu did this for height last decade (unsure which paper, but you could dig it up)
That sounds like the sort of situation where the harder you try to circumvent the rules, the worse trouble you'll end up in. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1494:_Insurance
I'd recommend settling for some lower-quality dataset which is accessible without any felonies. If there's truth to be had, some of it will still be in there, and if the service is worthwhile, better data will become available to refine the model as time goes on.
FWIW, pharma companies can also access UKB (I work in one and have access to it, having only an undergrad degree in a relevant field). So, maybe look for a rationalist or effective altruists owned company that can convince UKB they're doing a pharma research?
#2: Whenever people here start talking about selecting for higher IQ I pipe up in favor of a couple of alternatives, and I'm doing it again here. Assuming it was possible to identify genetic contributors to either of the following, I think it would benefit our species more to select for them:
-Mental health, especially a low risk for depression. While depression, except for the fairly rare godawful kind, is less disabling than schizophrenia & bipolar illness, it is MUCH more common. Even if your sole goal is to increase productivity and speed up scientific advances I think you might come out ahead there by reducing the population's burden of chronic sadness and inertia, rather than raising average IQ.
-High empathy and a low propensity for violence -- argument in favor is similar to the one for low vulnerability to depression.
Also note also that both of the above are much better candidates for reducing human suffering than increased IQ is.
Mental health, high empathy, and particularly low propensity for violence are positively correlated with IQ, so any selection on IQ selects for these traits as well. And generally, embryo selection can optimize for a variety of traits without much loss of selection power. For example, if you have 4 SD of selection power total and two completely independent traits X and Y you're optimizing for, then you can apply 4/sqrt(2) = 2sqrt(2) SDs of selection power for both X and Y, rather than 2 each (once again, the effective power is even greater if X and Y are positively correlated, which most beneficial traits are)
Another reason to optimize for IQ is that measuring it is much easier than measuring other traits. My understanding is that IQ is the most reliably measured psychometric variable, with other tests being noisier and less reliable. This has benefits in constructing accurate predictors.
There have been lots of studies of the relationship between mental illness and IQ, with results all over the map, some studies finding a positive relationship and some a negative one.. My impression is that the later and better studies find no relationship. Here's a good one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5014225/
IQ is the most easily measured trait -- far easier than creativity, sociability, etc. But depression is not a trait, it's an illness, and is not difficult to measure. The gold standard is diagnostic interview with very clear criteria where you get high test-retest reliability and high inter-rater reliability. I and someone I was working with on a study trained in administering the diagnostic interview and had inter-rater reliability of about 0.90.
So I agree with you that selection for other things besides IQ would be a good thing to do.
And fortunately, it is already being done! Genomic Prediction includes risk of depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder in their health index that is currently being used to select embryos.
I agree that empathy and low propensity for violence would also be good to select for, though the issue there is lack of phenotype data. You could likely get a lot of genetic data from prisoners arrested for violent crimes and form a fairly strong predictor. But this is one of the areas where there is almost no research being done, for what I believe are mostly political reasons. There is a very strong belief among some academics that genetics have no or little effect on human behavior, so any study that could undermine that narrative is not especially popular in funding committees.
While I would agree that reducing depression and mental health risk would be more effective at reducing suffering for the treated individual, my best guess is that increasing IQ would likely have a larger effect on society as a whole via an increased rate of scientific innovations like better medical treatments.
FL-Teacher here (German). I remember your "crazy idea for language teaching" and "can’t think of any reason this would work" ;) - See: Foreign language teaching in US-schools (+other countries) is pretty broken (as Bryan Caplan declares so often), and this may explain why you people come up with most of the "crazy new ideas" for FLT (during my Master, I learned about a couple of them, including a group-therapy-approach). Thing is: FLT is not broken. With good course-material, a reasonable schedule and a competent teacher: it actually works mostly fine.
As I am a) kinda qualified - b) underworked - c) an "embarrassing fanboy" d) actually believing this approach might have some use with German for English-speakers (Japanese: ... less so ...)
my g m a i l is m k r o d e
I am a native German speaker, and have a background in teaching and education (not FL, though), as well as in translation. I am interested in this project as well. If you want to connect, let me know as a comment and I can shoot you an email.
Gerne.
Btw. I do think starting with a German graded reader (A2) a more promising approach than "Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften". Also, there is a text that tries to teach Grammar ("Die Schöne ist angekommen" Grammatik-Krimi) - and the exact thing Scott thinks about, but for heavily simplified orthography of German (English could use that even more), where the author introduces one new simplification each chapter: "fom winde ferfeelt" by Zé do Rock
I'm going to try the language learning idea for learning Estonian -- while reading ACX.
I'll process all next ACX posts with ChatGPT, will probably make a browser extension to do it automatically. Here is the prompt:
************************************
I'm trying to use a new method to learn Estonian language. I'm going to read a text in English, which shown below. Please replace some of the English words with Estonian words. Just simple ones at first, ones that were obvious from context.
===
I’ll be starting a new round of ACX Grants sometime soon [...]
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and the result:
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I’ll be starting a new round of ACX Grants sometime soon. Ma ei saa garanteerida I’ll fund all these projects - some of them are more like vanity projects than truly effective. But ma võin fund some of them, and others might be teostatav without funding. Nii if you’re feeling left out and want a põhjus to devote your life to, here are some lisad.
Replicate aju entrainment learning results.
Osused needed: familiarity with EEG
Eelarve: A few thousand dollars for machines, plus a few hundred hours of your aeg?
Tasu: Inimesed can learn things several times faster?
In 2022, a meeskond at Cambridge found that experimental subjects õppisid faster when stimuli were presented at their brain’s unique alpha rhythm. The teadlased monitored their brain waves to figure out exactly what each subject’s alpha rhythm was (usually a pattern of flashes about a dozen times per second), then presented a flashing pattern that hit the trough of each alpha wave, then asked subjects to solve tough visual recognition problems. They found the alpha entrainment helped them õppida faster:
************************************
The result is quite good, it's exactly what I need on my current Estonian level.
My goal is to learn words -- I don't care much about grammar. From my experience with learning English, grammar is relatively easy to grasp after having a large enough vocabulary. Knowing only very basic grammar, you can improve it from reading and listening. Also, Estonian grammar is so weird that it's impossible to transform English into it's resemblance anyway.
Main problem is that I can't control how many words ChatGPT is replacing. If I add more instructions to the prompt like: "Replace at least 1 word in each sentence", "Replace 50% of words", it replaces all words, doing a full translation.
Maybe someone talented in prompt engineering can help?
As a native estonian speaker most of the replaced words felt quite normal to read in an english text, especially for nouns and verbs. For words like "so" it doesn't work that well due to the different grammar. So judging by this example it does seem like a fun and interesting way to learn new vocabulary. For estonian you do have to keep in mind that there aren't any prefixes but instead the word endings change. So if in english you have "in a car" and "into a car" then in estonian it is "autos" and "autosse". Same applies for past, present and future for verbs. That might make learning vocabulary a lot harder, especially since there are 14 different forms for nouns.
Also ChatGPT might have made a typo, the word for "skills" is "oskused" not "osused". That is quite a big difference in pronunciation.
Isn’t the answer to 8 just lobbying? In practical terms, get a bunch of money and hire a k-street outfit that draws from whatever regulator or political tendencies in congress are on your side.
In gears-level terms, you need to connect your reform to the interests of the people who can make it happen, then increase its salience. For congress, that’s donations and lobby connections to reps who have sway and/or are on the relevant committees. For regulators, that’s industry connections and and getting plum bookers to make it a hobby horse through connections.
The missing moods in your take are image/action distinctions and patronage. In the US, where individual politicians fates aren’t wholly tied to their parties, get lots of credit for grandstanding (sponsoring bills, endorsing things), not much for doing things (passing laws). Make something popular, and everyone will introduce laws to do it but no-one will achieve anything because that’s too far downstream of anything you get credit for with the electorate if you’re not the president.
Patron-client relations are how things actually work; in summary, people align with someone important and do them favours, on the basis that that person (more likely, their other clients) will do things for them. The patron is basically a co-ordinator, much of whose influence comes from their clients.
Lobbyists are patrons for profit; they can donate to campaigns (politicians) and find people jobs (everyone, including civil servants), as well as acting as a favour clearing house in the normal way. They don’t have to promise anyone anything, but you know they’ve got your back because you’re their client (in the patronage sense, not the customer who foots the bill).
I’m really interested in #3, #4, #7, and #8, and willing to contribute to any of them if anyone takes them up, although, as an otherwise unremarkable ‘guy who graduated in polsci from a top uni and is into old architecture as a hobby’, I wouldn’t be outstandingly useful for any of those. I’ll have a look into #8, at least :-)
Very interesting post, btw
I am very interested in 7- trying to start a thread of people who are.
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
Replied to the original post here; feel free to reach out to http://www.linkedin.com/in/elsbeth-geldhof
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/quests-and-requests?r=de94n&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=43722197
I am looking for something related to #8: a primer on ethical, effective methods of political persuasion. With your background in poly sci, can you suggest anything?
Everybody seems to know George Lakoff's work relating linguistics to politics, but linguistics isn't everything. Research in areas such as cognitive biases, marketing, and political science should be relevant, but I've had trouble finding this sort of thing.
I hadn’t actually heard of Lakoff, seems very interesting, thank you. I think Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind, made a broadly similar argument that conservatives and liberals had distinct values and that it was interesting to study those differences. The thing it most directly reminds me of is all those social psychology papers that claim that conservatives are conservatives because they’re anxious, and it makes them want authority more, or whatever. Probably an inkling of truth in there (in times of distress, people do tend to turn back toward the ingroup, in a somewhat more conservative manner), but quite biased, of course. But none of that is the same as "effective methods of political persuasion", and I’m not fully sure what those would be? I assume that, while Scott was asking for "how to convince the government to move", you’re asking "how to convince a member of the public to change their views on something"… and that’s something a degree in polsci focuses much less on. I’m also interested in psychology, in people believing in weird conspiracy theories, etc., however, and you might want to look that way for part of the answer. Basically, if you want to convince your uncle that the Illuminatis aren’t actually responsible for the socks he’s lost in the wash, you have to befriend him, accept that he actually believes what he does, and go from there, by helping him question, himself, all the details that aren’t quite right in his narrative. A bit like what this guy does: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes
or more generally like that :
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Street_Epistemology
But neither of those things is exactly what you’re looking for, I think?
Thank you for your helpful reply! Knowing what political scientists say that is related to my question helps me find what I am looking for. Knowing what they don’t say prevents me from barking up the wrong tree.
I have read Haidt’s Righteous Mind and a book by Hetherington and Weiler on authoritarianism in politics. The black guy talking to the KKK and Street Epistemology are new to me. Thank you.
I recently asked someone with a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology about this. She recommended the book “Influence” by Robert Cialdini, which I have just started to read. This is a wise but not at all obvious choice. The book is not about politics, but the political implications are obvious.
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
4 sounds a lot like https://donquixote.fun/ (which has content in Spanish, Italian, German and French) except that it progresses one sentence at a time. (When I last saw it, it was actually using Don Quixote as the text, but people didn't like the archaic language https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26601643 )
⸻ ⸻
After self-experimenting with various language-learning methods over the years, my current favorite is to do lots of dictation exercises (to force the foreign language through my head) until I know a few thousand words, then start reading comics (consuming at my own pace + pictures to aid with understanding).
For dictation, the simplest option is to take an existing Anki deck with audio files and modify the card templates to have a "type answer" field; slightly more complex is to start with https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en/datasets sorted by word frequency and construct an Anki deck from that; my most elaborate attempt so far is https://github.com/Yorwba/alphabet-soup but the scheduling algorithm would require significant performance optimization to be useful as a web service, so I've mostly left it to rot for now.
From my amateur viewpoint, #8 (A good primer on political change) sounds like it'd be right up the alley of either our own AshLael (https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/pbgeqo/comment/hadqka9/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3), or r/NeoLiberal's FireDistinguishers (https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/p4ctc6/congress_509_how_to_lobby_with_an_internet/).
Even if you don't get them, I'll just copy down their advice here, it's invaluable:
"AshLael
2 years ago
Context: I have worked as an advisor to 3 different (Australian) Senators.
I would say if you want to maximise political impact-for-effort, the best method is probably:
Form a lobby group. You can literally do this with a handful of friends. Give yourselves some sort of name that sounds like you might represent someone, appoint people office holders, adopt a constitution. The group doesn't need to do anything, it exists purely for you to be its representative.
Call up politician's offices and ask for appointments to express your concerns about some bill that's coming up. Some will meet with you, some will have their advisors meet with you, some will ignore you. But you'll get a much higher strike rate than you expect.
Take the meetings, sit down with legislators or advisors, tell them what you like or don't like about the proposed law and how you would like to see it changed. Literally no one will ask how many people you actually represent or why they should listen to you.
Most importantly, *rinse and repeat*. Find any opportunity you can to call around and ask for new meetings. You will build relationships over time, and legislators will learn and begin to internalise your concerns.
Why this works:
Politicians and political advisors spend a large percentage of their time having meetings with concerned interest groups. You're not asking them to take time out of their normal schedule to talk with you, you're slotting into their normal operations. It's not at all hard to get a meeting. I've seen professional lobbyists who make careers from "getting access" for corporate clients. It's pure grift, the client could have just called and asked for the meeting directly.
Politicians use the number of times people come and meet with them over an issue as a rough proxy for how important that issue is. Just by repeatedly badgering them on X issue, you can create an impression that people really care about X.
Politicians get most of their claims and talking points from interest groups (which is a part of why they so often say things that are so misleading). They do very little research of their own. There is no better way to put the salient facts in front of them, or for those facts to become a part of the public debate..."
&
"CONGRESS 509: HOW TO LOBBY WITH AN INTERNET CONNECTION AND A $3 POSTCARD
FireDistinguishers
2 years ago
...
REDUCED WORKLOAD > MONEY
When I first got my job as an LC I worked for a minimum of 40 hours a week. I don't mean I was at work for 40 hours a week. I was at work maybe 50 hours a week, of which I spent 40 hours working, 2.5 hours eating, and 7.5 hours goofing off. If there was a national crisis those numbers could double. The volume of things that need to happen on the Hill is unparalleled. So if someone comes up to me and says "Hey I can take care of that," and it turns out they legitimately can, then it's a wrap. I said it in the last post, having someone else write something that my LA was fine with circulating is *the closest thing to a bribe I've ever gotten.*
...
FOLLOWING UP MEANS MORE THAN REACHING OUT
Everybody says "follow up after your meeting" but the amount of people who take that to mean "write a thank you and never talk to them again" is astounding.
Yes, write a thank you note. Like I said we're all very busy, we took time for you, we like when you acknowledge that. Pro tip, send in thank you mail, a thoughtful letter might be something that the staffer holds on to, reminding them that you mean business. *The best thank you mail is a postcard...*"
Lots of good stuff like that from those two, they're the best answers I've seen to a similar question that got asked on the subreddit a while ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/12j3hqd/comment/jfx2edr/
"Aahdin
7 months ago
Sorry if this is a naive question but is there any sort of FAQ or anything on ways for rationalists to impact government? If I got like 20 people to email this to my congressperson would anyone read it? Have people in congress pretty much already heard all of these arguments before and don't care?"
BONUS EDIT: It might also be worth studying Dominic Cummings... whatever you think of his (lack of) morality, there's no doubt he was effective (albeit at referendums rather than legislative politics). At the very least he seems to be one of the most open about how exactly he did what he did: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/dominic-cummings-how-the-brexit-referendum-was-won (Dominic Cummings: how the Brexit referendum was won) -- an abridged summary for Effective Altruists, written up in the wake of the Carrick Flynn debacle, is available at https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/how-to-win-an-election-in-10-easy?sd=fs (How to win an election in 10 easy steps: an effective altruist's guide)
Also sharing this link which is similarly good https://www.maximumnewyork.com/p/political-capital-savings-plan. They use to run a school but now the link is broken.
“A good primer on political change”
I was a bit surprised to see this. I would rather see a good primer on social change, including the sorts of changes that can start small and grow exponentially, like a startup or a fad or a disease; the sort of changes that ignore politics, ooze around it; the sort of changes that by comparison make ineffective solutions look as ineffective as they are.
I suppose a charitable reading might include in a good primer on politics methods for finding and repealing bad solutions, or creating reforms that allow people to modify bad solutions by learning from experience.
It seems like no one really knows how to induce social change, whereas lots of people can and do induce political change.
Well, as long as we're wishing...
A dating site that doesn't suck is a good idea. One that is old OKC is a bad idea, because old OKC wasn't good and no one but a couple weird rats liked it.
All the bring back OKC crowd have failed at answering a simple question: if it was so good, why did Tinder eat their lunch? As soon as tinder existed OKC fell off a cliff, so why would you think women would come back? You need a good explanation for why they wouldn't hate it this time just as much.
(BTW, all the normie-ish women i know hate dating docs. Not the current population of people who have them, the idea and structure. Like you show them one and they freak out and say things like "why would anyone write anything like this??? This is so unappealing to do or read!" Before you bring back long text profiles maybe figure out why women hate that? I don't understand it either but I'm not telling everyone OKC is the best solution.)
>why did Tinder eat their lunch
Perverse incentives. It was terrible and useless, so people spent much more time on, it bringing in that sweet ad money.
It was shitty and therefore they chose it over something that worked better? Doesn't play.
Nah, tinder just had more money, bought them out and made it shittier as well.
Do women hate text-based profiles? or do normies (women included) dislike them? Because naively I would expect men to be even more picture-focused.
This is counterintuitive I agree! Yet women abandoned okcupid en masse. (I don't claim to know what normie-ish men think of dating docs.)
My guess is that OKCupid was for people who were serious enough about dating to write a giant profile and answer dozens of questions. Tinder et. al. have a much lower barrier to entry and become more "eh, why not? can't hurt." Thus, millions more people installed Tinder and only kinda sorta half-heartedly look through it.
Re #4, as a native Portuguese speaker with experience teaching English as a foreign language (and Science) I think I have the skills for this. Still I wouldn't do it for free as quite honestly, interesting as it seems, it doesn't seem better than either traditional methods employed by a good teacher or Duolingo used by a motivated learner.
I had similar thoughts! Except that I'm a Latin teacher. No Latin teachers are fluent in Latin, but we all have access to students to use as guinea pigs, so there might actually be a chance at cross-comparison. I started a grant proposal for #4, then read the end of the blog post and thought - "Wait , are we just supposed to mention general interest in the comments? Should we all get together and have a Hunger-Games-style elimination first to decide whose language to try it with?" I saw Dutch mentioned earlier in the comments, and a couple others have expressed interest. I hope Scott lets us all apply. It would validate this vanity project!
>No Latin teachers are fluent in Latin
A bit off topic but I've always wondered this: do you think anyone in the Vatican speaks fluent Latin?
Yes. For sure, but not a ton.
You're right, they can be pretty good! But I guess I'm niggling about "fluency." The type of Latin that classicists speak (even the ones in the Vatican, or the ones you mention in the comment below who rented the apartment, etc.) is not the Latin that the Romans spoke. Written Latin is highly artificial, and we know that even the vocabulary was often different, based on the way that words developed from spoken Latin into the Romance languages. By the way, I'm in complete awe of the few people who can train themselves to communicate successfully in classical Latin. But it's not the same as being fluent in a natural language.
Out of curiosity, have you used diglot weaves for teaching Latin before? I've seen them around, but they always look to me as if they go too slowly for the average student, so I've never really used them. And I've seen nothing (at least in print) that scales up the way Scott is envisioning.
Too slow. I only use such a weave incidentally.
#4 I know several Latin teachers who are truly fluent in Latin (they rented an apartment in Rome and only spoke Latin for a couple of years before returning stateside. Myself and a colleague communicate in Latin in front of students in order to induct them in our future Hive. I myself am not fluent enough to read the highest level texts without vocab help.
I use GPT4 (3.5 can't do languages well!) almost daily to practice Spanish, German, and Finnish. It's solid at Latin, but not as involved in rhetorical flourishes as Seneca or Cicero or the classical corpus, which is an interesting fact in itself (I would like to know the training data volumes).
I have tried several methods for teaching Latin in my time. Something like what Scott says works, however, it's very slow. I think we underestimate how many moving parts there are in languages and how slow vocabulary acquisition would be using this method. Really, once a word or grammatical form is introduced in the Tale of Genji, it would need to be changed everywhere in one's experience of text.
What I would want is an API that runs on top of everything you engage with on your phone and computer and increases the "filter-strength" a little more based upon your progress in the Tale of Genji (or heck, an Anki deck or grammar book).
I'm the cofounder of Tract (https://buildwithtract.com/), a startup trying to make it easier to reason about planning risk. One of the things I'd like to prototype, and which might dovetail rather nicely with §7, is a modern approach to visual preferences survey: a 'Tinder for buildings', somewhere local communities can vote on and discuss various architectural styles. We can use generative AI methods to slot new facades into existing streetscapes, analyse the data, and see if we can find meaningful clusters that pin down quantitively what a 'local vernacular' actually consists of.
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
Regarding the OkCupid clone: my sense is that it should not try to make any money – I'm normally definitely not opposed to people getting rich from their product, but I don't see it working out in this case. My first point is that maintaining an OkCupid-like site should have very moderate running costs. As I understand it, it's mostly a text-based website that doesn't need to have a lot of throughput. I think running costs could be covered by donations like Wikipedia does (in fact Wikipedia asks for way too much money; they're trying to set up an endowment fund).
Another problem with a for-profit OkCupid clone is that the company behind it will be very tempted to endlessly tinker with it in order to increase profits. This seems very unnecessary for such a site. I think once the software is written, it only occasionally needs to be slightly modified to keep up with new web technologies. There is a risk here that the site will look outdated after a while (similar to how Wikipedia looks maybe outdated), but I think that would be fine? You'd maybe need a few part time programmers for this, but most of the modifications should come from open source contributors. (As you're not making money off this software, there is no reason not to make it open source.)
The main question then is, who would be willing to fund the creation of the software if there are no profits to be made? And I think this can only be solved by a funder with public goods in mind (as might be happening here).
If someone was serious about funding this, I would maybe recommend structuring it as a competition with two (or three) rounds: multiple teams start to write software, then when everyone has a prototype, judges determine who goes to the next round and gets funding for developing it further; at the end, one team's software wins and the team gets paid to extend until it has reached feature-completeness.
I think that the usefulness of a dating website scales with the number of potential partners in your target demographic much more than other social media: I can interact with people on ACX, LW or the motte just fine even though almost all people in my country are not on them. By contrast, a dating website which, say, only includes a small part of the ratsphere will probably not be very useful outside the Bay Area, and of limited use even within. Dating websites are natural oligopolies.
Wikipedia succeeded because it had a first-movers advantage, and it is a fundamentally altruistic project: AOL had no incentive to set up their own encyclopedia wiki, and even if they had, few authors would have wanted to write articles for the benefit of AOL.
The dating website market today is very well established. I also do not see participating in a dating website as a deeply altruistic action.
I agree that user interests and company interests are rarely aligned for websites (see: reddit, twitter, etc) and often lead to what is technically known as enshittification.
I like simple black-on-white-with-blue-links old school websites. But then I am an aging male computer nerd. Like most of these, I do not want to date other aging male computer nerds. I think if you want to attract the sort of people essential to running a successful heterosexual dating website (that is, women), it would be a good idea if the website is shiny and has some fancy "app". If it requires people to use mediawiki or github syntax, it will fail.
I don't see a not-for-profit succeeding in that field, but would be happy to be proven wrong.
Are women who do happen to be nerdy satisfied with their options for finding dating prospects who can understand their interests (those women who want such)? Because if not, this gap can probably be within reach of a non-profit project… The results might not scale, but also might not require as much annoying polishing work.
Am currently developing a dating app. Similar to Tinder, but you CANNOT chat, just schedule a date and meet.
Pretty much the opposite of what Scott suggests. I feel like rationality/autism types always focus on the matchmaking algorithm whereas I think that that's all bullshit, except for the aspect described in "Sadly Porn" where people like having a "big other" saying that you are "compatible"
Do you need help on your dating app?
yes I do, let's get in touch
please find me on telegram or write me a mail on alexej.gerstmaier@gmail.com
I've definitely had language learning books similar to #4 advertised to me in my Facebook feed. They're illustrated children's books, IIRC, and they start by swapping in a handful of foreign words and you can work out what they are from the pictures, and then they gradually increase the density. I can't remember the name now, but I'll come back and update if I see them again.
Also worth mentioning the Lingua Latina series, which does something roughly similar for Latin, except it doesn't bother with any English. It starts with a map labelled in Latin and very simple sentences that explain in Latin the relationship between the places on the map, like "Roma in Italia est. Italia in Europa est." and builds up the vocabulary and complexity from there.
https://www.amazon.com/Familia-Romana-Lingua-Latina-Book-ebook/dp/B012HTEEDU/ref=sr_1_1
I've used the Lingua Latina! A lot of their effectiveness depends on Indo-European similarities between English and Latin. But the method works. Also, I've seen the cute children's books you mention as well. There seems to be an actual trademarked method for the replacement-style of learning, based on the Clockwork Orange.
https://onethirdstories.com/how-it-works/
Thank you - One Third Stories, that's the one I was thinking of.
The problem with #8 is that there are orders of magnitude more "good ideas" for new laws than there is legislative capacity. In the current system, most of those good ideas don't even get the attention of someone in Congress. But if someone figured out the "cheat code" and publicized it, congresspeople would be overwhelmed, and they'd develop new filters for getting their attention.
Scott's idea sounds kind of like Search Engine Optimization - there's thousands of websites competing for the first few Google results, and as soon as someone figures out a way to game the system, Google changes the algorithm and that game no longer works. It's an arms race between you, all your competitors, and Google.
Someone else pointed out that the current system is lobbying is already designed to address this issue. And the general public is always complaining about lobbyists - making them more effective would just make the public even more mad, and nudge us even more toward vetocracy.
I think in the ratsphere, the general opinion is that overregulation is more of a problem than underregulation (possibly excepting paperclips).
The threshold a new law should have to pass is not "is this on it's own better than the default?" but "is it so much better that it is worth making our codebase larger?"
Scott's goal of reducing regulations of kidney donations feels like a typical example here.
3. One person did not accomplish this. This was part of a concerted campaign by MSF, Stop TB, and a few other organizations to let the patents expire. I'm actually kind of annoying that John Greene gets credit. Not because he doesn't deserve any credit but because MSF and other such organizations deserve much more. Anyway, eventually J+J allowed to procure generic versions of the drug in certain countries. It did not ultimately surrender the patent.
If you really want to do this the play would be to go ask MSF or other organizations what drugs they spend the most money on and then go to places like J+J and get them to agree to supply such drugs at cost to such organizations. And then possibly set up a production pipeline depending on whether they supply it themselves or simply give you the right to produce it. A good mission but not a simple one or really something that can be done without the confluence of influence, social connections, medical knowledge, and non-profit connections.
Still, a worthy effort.
It's not at all clear to me that this is a worthy effort. Has anyone considered the impact on long term incentives in judging worthiness?
Pressuring them to give up their patents might have bad long term effects. The negative effects of being asked to give up the small potential profit of selling into certain countries while maintaining their full rights seems much less likely to have bad effects. If they feel the deal is bad they can simply leave it. And to be honest it's not like they're making a lot of money off TB drugs in Tanzania or wherever anyway. The goodwill they get from the charity is probably worth more than the potential profit (and if it isn't they can say no).
It's not just them. Everyone's watching and learning.
4. How is this superior to the already existing technique of sentence matching where you have two pages with one to one sentences and explanations for why they're different?
Anyway, I've already got an AI (well, a wrapper) that will chat with you in a foreign language and correct your mistakes when you reply to it. So do numerous language learning services. It speaks like an LLM because that's what it is. But it's still good for developing vocabulary and being corrected when you make mistakes. I haven't tried having it produce mixed sentences but I could take a look at it. But I'm dubious what value it provides above and beyond pre-existing language learning chatbots.
I think the value comes from being "forced" to read the foreign (or partially foreign) text in order to understand the story. A side-by-side interlinear comparison doesn't do that. It's like the difference between watching a foreign film with subtitles and without, or between taking a language class and going to live in the foreign country.
Couldn't you simply not look at the pages in your native language to replicate the effect though?
That would replicate the effect of a purely foreign-language book, which there are already plenty of. It wouldn't replicate what Scott is suggesting, which is a book that starts in English and gradually increases the proportion of foreign vocab/grammar as it goes along.
5. It's not hard to record sub-second differences. It'd be hard to sync them in real time. But you can just store test results locally and then upload them at the end. It's not that hard to make a site that helps you generate IATs either. It'd just be some CRUD infrastructure. But what would it be used for? My fear for this one is that it gets developed and it basically becomes a novelty project.
7. The sequence here is very wrong. First off, pick a medium. You have to start with one as your niche. If you're not a trained architect or a GC it's not going to be buildings. But that's fine. Furniture, as you suggest, works. Begin designing for it and either find a production team or start doing it on your own in a workshop. Then begin offering it for sale. Assuming you want to seize the commanding heights of culture make something truly special, adopt a luxury style, and charge high prices.
This will mean you won't get very many sales just from putting a store online. But you can get around this by getting into galleries and shows of various kinds which means a large amount of working the social scene around design hubs like LA or NYC (or Milan/Paris/London/Tokyo...) This will both give you the prestige to get some of those high end clients and will allow you to get a certain amount of super rich or famous clients who will spend large amounts of money on custom work. Their patronage and money in turn makes it easier to get into those fashion shows, which will also make you more famous and desirable, in a virtuous cycle. Eventually you will attract imitators by which the style will be propagated to the masses. And eventually you sell out to one of the luxury conglomerates.
If you want an organization then you just need to find designers, architects, etc with the appropriate styles and provide them studio space, commissions, etc.
I think making furniture like that (relatively) affordable (vs IKEA) might actually be harder than making buildings like that (relatively) affordable (vs modern steel+glass etc).
If your goal is to make money then affordability is the way to go. Walmart is something like 10x the size of LVMH. If your goal is to command the heights of culture then you want to go into the luxury market.
As to the difficulty: it depends on what you're willing to compromise. You can make mid tier furniture about as good as luxury stuff because the difference between a $10,000 couch and a $1,000 couch is probably more brand names and paying for prestige extras (like full handcrafting in Italy) rather than simple materials or processes. Though of course you're right that mass producing at a reasonable price point can be harder than making one offs like a house often is.
Surely the existence and culture of "design hubs" are what caused this ugly problem in the first place.
I don't think so. Fashion capitals have been a thing since forever, at least the middle ages.
Sounds like a proposal to recreate the Arts and Crafts Movement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_and_Crafts_movement
Arts and Crafts was meant to be a widespread movement to create skills and push back against industrialization. This is instead the career ladder of various kinds of luxury designers (architects, fashion designers, etc). Though they certainly use the kind of skills they'd get in such classes at the basis. Most designers have to have enough skills to make their own designs. The goal here is to get the thing mass produced eventually. Though sometimes handcrafted in Italy or wherever to charge a premium.
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
8. You know, I'm increasingly convinced this is just some kind of weird local knowledge. I feel like my government is pretty responsive but this is because I know who to reach out to or where to show up for public hearings or whatever. Anyone else could do this if they had that same knowledge but most people... just don't bother, I guess? It's weird. Government is really important. And local governments especially. And it's not really that hard to access.
I think the issue is that people want to outsource the work but also hate principal-agent problems. But mostly complain instead of doing anything about. Basically, if you have such access the incentive is to monetize it or serve as a specialized intermediary instead of putting it out to the general public. Both for venal reasons and because, to be honest, most people you teach don't bother to follow through. Also, most of it isn't learned from a book but from a series of experiences.
Anyway, to answer:
> Presumably the first step is convincing a member of Congress or the administrative state. How do you do this?
Step one is getting into a room with them. Step two is just normal persuasion. Step two is the harder part. Step 3 is even harder: getting them to prioritize it.
> you should get articles in newspapers, sign petitions, and hold some protests.
Eh, maybe? What you really need to convince them of is one of two things: either that it's correct (either in a moral or technical sense) or that it will win them votes. Ideally both. Keep in mind they have their own ideas of what wins/loses votes and what's right/wrong. Protests or whatever are just an honest signal of #2.
> Is there a way to avoid this? Is this your Congressman’s problem, or your problem?
It's your job to make it a battle leadership chooses to fight and to smooth it as much as possible for them. This gets into the process of whipping. Your job as an interest group is to convince leadership and then make the whipping process as easy as possible. The easier it is the less whipping that needs to be done and so the more likely leadership is to do it.
> If you want to convince the administrative state to make/repeal some regulation, do you write a letter to the appropriate official? How do you know who that is? Do they care about letters? Do they care how many protests you’ve organized?
The administrative state is regulation bound. You can convince them but only through strict procedures. Comment periods, briefs, etc. Politicians get to take initiative but bureaucrats generally don't. They act according to the rules or follow orders. They specifically do not want you convincing individual bureaucrats and to instead deal with the institution. They don't care how many protests you've organized but their bosses might.
Anyway, serious question: if EA is really so full with money and talent and wants to do some good why doesn't it just get someone appointed ambassador to some poor African country? It's not like there's a lot of competition or that anyone would object to the ambassador running around trying to get charity done. A lot of them are supposed to be conduits for aid there anyway. And it's a good chance to grow connections among elites and know who's trustworthy etc.
This is a very good comment and I heartily agree. Government tends to be pretty opaque, but if you put the effort in to knowing who is who and what they're doing, getting into a room to talk to them is hardly impossible.
Re: 8 - the answer is highly variable depending on the precise situation.
For example, during the Turnbull and Morrison governments, there was a lot of policy inertia. The government didn't have a lot of vision or purpose and was consumed with its own internal squabbles. Stuff percolated up through the public service but it wasn't really anything far-reaching or ambitious. The best avenue to change was to get a politician on side to fight for your issue and really make a stink about it.
But with the Albanese government I have been surprised to discover that getting a politician on side to yell about your issue - while obviously still really nice to have of course - is not so necessary. They have initiated a lot of substantial legislative changes and a bunch of big reviews and most of these processes are open to public comment. So you can get a surprising amount of progress by engaging with these processes. You send in a 5 page submission saying "hey your exposure draft is great but there are these 4 problems with it and we think they could be alleviated in this way and also we think it would be great to also address this related issue that your current bill doesn't look at". And sometimes you convince them.
So these are very different situations in the same country and political system. And perhaps as the Albanese government ages more policy inertia will set in. The situation may be different again in other countries. But in all cases a level of specific knowledge is needed about the system, issue, and political pressures that certain actors face.
For someone in Scott's particular situation, one tactic I would recommend is identifying the specific person you need to get the change made, and writing public posts and going on podcasts saying "it would be excellent and a testament to their wisdom if person X did Y". It's important to highlight Person X by name because Person X almost certainly uses a media monitoring service that alerts them about anything that gets said about them in the media, and prominent blogs and podcasts are very much a part of that. These people are often shockingly vain and notice when they get specific attention - Person X is among the top 0.01% of people interested in Person-X-related content. So by using their name in public you get a shortcut to put your argument in front of their eyes.
Just saw this from the quests and requests follow up email. I'd love to contribute and help. I have some time. My email is everydayemails2@gmail.com and will follow up from there if there is still energy to do something on (8) On A Primer About Political Change
#8 This guy seems like one of the best people to write the book:
Gregory Watson
Passing the 27th amendment
Interview
https://www.c-span.org/video/?447078-1/qa-gregory-watson
He spent $6000 over 10 years (1982-1992 iirc). The one-person lobbyist.
It seems he hasn't written a book yet because he has to work a bunch of jobs to get by.
His LinkedIn profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregorywatson1
Looks like he's most likely still in Texas working for the legislature.
https://alchetron.com/Gregory-Watson
Fascinating example! But yes this is a great demonstration that political change is absolutely possible if you put in the effort.
Re: language learning, that seems to already exist as a company: https://prismatext.com/
This looks cool! And thanks for posting - I've been looking for something like this too. But in this case, it looks as if Prisma only replaces the most common words/phrases. This page (https://prismatext.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/67000399873-can-you-dial-up-or-down-the-number-of-foreign-words-in-each-book-) says something about working on a more advanced model that will let people choose difficulty level, but even then it doesn't look as if the last chapter would be entirely in the target language.
My experience using diglot weaves when teaching Latin is that the few foreign words are so basic that it's pointless. I would love to find something more advanced, as Scott describes it.
>His particular big victory was convincing some pharma companies not to enforce patents for their anti-tuberculosis drugs in developing countries. How did one person accomplish this?
Importantly, he did not accomplish this by himself. He's been mildly obsessed with tuberculosis for the past few years and has been writing a non-fiction book on it. He has a lot of contacts with and advice from groups like Doctors without Borders, so he had a behind the scenes campaign of experts helping alongside the public campaign of all his followers.
If you want to do something like this again, I recommend just trying to contact him directly through an email and ask how you can help with similar efforts. I understand you have a lot of pretty influential contacts yourself and maybe you and John could help network the EA community with the anti-tubercolosis community more tightly or something.
The best contact would probably be emarshall@penguinrandomhouse.com for his press/publicity email or maybe just tweeting at him.
As a dutch speaker idea number 4 seems ideal to start of with dutch. Since it is already really close to the English language. I might contact some dutch and english teacher here in the Netherlands.
I was thinking the same thing, but then I wondered if this fuzzy gradual change would result in me being able to read both English and Dutch, but unable to distinctly speak either because they are so entangled in my brain. Or would my years of speaking English keep all of that language model on a separate brain shelf and I would be able to distinguish them? Very interesting.
Maybe the difference should be visually highlighted to help you separate the mix?
I would say that your English should be safe in any case (my first and second languages are not contaminated by the third and fourth, but when I try to remember a word in the latter two, sometimes I first remember a word from the wrong one)
“If you want to convince the administrative state to make/repeal some regulation, do you write a letter to the appropriate official? How do you know who that is? Do they care about letters? Do they care how many protests you’ve organized?” Not stupid questions. At all. Better use of time would be to figure out a better mechanism for getting the will of the people enacted. There is currently zero incentive for elected officials to take account of what people actually want. Much less the administrative state. Or make noise, because that’s all you can do at the moment. Although I’m anti socialist because it’s another centralized power scheme, perhaps it’s time to look at little s soviet type groups. The great grass roots revolution that happened in Russia was utterly crushed, but before that happened local groups got together to govern locally. Maybe it didn’t really work, idk, but what we need is less about how to navigate the current landscape and more creative thinking about how to do it differently. Along with all the possible pitfalls. I’m not talking about a new ideology, but a hard as nails look at how to distribute power. Right now your vote is just a blank check. It’s a very weak signal that’s routinely ignored. Not only does it have little to do with direct democracy, but it isn’t representative democracy either. If your government doesn’t have to care about what you want, neither writing letters nor screaming at the top of your lungs will do a damn thing. How do we make the administrative state accountable? Is it even possible or is something new necessary?
Bringing the US House of Representatives back up to one rep per 30,000 citizens, meaning a bit over eleven thousand federal legislators, might be a step in the right direction. Fewer constituents per politician would mean more time for each of them (and more reason to care about the marginal vote), while too many peers to know them all personally might make it harder to strangle reasonable policies with ideological purity-testing.
I wish someone would repeat the Implicit Association Test, but with the order switched (black/good first). I believe the test is actually measuring how long it takes to retrain your brain to quickly categorize two unrelated images.
Every IAT paper I'm aware of, including Greenwald, McGee, & Schwartz (1998) where the test was first introduced, randomizes the order of conditions. This is standard practice in any psychometric testing.
Here's the relevant quote from the paper (p. 1467):
"The two IAT measures obtained for each subject were analyzed in a design that contained five procedural variables, listed here and described more fully in the Procedure section: (a) order of the two target-concept discriminations (flowers vs. insects first or instruments vs. weapons first), (b) order of compatibility conditions within each IAT (evaluatively compatible combination of discriminations before or after noncompatible combination), (c) response key assigned to pleasant items (left or right), (d) category set sizes for discriminations (5 items or 25 items per category), and (e) interval between response and next item presentation for the combined task ( 100,400, or 700 ms). The first four of these were two-level between-subjects variables that were administered factorially, such that 2 subjects received each of the 16 possible combinations; the last was a three-level within-subjects variation. "
(b) is what you're getting at, and it was randomized such that half of the participants did the tasks in each possible order (compatible-then-incompatible vs. incompatible-then-compatible).
There was a difference between these two groups (the effect is a bit larger if you do the compatible task first), but this difference is small compared to the effect of condition (incompatible is always slower), regardless of order.
It's not surprising to me that this difference exists - my interpretation is that if you're exposed to the harder condition first, then when you get to the easy condition your brain is already in "sometimes these are hard, I should be careful" mode and you go more slowly. If you do the easy condition first, you blaze through it faster because you haven't yet been exposed to the tricky ones where your intuitive response can lead you astray, and only slow down when you get to the hard ones.
More generally: If there is some potential stupid procedural flaw you can think of in 5 minutes that would introduce a confound to a paper, it's worth checking whether the authors of the paper also thought of it and accounted for it. We're used to shitting on research psychology in these parts, but you can't just assume that every psych paper made every error you can think of that it was possible for them to make.
That's helpful, thanks.
As a video game player, I have a lot of practice with "see image, press button" for a lot of different kinds of images...
You should talk to Samuel Hughes (I'm sure you know him from Twitter: https://twitter.com/scp_hughes) about #7, in part because he is also quite au fait with some of the distributed answers to #8, and is already working on this question. He was the researcher for the UK's Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, which was sort of like a consensus-based committee attempt to make progress on this question.
Though I have to say that I think 'classical architecture' and 'traditional architecture' are probably the wrong framing. What we want is popular architecture (which they are a type of, but not the only type of): https://worksinprogress.co/issue/making-architecture-easy
Hopefully you saw our previous work on this question too (https://worksinprogress.co/issue/against-the-survival-of-the-prettiest and https://worksinprogress.co/issue/in-praise-of-pastiche)
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
"3. Things like John Green’s anti-tuberculosis campaign"
I would like for you to consider carefully what this does to R&D incentives - if this would be a medium to long term negative for the cause of innovation and development of solutions for developing country problems.
"3. Things like John Green’s anti-tuberculosis campaign"
I would like for you to consider carefully what this does to R&D incentives - if this would be a medium to long term negative for the cause of innovation and development of solutions for developing country problems.
#2: Many papers already release the statistical data needed to reconstruct the scores. See for example the supplementary information in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3935975/
And plink is software you can use to calculate scores based on genotype.
That being said, this is still pretty tricky to get right, and I think there is substantial room for improvement in terms of open-source polygenic scoring.
Not a statistical geneticist, but I think this article:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01016-z
also gives enough information to reconstruct the scores
I'm an EEG expert and re #1: To get a clear answer to this question you would need a large sample size, probably larger than the initial experiment (~N= 80), especially if performed with consumer grade EEG systems that have lower signal to noise ratio. Also, presenting stimuli at the ms precision required by this experiment, at a participant specific alpha frequency is not trivial. One possibility to ensure the success of this replication would be to team up with the #EEGManyLabs project, a group of researchers teaming up to replicate high profile EEG experiments.
Looking at the article, at least the flickering is supposed to force the alignment of the person's rythm, so it is a prepared stimulus with millisecond precision, not something that needs realtime updates based on EEG. And if the crucial part is just figuring out the frequency, as a signal-processing task this can tolerate quite a bit of noise.
All these avoidance of hard issues does not help a failed reproduction to be a meaningful outcome, though…
I think getting to a millisecond timing is not all that difficult. An off-the-shelf microcontroller board (e.g. RasPi Zero, Arduino) should be sufficient for that, no need for FPGAs.
However, I have not the first clue about EEG. My idea would be to use one of these ~10$ breakout boards for one channel ECG (yes, I know) chips, wire them up to the analog digital converter input of the microcontroller, put both electrodes on my head somewhere (under my naive assumption that the main difference between EEG and ECG is simply where the electrodes are placed on the body) and plot the resulting signal, hoping that I see something which looks like alpha waves.
Then perhaps run a Fourier transform on the signal in real time, figure out the principal frequency and phase of the wave and turn on the stimulus with whatever phase-delay is appropriate.
Good news is that apparently you don't even need to measure the phase, and FFT can be done as a separate preprocessing phase. Bad news is that you need the same rythm — not necessarily nicely related to 100Hz or 120Hz — for flickering and the first appearance of the task image (so, high-speed diaphragm? not sure how cheap you can go with them, though). Annoying news is that the interesting stuff is to go from there to tasks beyond split-second image classification.
Hey Alain, I'm taking lead on the EEG project: check out Scott Alexander's announcement on Open Thread #304 (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-304)
From your comment it doesn't sound like you are interested in actively participating in the project. But I would still like to have your email address just in case — to potentially have a email conversation about the issues outlined in your comment if they arise.
Would you be interested in giving me your email so I can get in touch with you? If so, perhaps the easiest way to do so is simply dropping me a short email to the email address provided in my intro google doc (linked by Scott in the OT#304 announcement, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SGwxQ_vdIkzM1ppVcpNxgqYnXTDNerPFgyWLBQzFa1g/edit?usp=sharing)
The book: "the avion my uncle flew" does the language idea. It starts in english and finishes in french.
https://www.amazon.com/Avion-Uncle-Puffin-Newbery-Library/dp/0140364870
Let's Parler Franglais! is the opposite kind of idea 😁
https://www.amazon.co.uk/parler-Franglais-French-Miles-Kington-ebook/dp/B016KA610G/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
"The trouble with French is that there are far too few English words in it. Miles Kington – the critic, columnist, and creator of Franglais – puts that right. His magnificent new language can be understood by almost anyone who failed GCSE French. If you passed GCSE French it could be tricky, but do try anyway."
https://www.mileskington.com/More%20Miles/ARTICLES/Franglais.html
"Four years ago I started a column in Punch called Let’s Parler Franglais. It wasn’t meant to be a column, just a jokey language lesson called “Dans le Taxi” featuring a taxi-driver who spouted such French phrases as ‘Blimey, le traffic est dodgy…il y a un tailback a flaming Marble Arch… c’est une liberte diabolique… non, c’est murder…’
Somewhat to my surprise, it caught on. People kept coming up to me (they still do) saying this was exactly how they spoke French, and how clever I was to reproduce it. Worse still, they came up to me and talked Franglais to me: ‘Votre column est spot on, monsieur; continuez avec le bon work…’ Which was embarrassing for me, as I can’t reply in Franglais; I daren’t usually admit it, as it seems so un-English, but I actually find it easier to talk French. Not much, but a bit."
Re: 7, I'm a landscape architect in the Washington DC area and would be happy to consult with anyone pursuing this quest. I have familiarity with design review (and the approvals process) at the municipal and county level, building code, the public response part of the design process, value engineering, etc., and can help get someone started navigating all that. These things vary by municipality, state, and market, but I can help you figure out where to start. Most of my relevant experience is in multifamily housing (apartments/condos/townhomes) and commercial (stores, restaurants, shopping centers, strip malls). I also have experience in single family homes and parks but I think those are less of a focal area for this hypothetical foundation.
You'd really want to get an architect and building contractor on board ASAP, and probably also a land use attorney, since I'm a landscape and land planning professional and not an architecture expert. But I might be able to help you get started.
Email me at why0hat at Gmail dot com if you want to talk!
Trying to collect people interested in no. 7, perhaps make a server or something.
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
There actually is already an organization that promotes classical architecture in government buildings, at least, the National Civic Art Society: https://www.civicart.org.
I doubt I have the connections or expertise to head up any kind of broader promotion of traditional architecture, but I’d be more than happy to assist with such an initiative, which seems a very worthy and achievable one.
Re: Dating. Maybe charge a fee for men and make it free for women. I know this only works for hetero-dating.
Something like a "freemium" model might be better - charge fees for specific actions which would otherwise be taken to excess, while leaving the typical path to a healthy relationship as frictionless as reasonably possible, so participants can feel clever by figuring it out.
Maybe even update the fee structure based on data from the service's ongoing operation. At first, simple stuff like discouraging unsolicited dick pics, or use of the word "bitch" in private messages to someone whose profile doesn't clearly state they're into that kind of thing, but then as a database of confirmed outcomes (and corresponding communication histories) accumulates, subtler or more context-sensitive warning signs could be assigned proportionate costs.
#8. A good primer on political change -- written from the inside
I've been writing my own case study on the journey from being an informed citizen w/ ideas to an involved citizen who has taken an idea into a bill that's been signed into law.
I try approach the Legislature, and writing about it, with "beginner's mind," because I like learning. I started an email newsletter/blog when I began my first campaign for state office last year. It's a behind-the-scenes journal to keep constituents informed.
I've received remarkable feedback from a diverse slice of voters who tell me that they feel far more informed about how things work, and they find it very readable. Example posts are below.
I do this newsletter as an unpaid part of my job to inform Vermonters, but I'd love to turn it into a book that provides answers to your questions.
We gavel in January 3rd and run through May. I have several policy areas where I'm trying to make some change. As a first-term state legislator, I don't have a lot of influence. I'm not a 6-term veteran who chairs a powerful committee. I'm a farmer, writer, and sustainability professional.
This makes things more interesting to me because if the policies that I care about get anywhere in 2024, it'll be more based on merit than seniority. I'm sure there are useful lessons in the memoirs of retired power brokers. But I'll give you a timely and accessible chronicle on what is working and what isn't working today on the question, "What’s the strategy for turning a good idea into law?"
That's what I can offer this project. I already have a lot into it, and I have an approach, but I'd love to work with a team and to be challenged on my assumptions. I feel strongly that everything gets better with collaboration.
If you have any inkling that you feel like-minded and want to contribute useful constraints/questions, writing or other media, editing, etc. -- let's talk!
I'm not waiting for financial backing to move forward with this project, but I am looking for a financial model and source of investment to bring this content to a wider audience. I'd be grateful for any support, or pointers on finding grants.
Thanks for reading this comment. Have an awesome rest of your day!
-Tristan tristan@tristanroberts.org
P.S. Examples:
what's better, delegate model or trustee model of representation? https://tristanroberts.org/news/trust-through-agreement-and-trust-through-disagreement
how to deal with toxicity on social media while forming a local caucus? https://tristanroberts.org/news/how-should-i-respond-to-fpf
finding hope in what's working locally https://tristanroberts.org/blog/do-you-have-hope-for-our-kids
how does a legislator decide what's a constitutional gun law, when experts disagree? https://tristanroberts.org/news/a-law-without-the-governors-signature
how bicameralism's inefficiencies are a feature, not a bug: https://tristanroberts.org/news/no-to-excuses-yes-to-second-chances
Better yet, get updates like these in real-time: https://pages.tristanroberts.org/signup :-)
#8 - A few dozen hours of your time? This idea sounds more like a Ph.D. thesis topic. It would take more than a few dozen hours to research existing literature to determine whether something already exists.
#7 is literally my "if I were a billionaire" fantasy. My skills are: ability to make academic arguments for why modernist architecture is bad (I've published a few). I don't have any practical skills, but would happily sign on as in-house polemicist.
Trying to collect some #7 people
For decorations and paintings from the 13th to the 17th century, I can help you. Contact me at thaphilotprob@gmail.com
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
I'm interested in #4
Re: #5: probably the initial prototype should be «dumb» in terms of content, e.g. you just upload lists of words and bunches of images for each category, then entering which mixes of categories you want to show. Also, as the topic is already marred as culture-war content, maybe downloadable archive to open locally in the browser or unpack as a static part of your website is safer…
No matter how you do it, if it is done on the user's computer, you probably cannot disentangle the delays introduced by the technical stack, and reaction time. Hopefully local delays will be relatively stable… but that probably makes only differences of times measurable, not ratios.
Re #8: I briefly dated someone who is very involved in political activism scenes, and according to her the model that is super popular right now is called the "momentum model": https://www.momentumcommunity.org/momentum-model, original book here http://thisisanuprising.org/. Although this might be more on the "social change" (i.e., get society to shift on controversial issues) rather than targeted political change for ideas that are already mostly accepted.
I could shed some light on #8.
I came from tech and now work in climate politics at the state level, running a think tank. I've spent the last couple of years piecing together how a bill actually becomes a law.
Some highlights:
- It’s about power, not persuasion.
- Beyond electoral campaigns, there's a parallel (and poorly documented) world of issue campaigns. Getting someone elected is necessary to pass a law, but often not sufficient. If said law is controversial, you then need to push them.
- Within these campaigns, there’s a playbook for building and exercising power, with two tracks: money and people. Legislation is written by advocates and trade groups, rarely by legislative staff. This is especially true at the state level.
- Legislators care about who is asking for something, not what they’re asking for.
- Theres a sharp line between c3 and c4 activities.
- There’s an inside game (lobbying) and an outside game (protests). Effective campaigns often combine both.
- Speakers decide which bills move, not individual legislators. They often become the chokepoints, and therefore the targets, of issue campaigns.
- Strategy often hinges on whether the bill is public and controversial, or not.
- That said, the best lens to think about strategy is whether an activity generates favorable legacy media coverage.
- In terms of tactics, petitions go in the trash, phone calls only matter to the extent they’re attributed to known organization with the power to reach constituents. Protests matter if they get coverage at key times in the legislative and electoral cycle.
- Evidence matters, but not for persuasion. (See point #1)
- For regulations, it is necessary but not sufficient to submit comments. Bureaucrats ultimately answer to elected executives. (See point #1)
- Contrary to popular belief, politics is not irrational. Politicians, especially the effective ones, largely act in accordance with the incentives shaped by their position within the political system. The trick to getting policy passed is understanding this logic. And the common theme is usually: raise the political costs of not passing your policy, and raise the rewards of doing so.
Happy to flesh out and connect these (somewhat simplified) maxims.
RE #1: I have only skimmed the study, but it looks to me like they only looked at the comparative advantage that flickering has on learning depending on whether it is synchronized with alpha oscilations or not. So synchronized flicker gives you an advantage over unsynchronized flicker. But, if you really want to boost learning in normal people (Scott, I guess this is what you are aiming at?), shouldnt your comparison group be learning of normal stimuli (i.e., ones that are not flickering at all)? I seriously doubt that the synchronized flicker gives you an advantage over no-flicker. But maybe they have done that and I just overlooked it. And if not, I would look for that in the new project (and would recomend a normal EEG, not a consumer one, this will be super hard, as has already been mentioned).
7 is a really good idea. It doesn't even have to be classical architecture being advocated for; just something that isn't an eyesore. Call it ABUA: the Anti-Butt#@$% Ugly Architecture Foundation. I will serve in a low-effort role on the board of trustees.
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
Re: #3
John Green + The Stop TB Partnership’s campaign against Johnson & Johnson is very similar to how EA animal groups like The Humane League (disclaimer: I used to work there) have run their corporate campaigns, although they’ve been successful without celebrity support for the most part - instead relying on grassroots support and funding.
I think corporate campaigns should work in basically any industry where (1) corporate reputation matters; and (2) corporate decision-making diverges from popular opinion. I’m a little nervous about doing this against pharma companies making drugs for neglected diseases since it could disincentivize them from making new drugs for that class of diseases (where the financial upside is already pretty low to begin with), but I am excited about some other opportunities.
Specifically, I’ve been working on a brand/web platform that I’m hoping to use for corporate campaigns in support of AI safety (mostly asking for smaller incremental concessions from AI labs - like stricter pre-deployment evaluations or greater investment in safety research). It’s still very young and pretty… homemade, and we haven’t begun our first campaign quite yet (waiting to build up more support), but If you’d like to check it out, it’s www.themidasproject.com
> For example, maybe we should start by getting someone to produce the sort of Art Nouveau furniture everyone wistfully lists on their Pinterest before grudgingly accepting reality and buying IKEA.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but my understanding is that you can buy this kind of thing, it's just absurdly expensive since it's bespoke (i.e., everyone has unique interests and you need to have custom furniture made). I know Goldman bankers, etc., who throw $40k at custom furniture and can basically have whatever they want built but rich people don't actually want weird bespoke things, they want things that show high status.
tl;dr revealed preferences suggests to me that few people actually want this. I would love to see evidence otherwise on REVEALED preferences.
Everyone has unique interests, but IKEA has compromised for Scandinavian modernist furniture and found a few basic models that they can sell at scale. I would like to see someone try this for Art Nouveau.
It feels like the order of compromises is different, unlike the arvhitecture case: they seem to have picked well what is best compatible with the desired scale of manufacturingg and logistics, then figured out how it is called, And it seems hard to find something more manufacturing-friendly.
If you want something at the prices of merely five times IKEA (sorry, loss of scale is expensive), and scalably — not just finding a local hobbyist carpenter who agree to take a commission — I guess you will end up defining as your signature aesthetics something that is actually necessary to make shipping easier. Dunno, a panel may be asymmetrical in its own, but there has to be a matching curve on another panel?
for 4. My crazy idea for language teaching.
How do we get in contact with the person doing this project? Are they just reading the comments?
Anyway, I am fluent in German and English I would be happy to do this kind of translation for a book and maybe eventually a short story. Just contact me if interested.
Re: #4 There's good evidence (for education research values of "good evidence") that extensive reading is an effective way to learn another language so this is not crazy from the outset. I also see a lot of overlap with projects like Destinos or French in Action (someone needs to remake these for the algorithm web!) and you might be able to draw on some of the theory behind them to help.
I do question whether this would be a useful method for most people who want to be able to listen and speak another language. It seems like it would be a good half of a language learning program, but only half.
#8. This book exists. It's called Organizing for Social Change and is put out by a lefty organizer training group called MidWest Academy. Of course, the tactics can also be used by conservatives and libertarians. It's very practical!
"As far as I know, proponents of classical architecture don’t have an aegis organization the same way charter city proponents have CCI or pro-progress types have Roots of Progress."
Actually, they do: The Institute of Classical Architecture and Art: https://www.classicist.org/
The academic center of the traditional architecture movement is the University of Notre Dame: https://architecture.nd.edu/
"Some of it is cost, some of it is regulation, and some of it is elite opinion."
Neither cost nor regulation is an important contributor to the problem. Elite opinion, especially in architecture schools, is by far the most important factor.
Regarding cost:
A) exterior ornament is a less important driver of building cost than structural and mechanical building systems. Those latter items scale more or less linearly with building size. So the main determinants of a building's cost are its location (since construction labor costs vary by region), its function (which drive the structural and mechanical code requirements) and its floor area. The use of limestone cornices rather than glass curtain walls is much less important than these factors.
B) Modernist detailing is deceptively expensive, so the apparent simplicity doesn't actually save money. And I'm talking about normal modernist buildings here, and not even touching the crazy Frank Gehry-tier "starchitect" buildings like MIT's Stata Center, which tend to be fiendishly difficult to build, expensive, and prone to defects.
Regarding regulation:
The building industry is highly regulated, but the most of the regulation deals with building use and size (zoning) and structure, fire protection, electrical safety, etc. (life safety). These regulations have considerable influence on what can be built and how much it costs, but they have virtually no impact on the decision to go with Midcentury Modern rather than Georgian Classical.
Actually, in the specific jurisdictions where regulation directly addresses aesthetics, the influence usually *favors* traditional design. These are jurisdictions where there are historic commissions or architectural review boards. They often require that new buildings or renovations fit in with the existing pre-WWII urban fabric. This does produce more traditional architecture (or, at least, prevents the destruction of old traditional architecture) in these specific neighborhoods.
The preferences of the faculty of most architecture schools, and therefore of most graduates of these schools, are what proliferate modernist architecture. Visit the websites of these schools, look at their galleries of student work and their academic design publications, and you will have your answer.
The “Black=bad, white=good” aspect of the IAT has always bugged me, because of the obvious confounder of the sun. Humans have a natural affinity for sunlight and fear of the dark, which is even baked into our language (eg “these are dark times” but “there’s a light at the end of the tunnel”) in a way that clearly has nothing to do with skin color.
Do blacks prefer blacks on the IAT, or do they show the same bias as whites?
they show similar, but smaller, bias
John Green's tuberculosis thing is a perfect example of where rationalists' rabid antipathy to socialism just doesn't make sense to me. OK, you got one company to reduce the price for one drug. How does that solve any structural problem? As long as pharma companies are for-profit entities, their share price will come before the good of public health, and the problem will be replicated over and over again. If the pharmaceutical industry was publicly owned, drugs could be developed and released without patents. Either publicly owned entities could handle the manufacturing or privately own companies could do it, and with the drugs public domain, they would compete on price and drive down the cost to very little. That seems like an awfully effective form of altruism. And yet I never see anything like that in rationalist spaces. It makes very little sense from an intellectual standpoint; it does, however, make sense from a social-cultural standpoint.
Banned for this comment.
> Either publicly owned entities could handle the manufacturing or privately own companies could do it, and with the drugs public domain, they would compete on price and drive down the cost to very little.
If it's all publicly owned, who would compete on price...?
"If the pharmaceutical industry was publicly owned, drugs could be developed and released without patents."
This is not in evidence. Firstly, publicly owned pharmaceutical industries do seek patents but the benefits instead accrue to their governments and which are still used to deny medicine abroad. Secondly, the assumption that publicly owned healthcare companies produce as many or as high quality drugs as private companies is simply not true. The profit motive is a load bearing part of how drug innovation happens right now. If you want to replace it I would want an ironclad plan. Especially given the track record you have to compare to is not the Nordics, which do have private pharmaceutical companies, but places like the Soviet Union or China. Which were not exactly biomedical powerhouses.
"And yet I never see anything like that in rationalist spaces. It makes very little sense from an intellectual standpoint; it does, however, make sense from a social-cultural standpoint."
I think the problem runs in the opposite direction. Socialists are often allergic to actually outlining their plans and have been since Marx's time. You could develop a rational socialism and I think that'd be well received by rationalists who generally lean left wing. But you'd first have to explain exactly how the solution would work in great detail and not deflect when people ask you to explain very minor details or to show it working in a pilot program. More generally you'd need to abandon a lot of Hegelian elements for utilitarian ones.
And I think this is for cultural reasons since many socialists are more interested in the Revolution(tm) in a millenarian sense more than actually making practical improvements to people's lives. Not all of them, of course, but it's undeniable that a lot of the movement's energy comes about overthrowing the System(also tm) and not about helping a few million poor people in Africa. The people who are really interested in incrementalism and wonky interventions to improve specific people's lives usually end up as vanilla-ish Democrats in the US in my experience. Which is where most rationalists end up.
Even granting arguendo that nationalizing the pharmaceutical industry would benefit TB patients in the developing world, how important different actions are to take depends not only on how good the world would be if you completely succeeded but also on your likelihood of success. John Green and nerdfighteria seem unlikely to bring about nationalization of major industries, but they do have a shot at pressuring pharmaceutical companies to reduce the prices of a few key drugs. Just because a systemic solution would be preferable doesn’t mean it’s wrong to pursue incremental change in the meantime.
There's already the NIH, which does drug research and sometimes patents the drugs it comes up with. It takes about $1 billion and a lot of infrastructure/lawyers/experts to get a drug through the FDA, so even when the NIH develops a drug, it usually hands it to a pharma company under some agreement. I support trying to lower the $1 billion barrier so that the NIH can push through more of its own drugs, and I've funded grants to this effect.
I don't think you care that much about expanding publicly funded drug research - people could easily advocate for more funding for this, but I've never seen anyone try to make it into a big political issue. I think you want to ban, or expropriate, privately funded drug research. I'm against that, for reasons I described at https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/07/reverse-voxsplaining-brand-name-drugs/
More generically, I notice you keep commenting here, going into some area you know nothing about, saying that the answer is obviously socialism, and that the only reason anyone disagrees with you is that "rationalists" are stupid and evil and biased against socialism. I find this pretty annoying and am pretty close to banning you. Not for your opinion but just for your constant insistence that anything I say you don't like represents "the rationalist movement", which is some group that apparently thinks about these issues a lot and is 100% focused on fighting socialism. I guarantee you the couple hundred rationalists are focusing most of their time on AI and aren't plotting how to discredit Marxism, and I wish you would stop trying to collective-punish the movement for any time I disagree with you.
Scott at some point you're going to have to deal with the fact that the product you've engaged with here for decades has proven vastly more effective at creating a cult of personality around you, primarily among a very particular strata of impressionable and sad men, than it ever has for any intellectual purpose. And perhaps you should engage your legendary critical thinking facilities to ponder if that's true BECAUSE THAT WAS WHAT YOU ALWAYS REALLY WANTED IN THE FIRST PLACE.
When absolutely everything that you write more firmly ensconces you in your role as Nerd King, can you really blame me for thinking that that's what you're really after?
I really like reading you, even when I disagree with you, because you can take people to task while also being compassionate. But this comment is neither true, nor necessary, nor kind, and honestly I expect better from you.
Freddie, imagine if I kept commenting on your blog with "Freddie writes articles about pop music, proving that socialism is about hating Taylor Swift". No matter what you wrote, I harped on the "Socialists hate Taylor Swift!" message.
You might have objections like:
- Even though you write posts about pop music that aren't completely worshipful, a big part of your point is that we need to think in terms more subtle than just "anyone who doesn't ultra-love pop hates Taylor Swift".
- Even if you personally loathed Taylor Swift, you aren't the only representative of socialism and it's unfair to apply this critique to all socialists.
- Even if a bunch of socialist Substackers all hated Taylor Swift, this is a boring contingent fact, and "socialism" is still about economic issues, from which Taylor Swift can only be a distraction.
- If someone was constantly posting "Freddie's output proves socialists hate Taylor Swift!" even when they were corrected on these points, you might worry it was an attempt to rile people up by tarring socialists with a position that makes lots of people mad, or at least to make it impossible to talk about important issues by keeping everyone stuck in the Controversial Outrage Bait Gutter.
This is how I feel about you applying any of my economic opinions to "rationalism". There are a dozen other rationalists you don't read, because they only talk about actual rationalist-relevant ideas like AI. But that doesn't mean you can assume whatever I say is the face of the movement.
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/ for more.
What testable predictions does the "wanted to be nerd king" theory make which meaningfully diverge from "wanted to make the world a better place, succeeded within limited reach, resulting patch of 'better' accidentally attracted people with similar goals and definitions" ?
This seems like a great issue for you to pitch that vision on, Freddie. I think if there's a group of folks who could be persuaded by writing a clear argument, it's going to be rationalists. The vast bulk of self-proclaimed socialists seem to have a such a poor grasp of economics that it's difficult to take them seriously. OTOH, someone such as yourself who recognizes that competition and private industry actually can push prices down would be a GREAT person to argue that knowledge itself is a Public Good (in the technical sense), and should be publicly funded. Because honestly, all the other socialists seem to think that if we could just get something like our public school system, THEN we'd have good healthcare, which seems like an absolute fucking disaster to me.
There is an architecture org similar to what you described (though their range may be slightly narrower): https://www.classicist.org
As for the language thing, https://prismatext.com/ has been advertising at me a lot lately. I'd wondered if they got the idea from you or independently re-invented it. Haven't tried them, but am considering it.
I'm an investor with Prismatext. They got this idea from the literature ( it's called a "Diglot Weave") https://prismatext.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/67000399861-the-diglot-weave-technique-a-scientifically-better-way-to-learn
It's also something that people (myself included) independently re-invent constantly. Basically I had the same idea as Scott, and then they advertised to me, and I was like "oh here's someone actually doing it. Maybe I'll just invest with them.
I have tried it out with Latin and it seems to be working nicely.
As for the dating site, I've been thinking a useful feature would be that users who are overburdened by incoming requests can establish "quests" to message them. Anything from "solve this captcha" to "slay a dragon in this embedded video game" to "write a python one-line that ...". All need to be machine-checkable, though maybe gpt allows that to be pretty sophisticated.
It establishes a sense of epicness, filters down messages to the overwhelmed, and lets people who do message signal that their message is worth reading (and maybe something about their competence). And it lets users control their experience based on their status within the dating market without hardcoding anything gender.
People you've messaged or interest-checked are immune from the requirement, and you can specify a match percentage that is as well.
My immediate reaction: how long until someone sets up a challenge «click this button _or_ pass this nontrivial test relevant to my hobby, which was tricky to set up» to inverse the direction of competence-signal.
There are already plenty of ways to signal in that direction.
From a development security point of view, having to securely run arbitrary user written code will be hard. Especially when the users expect a huge range of programing languages, and enough flexability to build in dragon video games.
And you just know someone is going to use it as a games platform. A person with a profile called "message_me_to_play_cndy_crsh". And copyright infringement phonecalls from the candy crush lawyers. And then someone puts popup adds in the game. Or bitcoin mining software where it only accepts after a million hashes.
Although you might make this work by finding some open source "learn to code" website and blatantly copying. Someone somewhere will have done a lot of the work to securely run user generated code.
Making this, with multiple choice quizzes only, might work. That's simple enough to not let anyone really mess you around.
Fully customizable tests for every user would be a nightmare, and probably also a lot of needlessly duplicated effort on the user end. Multiple-choice questions, though, have serious problems with signal-to-noise ratio.
How about a middle ground? Most users assemble a "quest" from standard modules with limited customizability. New modules have to go through an elaborate approval process involving actual human QA testers and lawyers, but then become available to everyone, with a reward to the creator (proportional to popularity) as compensation for the inconvenience.
Why so enthusiastic about the EEG study? The supposed effect is implausible.
Following up on implausible-sounding yet empirically validated results usually just results in regression to the mean, but when it doesn't, sometimes major theories get overturned and opportunities for drastic improvement at relatively low cost become available.
RE #2: Is any of the data being referenced publicly available, or is this request primarily directed at people sitting on large sets of genomic data?
This is something I'd be interested in exploring, but I currently work in edTech and would have no idea where to source the data.
Re #4, I like the idea of the language features being explained *before* you learn the new vocabulary. I don't speak Japanese, but I imagine you could also explain this way the informal and formal version of words ("my dad" vs "Your Mr. Father"), or the counting words (five cats = "cat of five animals", but five elephants = "elephant of five heads"). Also, idioms. That's basically like reading a translation made by someone whose knowledge of English is mostly limited to the vocabulary.
But I suspect that it would require a quite long text, if you want to introduce word by word based on context alone.
How would you do the grammatical genderᵐ for languagesᵐ that have it? I think a possible solutionⁿ could be to use superscriptᵐ to indicate the genderᵐ of each nounⁿ (e.g. "n" for neutral, "m" for masculine, "f" for feminine). To perceive the informationᶠ always, but not in a mannerᵐ that ruins readingⁿ. (I tried to annotate this paragraphᵐ according to Slovak.)
Maybe a part of this could be done automatically. Have a human translate the text from the original to "broken English", but then have a computer randomly replace some English words with original ones, and if you move the mouse cursor above the word (in case you cannot figure it out from context, or you want to check that you got it right) it would show the English word. Like when you have spoilers in text. And gradually increase the frequency of untranslated words. That way, when you run out of text, you could read the same chapters second time, with different words untranslated.
Hello!
I'm currently working with a small team on the dating site. Alyssa had an excellent tweet, I'm in contact with her, and she recently retweeted my bid to get more team-members on board. (https://twitter.com/freeshreeda/status/1719118204297966003)
I also think I understand the problem pretty well as it was the research topic of my choice for a recent fellowship with Ethereum Foundation (summerofprotocols.com). Happy to chat through the problem and/or share my research with people in private.
We're looking for more frontend and design support. Also donations to help us cover infra costs. We're keenly aware that the tech is not going to be the big thing — it's the network of daters that joins. We think we can do a better job of marketing such a product than things like twitterdatingapp.com (which we think is good as an MVP and product but bad at branding).
DM me on Twitter (@freeshreeda) or email me (shreedashreeda at gmail dot com) if interested!
If you're accepting free ideas: Don't make browsing profiles for a date the core interaction point but matchmaking. Do all the normal profile things of long text description, questionnaires, pictures, etc. Even allow people to browse profiles looking for a match.
Then setup a special user capability to suggest matches between profiles they browse. In any online community there's always power users, "whales" in the online gaming parlance, who spend ridiculous amounts of time on well designed apps. Outsource the work of matchmaking to them for entertainment value/monetary compensation. A somewhat neutral third party will work to obviate misrepresenting yourself (or at least change what you misrepresent on) and serve as an incentivized party to the match going well. Maybe integrate with network effect websites (social media mostly) so matchmakers that have links to both parties get a "super match"?
Monetize it by having people put money in escrow as they sign up and anytime they go on a matchmaker's date, pay out the escrow amount to the matchmaker, minus some amount for app upkeep (I admit this is probably the weakest part of the proposal since its based on humans not lying to save money, but i consider profitability disgusting so come up with something better.)
Seems like the incentives are aligned much better than profile browsing, it would allow matchmakers to do "side-hustle" style work which seems to be so popular among the Instagram crowd, and would create a cadre of people with incentives to scale the app's network.
It's pretty good. I like this not being the central product / brand point of the product. I think the manifold or manifest or whatever it is is getting that part wrong.
I love this -- haven't seen this suggestion before. Not sure it's viable (it's not clear to me that people's partner preferenes are super-legible from their profiles), but it's a great idea
if they're expecting the profile to be seen more by potential matchmakers than potential partners, that'd probably shift the incentives around what they choose to make legible.
This got discussed on Reddit a few weeks ago. (https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/173yxi3/can_a_dating_app_that_doesnt_suck_be_built_lets/) Here were my suggestions:
What I would advocate is the ability to only initiate one conversation per day.
The reason swiping apps took off is that women don't want to get spammed with messages the moment they join an app. To prevent this, apps started requiring both parties to indicate interest before anyone could message. The problem is that this incentivizes superficial evaluations. Why take the time to read someone's profile if you're probably not going to match anyway? The winning move is to rate as many profiles as possible as quickly as possible. Most apps won't even let you write a decent profile and cut you off after a couple of paragraphs.
My proposal is that you ditch the swiping system altogether and limit people to sending one opening message per day (with unlimited messaging once there is a response). This incentivizes viewing lots of profiles and choosing the person you most want to connect with. If you're a shallow person, you can still choose based on appearance, but if you value personality more, you can choose based on profile. This incentivizes reading profiles and, crucially, incentivizes writing good profiles. It also gives people an opportunity to give personalized information in an opening message that they wouldn't necessarily include in their public profile. I'd also include a "save for later" option where you can bookmark a profile to message tomorrow.
From a business perspective, this also works because (a) even if you start with a small user base, people can still probably find a handful of profiles they like, so they won't run out of profiles like they do on other apps; and (b) it keeps people coming back every day. Mobile games use this model and it seems to get people coming back. You could also charge people to initiate extra conversations. If the price is right, it's still a credible signal of interest.
Other thoughts:
if you want to keep gender ratios roughly equal, why not just do that directly? Just limit the amount of active hetero men to 130% or so of the number of active women interested in men.
definitely do the old OkCupid thing of having lots of questions and, importantly, allowing people to choose for themselves which questions to weight highly (and allowing them to submit their own questions). I've seen lots of complaints about dating apps, and universally people are like "I wish old OkCupid was still around"
please have a web interface! One of the reasons profiles and messages suck these days is because apps make you type them on your phone. Let people use real keyboards!
give people the option to do a 3D body-scan. Phones can do this easily now. You don't want this to be mandatory, but it would be neat to give people the option to credibly display a 3D model of their body to potential matches.
something that would be an absolute killer app, though I'm not sure if the tech is there yet, is the option to have an AI set up a date for you. Just tell it when you're available, how far you're willing to travel, and what types of places you're willing to go, and it can contact other people who've opted in to the system and set up a date with minimal effort on both people's parts. You just tell it "set me up a date for Friday evening" and then it does the rest. It shows you a location, time, and profile of your date, and you just click yes or no.
Hey Wesley — these are great ideas, many of which we are planning to already implement (e.g. web-first). Thanks for these.
If you have more ideas / want to talk, please email me shreedashreeda at gmail dot com.
I have my own opinion regarding spamming, which is that the current system is actually bad for both parties because women feel swamped but men feel like they are swiping into the void. My initial reaction is to divide users into seekers (who swipe on profiles) and choosers (who select from people who swiped on them) depending on their gender and gender preference. Women would be universal seekers that can swipe on everyone, while men are universal choosers in that anyone can swipe on them. This replicates a more natural environment where the girl "hints" to the guy that their approach won't be rejected and then the guy makes the opening. This has a bootstrapping issue, but it can build network effects by using recommender systems on seeker choices by tracking metrics such as chooser response rate, conversation initiation and frequency, and reporting of date count and quality, which could eventually solve the other issue women often find of "no quality men available".
To elaborate, I feel that fears of the AI girlfriend future are overblown, because there really is enormous potential for AI matchmakers assuming that the bootstrapping and incentive issues are solved.
A lot of this has to do with incorporating skeuomorphic design into the dating apps. Aside from recreating the hint -> approach system, you can have the app "wingman" profiles by having an LLM describe why they are recommending any particular profile. Similarly, it can act as a friend to emotionally dump on or by providing basic relationship counselling, which has the benefit of generating training data at the same time for which profiles to recommend. If you do it right, rather than using different apps (Tinder for hookups, Hinge for long-term, etc), you could actually have the user change what they are looking for (short/long, monog/poly), and the app should be able to recommend good profiles based on others with similar profiles who have made similar switches.
bumble might be the app for you!
Additional consideration for Questions: Make it clear to whoever writes the questions, especially if they are user-submitted, that questions should be about the person being asked, and not about their perfect match. This could probably be done as easily as giving a preview page with both sides of the question before submitting.
I really hated having to slog through poorly-framed questions, where instead of a useful question like:
"How many fingers do you have?"
[ ] More than one
[O] One
[ ] None
(Indicating you have one finger.)
Your ideal partner would answer:
[X] More than one
[X] One
[X] None
(Indicating you don't care how many your ideal partner has.)
...
You got practically worthless questions like:
"How many fingers does your ideal partner have?"
[O] More than one
[ ] One
[ ] None
(You don't really care, but you can only select one option and more-than-one is the most common so sure why not.)
Your ideal partner would answer:
[ ] More than one
[X] One
[ ] None
(Suggestive of the truth that you only have one finger, but now matches you highest with people who have a weird fetish for one-fingered people, and crucially, does not downgrade matches with people who specifically do not want one-fingered dates at a higher rate than people who, like you, just checked the first option by default.)
Just one persepective: There is a fairly new German Dating App called Blind Mate that has spread around quite a bit in my friend group. The idea: Your friends fill out your questions, and they search for matches for you. It incentivises engagement with a point system. i think it's cool because it adds this social component. I have more fun swiping for friends than swiping for myself. I think it also levels the male/female right-swipe ratio somewhat, since you can have male and female friends swiping for you.
The app has a nice advert effect in that I got incentivised to get friends of mine on it, since more friends mean more swipes (the number of swipes you can do a day is limited). These friends then started using it themselves.
I've never seen an advert for it, it was just in the list of apps in the playstore and looked interestign, as I was searching for more niche apps.
Just wanted to give this as an example of a recent app that got off the ground through a decent idea :)
Doesn't Manifold basically accomplish something like this? (Others bet on matches instead.)
I don't know how much other people want to be objectified / seen as a "product" themselves. I think much of the current dating culture of having your friends swipe for you is coming from a place of cope / swipe fatigue / boredom / unseriousness.
mhm, I doubt that something as complicated as manifold will ever become popular, among non-rationalists.
I personally don't share that impression of unseriousness letting your friends swipe for you. I agree swipe fatigue is actually an issue, but I think that is tackled by friend-swipes somewhat. I don't react as emotional if swiping for friends and find it thus less tiring. If I swipe for myself and find someone that I really would like to match and then it doesn't happen, it's a negative emotional reaction from me, contributing to swipe fatigue.
That actually makes sense. I just dislike the swipe protocol entirely and think we can do something better!
I agree very much with that, we can definitely do better! :)
I thought a fair amount about how to get ore users (especially women) on an App like that. I really would love to see this succeed! Here are some of my thoughts, maybe they are helpful.
1) Partner with events: Get some kind of code if you are on a certain event that lets people match with others on this event. E.g. a summercamp, a concert, a tantric healing workshop or so. Especially women might be interested in poeple going to similar events as they are, since men cannot easily spam attending all these events. Also it's a good filter for similar interest, and you might meet up at the event without a lot of hassle. Partnering with certain events might spread it into niches that helps expand the app.
2) Introduce some kind of social aspect that incentivises people to get friends on the app as well. I explain this idea in an example a bit more in a separate comment.
3) Definitely make it appealing design wise, the mechanism, the interface, etc. I think especially women care for that. A lot of these alternative dating apps look a bit autistic, and some are put off by that. Even from the theme and name, I would rather choose something holistic/wholesome than tech focused. If the algorithm is clever, this will spread amongst men regardless whether it's a big focus theme-wise.
4) I think big cities are a good place to start with promotion and marketing. I actually searched for niche apps, since I live in a big city (Berlin), and am not competitive on mainstream dating apps, where the pool is just too large and the top percentage you have to break to get matches is too small. This effect might appeal more to men than to women. But remember that the value of a new user is proportional to the value of the users present, given that they are in the same location.
5) Don't make it overwhelming to start using the app with too many questions to fill out etc. I sometimes just wanted to explore what using the app feels like and there was a barrier of answering many hard questions about everything and that ended up turning me off. Rather, make the entry really easy and give the option to continuously expand your profile with more information. Maybe add some gamification that incentivises this + match making.
6) I think that the donations based model can actually have some unique draws. E.g., most apps are annoying because they constantly aim to bait you into spending money on them by restricting features you really want to use. I would love to donate something to the app, if I don't get the feeling that I'm being suckered. Possibly allow for human matchmaking and the option to tip the person (and the app) if they did a good job? So people who are a bit bad at presenting themselves online can get the help from someone socially versed (I think esp. women might enjoy this) to set up their profile and match them. There might be social niches around certain people that are very good at this.
7) Creative guerilla marketing in big cities can be quite the boost. Sometimes random stickers that advertised dating apps caught my attention. This is probably not as expensive, just hire some people to put these stickers at places where cool/young people hang out.
8) Getting endorsements from "queer" spaces might be helpful. I am adjacent to that bubble and not only do they seem to constantly dating (and talking about it), in my impression the queer community gives off vibes that make women feel safer. Probably this is because it just follows a not so heterosexual dynamic of them feeling as prey. Maybe have some shtick of being especially queer friendly in some way that allows you to be advertised in these spaces. I think most apps already try to do that, the opinion of someone in these spaces might be more helpful.
Hope that helps!
Feel free to reach out to me if you want to discuss any of these points more.
Yooo what's your email?
st.wald@live.de
just sent an email :)
I'd potentially be interested in implementing #2 (PGS scores). I have previously applied educational attainment PGS scores to 1k genomes data, though I'm not a geneticist (I'm a data scientist/software engineer). My sense is that getting this up and running for 23andme data would be pretty easy, but I'm somewhat less clear about the data currently available from embryo testing companies (so I would need to look into that).
Perhaps including other PGS aside from edu attainment, e.g. for autism, could be useful as well. Also, I notice someone else raised concerns about within-group pop strat (fine-grained ancestry) confounding in the existing PGS scores, but I think that's a somewhat over-rated concern given the PCA controls that are generally included (a more likely concern would be bias from genetic nuture).
If you're still interested in working on this, please reach out to me: morewronger@gmail.com
On the topic of dating apps, three notes:
1) It might be interesting to explore a pricing model like "Free, except if you continue dating for a year, you pay $250; if you get married, you pay $1000." While obviously hard to enforce, I think this aligns the incentives for the app and for the users towards creating good matches that last. $1000 is a lot to pay up front, but a small amount to pay if I've found the love of my life.
2) I am a person who is allergic to dogs and cats and can never date someone who lives with one or the other. This is currently an impossible ask in the current dating market, let alone on dating apps where you can't filter by those. I would honestly pay for petfree dating.
3) I would suggest launching in a specific market first. I believe Hinge did this? That way you need fewer total users for the app to be functional for those users..
Commented below but we're working with a small team to work on something like this. I agree about incentive alignment in principle but hard to enforce. Is there a specific market you recommend? The issue with certain markets like "TPOT" is that they're way too small and give others who might want to join a bit of an ick.
I'm not sure what you mean by the last sentence. I meant a market area like Boston or Chicago.
Re: incentive alignment, I believe even a single-digit percentage of users paying (and a nudge one year after users stop using the app) would be a viable goal. Whether this alone can pay for the app's development is an open question, of course!
Enforcement might be the wrong way to think about it. Lots of people willingly pay for stuff they could easily get away with taking for free, if doing so is reasonably convenient and they feel like they've been treated fairly.
If you want a low-effort way to coerce freeloaders, though, could simply threaten to send a message about fact that they haven't paid to whoever your algorithm thinks is on the other end of that relationship, insinuating that it shows lack of sincere commitment. DeBeers raked in plenty of cash through similar emotional blackmail without even bothering to personalize. Wouldn't work if both parties are in perfect agreement about the decision and reasoning behind it, but in that case you're most likely trying to squeeze blood from a turnip regardless.
I'd be interested in #2, but I'm not in a good position to do this on my own (because I'm a CS/economics/data science student with no genomics experience whatsoever). However, I think my programming and statistics experience may be useful on the project. Anyone else want to collaborate with me on this?
I'm interested, although I'm not sure how much I can commit at the moment. I have a comment above with my thoughts on #2 and an email.
Great list - I would love to help take on #2! Previously done some self-directed work on a generic PGS upload & analysis website project, hence moderately familiar with some of the components that go into this, though I would definitely want support / advice from seasoned academic bioinformaticians in the wider GWAS world. I'd actually kept thinking recently about how one would get more direct IQ - genotype data (as opposed to EA) at scale for a better "selector", so to me it's funny timing that you mentioned it!
Interested on your thoughts on how to get more direct genotype - IQ data. Would you mind sharing them? kakyo083@gmail.com
I would also be interested in hearing if you have any good ideas about how to get more phenotype-genotype pairs for intelligence. You can reach me at morewronger@gmail.com
Dating explicit sites are awful. The best site to facilitate dating that I've seen is a French site called onvasortir.com. It's not actually for dating but more like an open meetup.com. I toyed with the idea of making an ovs like site for North America but I can't stand web development.
This makes me wonder - what if there were a dating site where instead of browsing profiles, you proposed dates and people could opt into the date? You'd say, I want to go to X place at X time, and someone could see it on a map (if they're within your sex/gender/age range) and if they're interested they can say, let's do this. That might be an interesting hybrid between the two ideas.
Given discussion elsewhere about a matchmaker-centric arrangement, perhaps there could be a setup where a lot of analysis and sorting happens behind the scenes, but neither party to the date learns anything substantial about the other until they meet in person - just time, place, and some sort of (possibly smartphone-based) recognition token.
re: #7
I think I have pretty good insight on why all new buildings look like smooth blobs. I'm a design student, have spent 100's of hours studying form development. When I look at the AI generated frank gehry my first reaction is "wow, that's a pretty cool building". It seems like spending 100's of hours studying form development and such perhaps makes you think that really sophisticated blobs are the way to go. This is a problem because most people have not spent the time training their brains to recognize really sophisticated blobs and prefer classic architecture.
Over the past 100 years or so architects have gone from rich dudes who were unusually good at drawing and had basically the same taste as everyone else to design students who have spent 1000 hours trying to draw increasingly sophisticated blobs to score a chance at getting into a top architecture firm, and no longer have the same aesthetic taste as everyone else. Architects also gradually changed from being service people to being artists, who think they know more then their clients and impose their preferred artistic vision on whatever projects they work on.
Even if architects now have increasingly differing aesthetic tastes from everyone else, why gravitate towards sophisticated blobs? it could be that it's a basic quirk of human psychology that you prefer more basic shapes if you think about it for an unusual amount of time. Alternatively, this could be basically a trapped prior issue. Architects are all taught by architects, once 51% of architecture teachers prefer sophisticated blobs, you get a death spiral.
As to how you could get to 51% of architects preferring modern styles, it's probably a combination of economic incentives and projects shifting from client led to architect led. Classic architecture requires 100's of skilled crafts people for the elaborate bricklaying, engraving, etc. Architects are trained in form development not bricklaying, so the buildings they design are going to gravitate towards being dominated by one or two pleasing forms, not the 1000's of small details that compose classic cathedrals.
My different guess was that when you seen a small model of a modern architecture creation from above, it looks nice, but it sucks if you are a small human in front of it. While instead old buildings tried to look nice to people beneath them. What do you think about this hypothesis?
Strongly agree, this seems basically in line with what I was thinking about. The bulk of the artistic work shifted from skilled craftsman working at a human scale on the building itself to a few architects standing above a scale model.
Tom Wolfe wrote a good book called "From Bauhaus to Our House" covering the history of why all new buildings look like smooth blobs. My interpretation, given his history plus what I know of the rest of art history, is that it's just one more case of an artistic medium being destroyed by the modernist demand to burn everything down, start from scratch, never make anything that the public likes, and never use any elements in an artwork which were effective in the past (because they're "played out", "bourgeois", etc.) We saw the same thing in painting, sculpture, orchestral composition, and fiction.
In architecture, this manifested as the doctrine that a new architecture must be made that is for the proletariat: cheap to produce, and lacking all bourgeois affectations. "Bourgeois affectations" meant anything nice, because only the bourgeois like nice things. For instance, eaves to keep the rain off you when you're standing in front of your door are nice; therefore, no eaves. Sloped roofs that shed rain and snow are nice; therefore, no sloped roofs, no matter how many buildings in northern climates collapse.
He did not cover the loss of understanding of materials and structural engineering among architects, which had been the core of architecture in the 13th century CE, but had vanished by the time modernists were making concrete buildings that crack, break, or fall down in the 1940s.
This seems like a rather cynical interpretation of art history. Maybe I am just being naive, but I am skeptical that architects were sitting around thinking about how to make buildings worse. The Bauhaus school had a well documented epistemology which did not include "take away nice things" (although what I am referencing mostly addressed their pedagogical style so). That being said, they were accused of being communists so they might have wanted to take away nice things. Thanks for the book recommendation
It never begins as "take away nice things", but with the demand to "make it new", which always turns out to mean throw out the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years and start over from scratch, scrupulously avoiding anything that looks like anything that came before. This was done explicitly and intentionally in banning harmony from 20th century orchestral music, banning beauty and representation from painting, and banning sentiment, suspension of disbelief, entertainment, and happy endings from fiction. Operationally, this is indistinguishable from "take away all the nice things."
In literature, the idea was articulated early by Ezra Pound, and quickly devastated poetry; but some valuable elements of fiction held out long past the 1920s, because the masses pay for fiction and want nice things. More individual story components were thrown out one by one over decades, perhaps starting with story structure and plot (think /Ulysses/, and anything by Pynchon), until we ended up with eg the 20th-century New Yorker / literary magazine short story, which must have no plot, no crisis, no action, no cognitive challenge, no resolution, no compelling characters, and no theme other than the dreariness of life. There were many attempts to replace the old story elements with something else, e.g., disruption in Shklovsky, ironic reworking of a myth in /Ulysses/, collage in “The Waste Land”, word games in /Finnegan's Wake/, randomness in William Burroughs, shock in the beat poets, meta-textual references in Borges and Nabokov, places as characters in Calvino, montage in magical realism, and irony everywhere all the time; but none of these ever caught on with the public.
I think the OP’s comment implicitly answers the arguments made here. While Phil argues that artists hate beauty and don’t like nice things, Tristan’s post actually tries to explain *why* tastes of artists who have spent 1000s of hours invested in various design philosophies may differ from the lay person–their core audience–instead of just assuming that it’s because artists literally hate the general public and its cultural traditions.
These claims imply a breathtaking level of conspiracy in all manners of social movements that are on face false because of their jaw-dropping universality. Any artistic movements is just part of one swatch of a tapestry containing incredible diverse art made across a global scale. Many artists dedicated to their movement can appreciate the work of others outside it, and given the cliche anti-authority position that many artists take–few would deign to “ban” or force all other artists to comply with their style.
Obviously no one banned harmony from 20th century orchestral music. No one has the power to do something like this, and even if they did, they clearly failed: there is so much great harmonic orchestral music from the 20th century from composers like Copeland and others that this… cannot be argued in good faith? You will certainly also find beauty and representation in all eras of painting, and sentiment, suspension of disbelief, entertainment, and happy endings from fiction books written through this very year.
I'm not "arguing" that artists hate beauty. I'm recounting the historical fact that many of the most-important painters and musical composers of the early 20th century explicitly called for discarding what had been done before them. This was not a case of them developing refined tastes; it was a case of revolutionary ardor which demanded all things be made new. Other artists disagreed; but on the whole, the destructionists won.
You can still find beautiful paintings, and stories with happy endings; but if you read the theory that rules the academy today, you will find the most-influential theorists renounced beauty, and the most-influential critics and magazine editors today renounce sentiment and happy endings.
Even if this were true, I think my original thesis stands. I do not believe that architects are making ugly buildings on purpose. I have talked to many of them, I think they try hard to make beautiful things, they just have a different sense of beauty for the previously mentioned reasons.
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
Here is a company carving statues with robots.
Relevant to 7.
https://twitter.com/Monumental_Labs
Edit: Second company
https://www.robotor.it/about/
Monumental Labs looks neat. The robots carve the statues out most of the way, and then human artists finish it with the fine details. This seems to me to be an excellent application of technology: the robots appear to be automating the boring work that apprentices would have done in days of old. I can imagine this greatly increasing the productivity of any particular talented sculptor.
These are great, thanks for pointing them out!
I wonder if there's an interesting economic story here: in the past, elaborate and beautiful architecture was one of the few ways that the wealthy could signal their wealth/importance or honour a deity, and there was a large, affordable supply of high- and low-skilled labour to create it.
Now, demand is lower because (among other things?) the wealthy have more options to achieve similar ends, so the the market has fallen apart. But the demand is still there from the inhabitants and tourists that enjoy them, albeit at a lower price, so perhaps some form of AI-aided supply can meet the price to make it possible again?
The architectural and sculpture designs that these robots use seem to me like an unusually well suited use-case for generative AI: a) there is a massive dataset of 'prior art', b) it is elaborate and time-consuming to do by hand, c) the required skills are likely not widely available anymore, and d) there is still plenty of unexplored possibility-space available from simply mixing styles (e.g. similar to the many architectural revival styles).
In any case if anyone is putting together folks interested in 7. I'd be happy to be included!
Digital 3d modeling already has a huge speedup over stone carving.
And there are already lots of out of copyright old statues we can just copy.
Or, we can use laser scanners, and have some actor pose.
And 3d modeling skills are fairly widely used for computer games/movies/3d printing.
So while AI could be used, we don't really need it.
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
On #4, I'm a bit of a language head myself, and I don't think it's more efficient than the standard way of learning a language. Honestly, syntax rules and untranslatable language particles are the easiest things to learn - you can do it in, like, a week. The hard things to penetrate in a language are overall sentence architecture relating to sense (this is where variance in the ability of pro translators comes into play) and vocabulary (this is mostly practice). The former stands above simple syntax because, especially in a narrative work (or conversation), you need a general context for how the language orders and responds to information in the abstract. Also, your example uses the same sentence over and over, where the find and replace is clear, but in a long (and especially a culturally important work, which tend to be complex) you might stutter just as much as you would learning grammar and starter vocab and just reading the full thing in the language. The real problem I think with popular language learning is that it's tailored to people who A. aren't particularly serious and B. want results straight away. The tendency of focusing on ways tourists communicate wastes a lot of time.
> overall sentence architecture relating to sense
Can you give an example to clarify what this means? It sounds like "grammar" to me.
It's essentially grammar, but in comparing two languages there are some emergent factors regarding linguistic sense and focus that I think get missed with this method. For instance: essential vs accidental attributes and use of ser/estar in spanish, the french use of gerunds mostly to express simultaneity of action between two verbs, the placement of location descriptions in mandarin chinese sentenced based on whether the verb is static (before the verb) or dynamic (after the verb). Especially regarding something like mandarin where sentences are full units that tend to order logically from known to unknown/received information, I don't think these architectural qualities are clear with his method. If anything, you spend less time in practice interpeting them.
#2
I've looked into doing this myself. I think the project as currently formulated is valuable, but unlikely to accelerate research.
Here are my current unorganized thoughts:
1. The raw data for making EA polygenic predictors is locked behind various institutional barriers (i.e. you need to be a tenured professor to even ask for UK biobank access), so open-source people are limited to using summary stats of the latest EA GWAS's. But even the summary stats aren't being released in full for the latest EA GWAS's, case in point being EA4, which releases only the top 10,000 SNP betas as far as I remember in their PGS model, which is also likely where you got the (incorrect?) 25% variance explained from (EA4 paper says, "explains 12–16% of EA variance."). 3-5 points of IQ gain seems like an optimistic calculation for open-source because of this, and the fact that there's frequently problems with implantation/viability).
2. I think using said GWAS summary stats for your own PGS is already implemented at pgscatalog.org. There seems to be a workflow for scoring your own genotype data using the available GWAS's in the catalog. EA is available here, but due to reasons stated above, the avilable PGS weights aren't very good. Of course, this is far from layman-usable, so making an interface would be helpful I think (in particular, I think a slider adjusting how much you value various traits would be useful).
3. An even more high-value project might be to collect high-quality genotype-IQ data independently (1 million data points is an estimate of what's needed), or find contacts in existing biobanks amenable to sharing their data/listening to suggestions of what phenotypes to measure (asking directly for IQ would be difficult, but even adding a few mildly g-loaded items could provide a large increase in signal as opposed to just EA).
After saying all that, if anyone is planning on working on #2, I'd be willing to provide any help I can, although I'm not a specialist in this area. Contact me at kakyo083@gmail.com (not my personal email - i'd prefer to remain at least somewhat anonymous - so it might take a bit for me to read anything).
I thought that in EA4, they had a full PGS model with >10k SNPs which explains 12-16%, after which they released the top 10k SNP betas which in total explain less than 12-16%. If I'm reading you correctly, are you saying that a model using the 10k SNPs has a variance explained of 12-16%? I skimmed back through the EA4 paper and their best result, 17%, comes from this: "We found that a PGI generated from ~2.5 million pruned common SNPs using the software SBayesR (ref. 22) is more predictive than our LDpred PGI. It explains 17.0% of the variance in EduYears..."
As for higher variance explained figures, Scott said 25% in reference to individual EA, which is inaccurate as far as I know, although 25% would make sense for SNP heritability.
Interesting. I'll have to reread the paper. Is there a quick quote where they say 4k?
As far as 4k, I was just rounding the 3,952 genome-wide significant SNPS. But actually I just double-checked the paper, and the PGS from those lead SNPs only explained 7% - 9.1% (not 12-16% as I had thought, which did likely involve a larger set of SNPs via LDpred). Sorry about that!
Here's a quote: "A PGI constructed using only genome-wide-significant SNPs has an incremental R2 of 9.1% in Add Health and 7.0% in HRS"
That makes more sense to me; it'd be surprising to have so little gain from adding more than 4k SNPs into a predictor. Thanks for the clarification!
What genome upload services do people know of (esp open source or open source adjacent)? I of course am aware of promethease.com for cheap reports, but I can only assume there are some interesting platforms that analyze specialty information from a genome.
Question is adjacent to #2
opensnp.org has data available for free.
#4 - I have a vague memory of reading a language-learning book like this, many years ago. But I can't remember the non-English language involved. (Also, people seem to hate having 汉字 in the middle of English sentences ... but if there is enough self-selection maybe it will work.)
#8 - as I see it, there are basically three approaches for political change in America these days. For one approach, you need a seven-figure lobbying budget. For the second approach, you need a copy of Saul Alinsky's book "Rules for Radicals". And the third approach requires a lot of lawyers.
> “Educational attainment” (EA) ... and IQ correlate well enough that it’s rarely worth examining them separately.
Is that really true, especially in the context of finding polygenic predictors? This seem dubious to me. In particular, EA seems like it would be more subject to environmental effects than IQ. There is enough noise in finding massively polygenic predictors that it seems like you really wouldn't want to inject more noise by using such a proxy. There is an increased risk of losing or mistaking signal.
I bet they come apart at the tails, but they're close enough for most practical purposes.
My grouch here is that this is a crude measure of "a PhD is better than a master's; a master's is better than an undergraduate degree; a degree is better than high school; high school is better than dropping on" and so on, and yes, broadly that's true.
It's when you get into "a degree is a degree" that you hit trouble, because I don't think most people on here would accept that "a degree in English Lit is the same as a degree in Electrical Engineering", but on the crude measure of EA both are equally valid. So if you want a Smart Baby, you may end up with "great at English Lit" but not "going to get a high paying job as a quant" or whatever and I think when people are maximising for IQ this way, they intend (whether conscious of it or not) "my kid will be successful in life, which means earning tons of money, which means they need to be smart".
You can be smart and poor, you can be "only high school but made a fortune with a motor dealership" and so on:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/angelauyeung/2017/10/19/high-school-billionaires-2017-forbes-400/?sh=36e786163262
"Diane Hendricks dreamed of going to the city and wearing a suit. Then she got pregnant and gave birth one month before her 18th birthday. She had to finish her high school studies at home. Three years later, she met and married a contractor who was a high school dropout. Together, they founded roofing distributor ABC Supply (he died in 2007). Today she is now ranked 122 among The Forbes 400, worth $4.9 billion."
But IQ tests have a verbal and a non-verbal component -- sort of like the American SAT, which gives a math score and a verbal score. Of course scores for the 2 kinds of smarts are fairly highly correlated, but not so highly correlated it makes sense to think of them as measures of the same thing. And people high on verbal skills *are* smart. You pick it up quickly when you talk with them. They grasp what you say quickly. They are good at expressing complex ideas and making subtle distinctions. If you give them something to read about a novel and complicated subject, say the structure of the Icelantic language or how perspective is represented in Japanese art they will be pretty quick to take in the info. If they are managers they will communicate well with employees. If they're in sales they'll be pretty sharp about how to word the ads. Etc. It's probably true that verbal smarts without math & spacial smarts are less likely to lead to wealth than math smarts without verbal smarts, but verbal smarts are a real thing. YOU have a lot of verbal smarts. Surely you get that.
I dunno about that, polygenic predictors are hard enough to identify without having a blurry measure of what they're predicting. Maybe identifying predictors of intelligence via a search for predictors of educational attainment is sort of like wanting directions to New York, but asking google maps for directions to the nearest really big city. If you're near New York anyhow that will often get you to New York, but some of the time google might decide a city that's only pretty big on your mental scale counts as a big city, and send you to fucking Hartford.
Related to #7 (classical architecture), there are regulatory and cost reasons for building ugly concrete blocks. In a nutshell, it's easy to prove that your building won't fall down if it uses "standard" modern materials and designs. There's off-the-shelf software for that kind of thing.
Anyone interested in this, I'd recommend looking up the work of John Ochsendorf. He's an MIT researcher who develops methods and algorithms for making masonry buildings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfAYSra5JbA
Our civilization used to have the implicit knowledge of how to make very strong and durable shapes based on simple physical laws (e.g. catenary arches and vaults). The trend of modern architecture goes in the opposite direction, leaving the heavy lifting up to incredibly strong materials arranged in simple to industrialize but not particularly optimal shapes.
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
Just to pitch my idea for a dating app that I would probably never build (I do need a summer job if someone wants to spend 8K getting me to spend my summer on it), but in case people are interested in discussing such designs:
I generally am dubious of dating apps, and tend to think that dating happens more via social networking than the artificial environment. I also think that people are more likely to accept something recommended by a friend, and their standards for friends are lower than their friends' standards for themselves.
So my pitch is: do larger bios (hinge style), but you can't like people yourself, you can only recommend profiles to friends. So basically you and a friend go through and send eachother people; you can directly accept a recommendation (which then puts you in the person you liked friends' queues). You could perhaps also opt to chat with someone before referring them to a friend (showing them the friend you were thinking about referring them to) for pre-screening.
I think that the idea would have a pretty good chance of failing instantly, but I think that it gets you closer to the way that real-world dating often works
On dating apps: the mechanism design should include a way to VIP-track people who read profiles carefully, write thoughtful messages, behave well on dates, and treat their relationships responsibly (i.e. don’t ghost). Those are the folks users want to meet and hear from, and they’re rendered illegible/non-credible when legacy apps dilute them into an ocean of “peers” who fail the criteria above. I wonder if the “good user” status could be crowdsourced by collecting multiple-choice feedback on messages and scheduled/completed dates. A successful design here would offer some hope to the highest-character AMABs in particular, who are presently devalued, dismissed, and abused by their prospects with an almost universal consistency, despite stepping up in every way at once and offering them what the platform is supposed to deliver.
I thought Steve Hsu's company offered something very close to 2 for IVF couples.. But, why the damn obsession with EA? Why not try to predict lifetime happiness/satisfaction. It's likely to be less heavily selected for and make a much bigger difference in life quality!
I don't think Steve's company does intelligence in particular for political reasons. Even if it did, that would be the closed-source version of the thing I want to open source.
I haven't seen good studies showing that life satisfaction is genetic. If it was, I think it would be a good target, although it would be mostly internal rather than having positive externalities for the rest of society (unless it did - I'm actually not sure how to think about that).
Re: satisfaction I presume what you'd actually be eliciting is the generic component of happiness set point. But worst case scenario you just end up pulling out some other signal (like being conscientious or smart or whatever) that indirectly leads to a good life.
I don't remember if they released that screening (I think you may be right) but I'm pretty sure Steve wrote a paper describing how they were able to use ML to predict EA and has a number of YouTube videos discussing how he got it to work. I suspect those offer a pretty good blueprint to get this thing working.
I suspect that the big barrier is access to a large collection of records for an open-source style project. I fear that any database will want some kind of corporate form to reassure them about privacy of records etc.
--
I'd add that I'm a mathematician who worked for a bit at google on machine learning related stuff (tho my expertise lies in logic) and someone else lines up the data part of the project lined I'd be willing to contribute.
Putting in a vote here, as I do on many of these threads, for selecting for low propensity for violence and high empathy. Have been reading the research on heritability of these traits, and it seems promising. It seems to me that increasing the number of people with either of both of these traits would lead to better quality of life for humankind. It would, for instance, reduce the chance of elected leaders being monsters, and of situations like Israel-Palestine developing to the point that there's no fixing them.
I'd add the whole way this works is by finding genes that indirectly contribute to some outcome by unknown means. Unless you believe that nothing about your innate features affects lifetime happiness you should be able to find a signal (even if it's just via avoiding chronic pain or being pretty).
So it seems strictly more desierable to optimize for that if you can get the data.
Isn't it enough to believe that it is easier to affect the usual issues with measuring happiness (anxious to be seen complaining or whatever) than the worth-altering part?
What about coming at it from the other direction, and selecting against risk of depression? I know many extremely smart people, not all of them my psychotherapy patients, whose smarts have mostly gone to waste because they are chronically unhappy, anhedonic, self-critical, self-doubting, anxious and unmotivated -- in other words depressed. If you reduced the population level of depression not only would you have happier human beings, you'd have more available IQ points -- because there wouldn't be so many smart people wearing lead boots.
Fortunately, depression risk is something you can already select against! Genomic Prediction includes risk of depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in their health index weighted by the absolute risk of each in the embryo and the reduction in quality-adjusted lifespan associated with each disorder.
They also give line-item reports for each disease, so you can even re-weight them using your own personal beliefs about the importance of each disorder if you wish.
When I was in training some people at the psych hospital where I worked did a modest-sized but impressive study of the traits of first degree relatives of people with bipolar illness. Those who did not have the disorder themselves were markedly higher in creativity -- and by that I don't mean they were artistic, I mean they were original and fluent in their thinking. They could think of more uses for a brick in 5 mins. than other subjects could. And in their hobbies and work they got higher ratings for originality from judges blind to their status -- even if their business was owning a drug store, the relatives of bipolars were more likely to come up with some original twist on how to do that well.
I don't know whether their findings have held up. But if so, we should maybe think twice about reducing now much of the genes for bipolar are in the population. Finding better treatment for those who have the disorder might make more sense.
I have a friend with bipolar in his family, and he is the wittiest, funniest person I ever met. He starts riffing, and takes the subject in all kinds of directions you'd never think to take it, and connects it with things you'd never think to connect it to but it's apt. And the one-liners!
Yeah, this is more or less why I think we should just throw all the traits we can into the polygenic index. It seems very likely to me that there is some genetic overlap between the sets, but that not every gene that increases creativity increases bipolar or vice-versa.
Ideally whatever selector we use would balance those two traits against one another, which would disproporionately select for creativity genes that don't increase bipolar risk and against bipolar disk genes that don't increase creativity.
The problem is biobanks don't want to do the research for this. There is shockingly little research into personality in the field of genetics. The best predictors for the big five personality traits explain like 1 or 2% of the variance.
I think the big 5 traits are too general. Seems to me you'd get better heritability selecting for smaller things that are clearly important contributors to someone's proneness to a certain kind of good or bad behavior. Here's a well-thought-of-test for "Cognitive Empathy"--ability to accurately perceive other's emotional state.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/he-assets-prod/interactives/233_reading_the_mind_through_eyes/Launch.html
Read something yesterday about its heritability. Can't remember what the figure was, but it was not tiny. (And by the way, scores of this test are a bit correlated with IQ, but not very.)
What about selecting against violence and for empathy? These tweaks seem much more likely to help with, say, the Israel-Palestine situation than a few extra IQ points. As for measuring violence and empathy, there is a very well-respected test of what's called Cognitive Empathy -- the ability to accurately read other's feelings (separate from resonating to them, as one does in emotional empathy). It's called the Eyes Test, and you can actually take it on Amazon for some reason. https://s3.amazonaws.com/he-assets-prod/interactives/233_reading_the_mind_through_eyes/Launch.html
Like lots of things, it correlates with intelligence, but the correlation is actually very modest.
Have been reading around about heritability of violence. Lots of studies use criminal convictions as a measure of propensity for violence, but here's one that used both observer report and actual behavioral observation to measure in small children 2 predictors of "callous-unemotional" behaviors. Predictors are fearlessness and lack of affiliativeness, measured as early as age 2. Adoption studies show a correlation with scores of biological mother: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/heritable-temperament-pathways-to-early-callousunemotional-behaviour/DBC0164057571E9A3B0BB1763EC103E2
Hmm, interesting. Though while I like the idea of selecting for empathy I'm much less sold on the idea of selecting for non-violence. I mean, it seems like the most obvious ways you might be less likely to be violent could be via some negative traits like lower ambition.
Also, I strongly suspect that proclivity for not engaging in criminal violence might well anti-correlate with not engaging in war style violence (eg ppl who are especially willing to sacrifice themselves for their tribe might be more likely to do war).
Well, in the study I linked to, they weren't targeting violence precisely. They were targeting what they called "callous-unemotional behavior" -- basically, not being a bit bothered by harming others. You could call it sociopathy. So these are people who as adults would not be distressed by scamming a grandmother out of her life savings or by knocking out somebody's teeth. Seems like a good measure to me. If your measure of violence or sociopathy is conviction for crimes you'll have a fair number of people in the mix whose crimes were victimless or at least not particularly callous, plus some who stole or whatever out of sheer desperation. Also, somebody callous would not be willing to sacrifice themselves to for their tribe, so we keep those people out of the pool too.
Neither of the 2 traits they were measuring in kids the measures that predicted callous-unemotional behaviors when older seem bad by themselves. Non-affiliativeness --OK, so introverts. Lack of fear: Chuck Yeager was unable to feel fear. Would have taken longer to break the sound barrier without a fearless pilot. There's a famous female rock climber and wingsuit jumper I've been reading about who can't feel fear, and she has a brother who's the same, and is an ER physician.
Ok, yah I agree that might be a desierable thing to select for.
My concern though is that I'm not convinced all parents would *want* to select for that. Once you release that data what if sociopathic parents then select for sociopathic kids?
Well, that's a daunting thought. I have no idea what sociopathic parents' feelings would be about building kids who have their traits. I have seen a number of sociopaths in my work, but the thing about sociopaths is that they are unable or unwilling to disclose their actual thoughts and feelings about anything to you. I don't think they even grasp the concept of sharing their inner life. All their communication is in the service of manipulating the listener, via lies, etc, to think or do certain things that will be to the sociopath's advantage.
It does seem like it would be possible to study this -- though of course not by asking sociopathd whether they want fearless, unaffiliative kids who will grow up to be callous-unemotional adults. You'd have to observe them, or have people who know them well rate them on various scales. This isn't the kind of thing where it makes sense to shoot from the hip and decide against selecting against sociopathic traits -- one needs data! Just did a quick Google Scholar of "sociopathic parents offspring" and saw several links about the abusiveness of sociopathic parents towards their children -- including higher than the baseline rate of sexual abuse. It may be that these people lack the feeling of connection with their kids that makes people hope their kids will be a chip off the old block.
… and if you want a failure mode for selection for empathy, more similar people are easier to empathise to — what will better empathy with in-group imply once there is a toxoplasma drill against the outgroup?
It depends a bit on what you mean by ability to empathize. I was assuming it meant something like the ability to empathize with people who were more different from oneself but you make a good point that looking at strength of empathy could be very dangerous.
I think it is a difference-to-strength function, so you increase strength somewhere; even if it only happens at relatively large differences, you might increase sharpness at some threshold. Or you can extend the range just enough to empathise with entire ingroup excluding approximately all the outgroup.
In any case empathy works best for perceptions people share, and there are cases where perceptions are just alien. Say, when your set point for temperature is radically different, I don't think empathy to unimaginable feelings of the other person (how could anyone be too cold / too hot in here??) is more promising that sympathetic attempts at negotiations.
There are at least 2 kinds of empathy. One is called Cognitive Empathy, and it's the ability to accurately identify what other people are feeling. The Eyes test I linked to earlier is a good measure of that. But knowing how someone else is feeling is different from resonating to it . Resonating is called Emotional Empathy:
You feel a version of what the person is feeling. Unless you have trouble with personal boundaries, resonating to someone's feelings is different from being taken over by their feeling and acting in line with it. You can experience an inner version of somebody's anger without buying into their read of the infuriating incident and their belief that they should take revenge on the person they're angry at.
I think it's a mistake to conflate old architecture with what people want - beauty. The false dichotomy between beautiful classical architecture and ugly modern architecture is false because Modernism is not the only possible way to move forward in architecture.
Academic Modernist art wants to go beyond beauty, question beauty, and so on, but is this the only thing new art could do? If you listen to amateur music and see amateur art, there are tons of beautiful new things. Just avoid the academy and ignore 20th century philosophy (ew).
Look at Chinese Instagram and make a building like that.
I agree it's possible to do new things beautifully; I think "classical" is a good rallying flag for this but I hope it eventually turns into new styles merging the best of old and new (I think Gaudi did a good job of that while he was alive).
Can you link a good Chinese Instagram example?
As far as architecture is concerned, this Facebook group is about reviving human based architecture and reviving classical design styles https://m.facebook.com/groups/Klassisknyproduktion/?ref=share&mibextid=S66gvF
Here's my idea for a dating site. Tinder ranks people based on "desirability," but doesn't show users the data, it's only for internal matchmaking. What people could see their own (but not other peoples') desirability score? This would help mitigate one of the main problem's with modern dating: the tendency to one's own attractiveness.
You'd sign up for the website and, before being allowed to send messages, would be required to answer twenty "which of these two profiles is more desirable?" questions. If a person continues to use the site, they'd have to continue to rank two or three profiles every week or so.
This would suffer from the problem of people using the site "just for the fun of" ranking people without actually intending to date. You could mitigate this by making people pay a nominal fee to use the site, requiring identity verification, and deemphasizing the ratings of people who do not send or respond to messages. You could also limit the number of total rankings people make, so the ratings don't wind up being dominated by a few people who spent years on the site.
I think a lot of people would go "This stupid freakin' site, what do they mean I'm 12 out of 20? I'm a 20 *at least*!" rather than accept what they consider low desirability score (unless you've very depressed and go "yeah, 6 out of 20, I didn't expect anything better, I know I'm useless trash").
I was actually trying to replicate the results for polygenic scores on IQ, because I had a pet theory that polygenic scores weren't being calculated well, and naturally the first step to checking that would be replicating what already exists. I couldn't find a public dataset anywhere though. I switched to looking for one for polygenic scores and any variable of interest, but it seems like everything available is gated and requires academic credentials. If anyone has those credentials and would be willing to share some datasets, or knows where I can find some public ones, I would be interested in trying this.
You can get SNP info here: https://pan.ukbb.broadinstitute.org/
It's not as good as having access to the raw data, but my guess is it's enough to form a halfway decent predictor if you throw in some finemapping using their linkage disequilibrium info.
I'd be interested in building #6 (everything but the frontend html/css/javascript)
On 8: I have worked for ~13 years in various levels of federal politics and been involved with both congressional and executive changes. When I worked as a congressional staffer my office was ranked the most effective legislative office by a (sort of not that rigorous, but not entirely fake) project by political scientists at UVA and Vanderbilt. I’ve also worked in the think tank world. Would be interested in collaborating on this primer if anyone else wants to work on it together.
Where do you live? I hate phone/video calls, but if you're in the Bay it might be worth me meeting you and interviewing you to try to get what you know into a writeable format.
I’m in Chicago. Agree on hating phone/video calls. I don’t have any plans to be in the Bay in the near future. I can answer some of the questions you posed and provide other questions and answers for areas you missed via email, which I saw you left in response to another comment on 8. One meta comment: policy change is typically chaotic, non-linear, and relationship based. A primer may help parties navigate the chaos effectively, but provide limited utility for the relationship building aspect.
Just saw this from the quests and requests follow up email. I'd love to contribute and help. I have some time. My email is everydayemails2@gmail.com and will follow up from there if there is still energy to do something on (8) On A Primer About Political Change
Re: #4, "The Avion My Uncle Flew" by Cyrus Fisher is exactly this. It's a good story anyway, and my son learned a lot of French; the final three pages are French-only. The drawback is that he could only read French by the end, not pronounce it, but it's a really good way to learn the basics without any mental block of "oh, it's a foreign language, it'll be hard and boring."
Just to add the encouragement that #4 is a really good idea, it works, and I don't know why it isn't standard practice, especially for languages that share an alphabet!
Thanks, I've ordered a copy and will check it out!
#4 seems like a variant on graded readers, except instead of mangling Language A until it sort of matches Language B, it's just a book/story (or series of books and stories more often) that starts at incredibly basic Language B and just progressively increases the complexity.
It's useful, but not some silver bullet for language acquisition: I think fundamentally it just takes a lot more time than reading a single chapter to advance your understanding of a language to a new level.
Like, I'm reading Harry Potter in Japanese and it's about the right level for me: challenging but doable, and I'm most of the way through the first book and it's... still challenging but doable. The idea that I could read the first chapter and then the second chapter could 'turn up the difficulty', just doesn't seem realistic: I'd read some number of chapters, then hit a wall.
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Maybe an advantage of this solution is that the stories could be more interesting: a problem with graded readers is that the low-level grammar (and the usual audience of children) means that the content is just not very interesting at low levels, so maybe being able to use Deathnote as your reading material and not "The Ant and the Grasshopper" is an advantage.
... but I think the disadvantages is that the content has to be custom produced for each pair of languages, and the limits of "making language A look like language B" in a way that's still remotely understandable, and ultimately it may not be teaching you the actual target language as much as it's teaching you how to read the A-structured-like-B hybrid language.
I can't head #7, but would love to help anyone else interested/start a server for discussion and planning/etc
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
If anyone is thinking of tackling #3, I'd be interested in chatting. I founded a startup that is doing a small amount of antibiotic development outside our main focus. More antibiotics are an unalloyed good, and I think the patent extension mechanisms are generally bad, but probably there are some very important choices to be made in how this campaign is structured and what it targets.
@Scott
Ugh, mobile interface troubles.
@scott - at the very least I could maybe help with judging entries on this one or connecting applicants to some existing antibiotic funding/advocacy campaigns
A point about language teaching:
In order to better my Chinese, I tried reading "The Legend of the Condor Heroes". My English version was very close to the original in the sense that it seemed to have been translated sentence by sentence with no attempt to rearrange the structure. Sadly, the result was merely that it came out as very stiff and unwieldy prose. So stiff, that I finally stopped reading it a bit into the second volume.
However, the structure of written chinese is also very different from English. I wonder if I could make something like #4 work translating between Danish and English. Many Danish words and phrases just sound like archaic anglo-saxon so maybe...
Also, I think part of the problem with translating Chinese works into English is that they tend to be stuffed full of cultural allusions that you just won't get unless you're aware of the originals.
So if me, an English speaker, is reading a translation that goes "Our hero went to sit under a magnolia tree and looked like a shadow in snow", I'd probably go "pretty image" and move on, whereas a native reader would be "oh man, that's a direct reference to these three famous poems, that famous anecdote about Historical Figure, and a paraphrase of an entirely different story!" (I've had a minor bit of that when reading what is a very stiff and unwieldly translation into English, then somebody explains all the cultural references I'm missing and how it is much more fluid and poetic in the original language rather than the literal English translation).
Think of it the other way round; someone is reading a translation into Chinese of an English story, they don't know anything about Greek mythology, and when they read the equivalent of "The heroine wore a corset like that of Venus", they go "Huh, okay, no idea who that is but okay" and have no idea of the whole "Girdle of Aphrodite" and the magical attractiveness it bestows:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girdle_of_Aphrodite
Ed West might be up for getting involved with the architecture one. It would be a very nice fit with his Canon Club that he's just started. https://substack.com/@edwest
How much of the implicit bias is due to training? You start off asking people to keep in mind four things: white and black, good and bad, then assign them to keys like A and L so that makes six things.
People then make it through a round of "white is good is A" and "black is bad is L".
Then you switch it around. So how much of the "if you pause that means BIAS" conclusion is because of bias, and how much is "black is L no wait now black is A"? I'm one of the fumble-fingers who would be "which one again is white this round?"
I am going to ask the obvious question about did they get the same pauses for all second rounds, or *only* for 'black'? Because if people can be just as fast for "white is L" then yeah, it's bias, but if they're pausing over "is white A or L now? which one is good word or bad word?" then I think it's because of training in the first round that "white is A, black is L".
Have they done any IAT tests with "black is good is A" and "white is bad is L" in the first round for comparison?
I'm pretty sure they randomize which condition you get first.
(I say "pretty sure" because I'm not going to re-read the papers now, but this is standard in psychology and it would utterly shock me if ten years of IAT research failed to do this very basic and universally recommended thing; I would be willing to bet at 100:1 odds that they do this routinely.)
They do, I had this same convo upthread and looked up the quote: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/quests-and-requests/comment/42988376
Thanks, so it's not training to associate "Black with L" that slows people down.
(It would still slow me down because I have no reflexes, but given the replication crisis in social studies, I figured it wouldn't be any harm to check that the obvious stupid question had not been already asked).
I just tried the IAT Scott has linked and it says the order is randomized. It also has pre-rounds, but it did not specify clearly if those rounds are just for training yourself, or if they also do some more sophisticated adjustment to compute the result (I guess just the former).
Potato only diet community trial
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/04/29/potato-diet-community-trial-sign-up-now-lol/
I wish I could try this, I really do, but I fear it'll be "plain cold boiled potatoes with some salt and nothing else" instead of "mashed with butter and cream, or fried with onions, or..." all the other delicious but fattening ways I eat spuds.
Also do you only eat a certain amount of potatoes at a sitting? Trying to figure out 'how many grams is this, is it a small potato or a medium one?' is another way of torpedoing any diets because I tend to eyeball it as "well these are three small potatoes" and then it turns out I've exceeded my carb limit by A LOT.
"Everyone seems to agree: No dairy. Maybe this doesn’t matter, but on the off chance this is really important for some reason, please avoid all dairy products."
(sigh) Yes, that would be the sticking-point for me. No pandy? (Boiled potato mashed with a little salt and milk; mostly, at least in my family, a child's meal to coax a fussy eater but you can go very elaborate in other versions). No colcannon? No champ? No lovely floury Golden Wonders or Kerr's Pinks drenched in butter?
Impossible!
"If you know why one of these ideas is actually really stupid and won’t work / shouldn’t be tried, please comment about that too."
Finally. My time has come. I can be contrarian, except only in the realm of this blog, because actually, my language acquisition opinions are extremely mainstream and common within language acquisition research and methodology.
Number 4 is really stupid and shouldn't be tried, but it might work. One might ask, if it might work, why not try it? Because we've pretty much figured out optimal language learning, the same way we've figured out optimal weight loss. Language learning is hard the way weight loss is hard, but that you may find some weird method to lose weight better than a fad diet, or learn a language better than the waste of time general language classes are, that's not the bar that should be set.
The optimal path to learning a language is just extended exposure, but more specifically, extended exposure just at the edge of understanding. Rearranging the word order isn't at the edge of anything, and I say that as somebody who really likes literal translations like that for trying to understand idioms and euphemisms. Gradually rearranging the word order is something very close to a waste of time. It might be detrimental, because what you want to avoid is mental translating, and what rearranging the word order would do is make you expect mental translating to carry you to the end. Plus early reading is generally a bad idea because it tends to make it difficult to pronounce things properly. That is, your mental idea of what things sound like forms the basis of your reading, so when your mental idea of how to pronounce things is wrong, your reading will just reinforce that and it will be harder to unlearn later. Reading early is only for certain practical applications, for example, if you have no concern for speaking and are trying to land a translating job.
Anyway, to use Death Note as an example, you would get further just watching Death Note without any subtitles, and reading an extremely basic grammar guide. By extremely basic, I mean a guide that is no more than five pages that simply explains basic word order, the regular conjugations, and some common particles. You'd need this only because you're watching Death Note and presumably you don't know anything about Japanese at the beginning.
A better idea might be to watch something like Peppa Pig in Japanese with no subtitles, again after reading an extremely basic grammar guide. Just keep watching, and then graduate to, I don't know, Chibi Maruko-chan, and then some mainstream slice of life like Karakai Jouzu no Tagaki-san. It really doesn't matter, so long as you can barely understand what's happening, and you're interested enough to pay attention. In some cases this means some people might want to avoid these basic suggestions I've just given, because it's more important you pay attention than you understand. Some people find children's content or slice of life to be extremely boring even in the context of learning a language they want to learn.
While doing this it's also arguably a good idea to use some spaced repetition software. Essentially, flash cards with software behind it to optimise remembering. Anki is popular and free. Ideally you'd just go through the most common 1000 words, and after than any new cards should be made by you based on what you don't understand when watching or listening to native content.
None of this is secret. There are already some language schools that use pure exposure, usually by just teaching in the target language and not allowing the use of native language within the classroom. Online, this sort of method is well known too. Millions unintentionally teach themselves English all the time because English media is ubiquitous and they want to engage with it. Even for Japanese, AJATT has been around for decades, and more modern offshoots like Refold are pretty popular.
Language classes like you see in high-school or college aren't there because we don't know a better way. I don't exactly know why they're there, but only in the sense that I don't know why school is there in general. Even teachers of these language classes know that essentially nobody is going to learn the language from their classes.
Finally, there's psychology research about this, but I think psychology isn't real so I don't bother to remember it off the top of my head. I'm sure it could be found though, the Refold guys talk about it.
Re #7: if you dislike modern architecture, consider critiquing it conceptually.
For instance, Patrick Schumacher, principal of Zaha Hadid Architects (leading makers of the monstrous postmodern blobs), is also an intellectual and an author.
His book, The Autopoesis of Architecture, explains not just his philosophy but why architecture got so insular, why architects design for other architects, not the public.
I contend that, of all the professions, architecture as practiced today is most informed by and engaged in theoretical discourse. Given your position, Scott, as a public intellectual, you could perhaps make a bigger difference with words than by commissioning buildings.
Of course, you risk being contaminated by the architectural discourse; I wouldn’t be surprised if you find a lot to like about Schumacher’s theory of design once you understand it.
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
When it comes to the question of political change - there's the basic "how a bill becomes law" question, but any proper account would be how to lobby efficiently and ethically. (And importantly, as long as what you want is inexpensive and without much opposition, then it's usually relatively easy, at least in the UK, to shape legislation)
(8) is something I'd like to work on, with a little help from you setting up some interviews.
As far as I can tell, a lot of (8) is already written but it's scattered between many different sources, and between many different specialties. Different people handle appealing to voters, mass activism, lobbying and intra-elite activism, mass litigation strategies, and so on (this is far from exhaustive).
The real hole here is that there's no good, trustworthy, reliable, and *current* book to tie together the trustworthy sources, go over the basics of how political change can be accomplished and how the process works, and offer a sober but actionable set of strategies and courses of action.
I'd like to discuss details with you over Twitter DMs (I'm @surcomplicated) or email (DM me and I'll trade emails with you if you want) but what you could really do for me is set me up with a few interview subjects to make sure I get the details of their sides of things right. Different people handle issue polling than handle litigation than handle intra-elite activism and lobbying than handle protesting in the streets and so on. The job here is fundamentally to take expert knowledge in these (in practice) separate specialties and weave it together into a general primer on how you change things, and while there's plenty of written expert material on these specialties interviews can paper over any holes that remain.
My email is scott@slatestarcodex.com
Just saw this from the quests and requests follow up email. I'd love to contribute and help. I have some time. My email is everydayemails2@gmail.com and will follow up from there if there is still energy to do something on (8) On A Primer About Political Change
> but maybe you could fix it by having separate “excited to date this person” and “willing to try dating this person if they were excited about dating me” levels of box-tick.
This type of design hack (when done *in extreme moderation*, to avoid feature/complexity creep) is still underrated, so I'm singling it out here.
It's why I'm highly glad LW added a separate "agree/disagree" button on comments, and later added a (Hidden-by-default! Collapsible/expandable!) palette of like 40 other reacts.
As for the .7 'Poll after poll shows that Americans prefer classical art and architecture, here used as a catchall term for styles that old-fashioned, ornate, symmetrical, elegant, etc - eg neo-classical, Gothic revival, Art Nouveau, Art Deco', I think it is because you have few original examples. As a European, in the Old Continent I find the exact opposite trend: there is a real generalised fetish for American modernist architecture and Swedish minimalism (in the latter case, I think it is because it is intrinsic to satisfying the impulse to create that IKEA gives people by having their lousy furniture assembled). I have to say that the trend has always bothered me, being a devotee of 13th to 17th century aesthetics and having a 13-year background in art, as well as being a professional painter. I would really be interested in participating - albeit from the other side of the ocean -, perhaps designing decorations and paintings, if they were required. If anyone else is interested, I would be available
Given your background you maybe hang out with people who don’t reflect the average European. I also live in Europe and I don’t know any one who has a fetish for American Modernist architecture. I think the average European likes “old fashioned“ architecture just like Americans.
I associate Scandinavian minimalism mostly with interior design.
I understand the issue people have with modern especially post WWII architecture but the other side of the coin is that modern designs in a “traditional“ style can seem kitschy.
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
Killing 5 and 6 with one stone, why not just make an implicit bias dating site? Swiping on various facial, body, or profile descriptions/tags in a never ending implicit bias test. Discover universal and niche biases and pair users based on that. Or maybe implicit bias as captcha?
BTW, does anyone have a good reference article or link (not a whole book) on the correlation between IQ scores and other intelligence assessment tests and educational achievement? I've been looking into it, and it's proving harder to find a scholarly source than it should be.
I think I will be applying for a grant for #4. I am very fluent in both Spanish and English and I have a lot of free time over the next 18 months.
The language learning idea sounds really interesting. I don't think GPT would be good at it but I can imagine some techniques which might not be completely awful at producing the desired output. (I'm an NLP researcher doing a mediocre job at learning a language right now).
I have some advice for anyone interested in tackling #2:
On https://pan.ukbb.broadinstitute.org/ there's a phenotype catalog, among which is fluid intelligence. There's like ~6800 SNPs significantly associated with it in the database. I believe you can actually download this set of SNPs!
The file is almost 2GB, so you need to put it into a database like SQLite and run commands to figure out stuff about it. Also, I bellieve the data all comes from a meta-analysis of fluid intellligence, which didn't use clumping alogirhtms to reduce false positives.
What I mean by this is that variants physically close on the genome will often be quite strongly correlated with one another, meaning one may mistakenly think that a particular variant is causing an observed difference in phenotype values when the real effect is cause by a neighboring variant.
It's possible one could obtain a data set of which variants are correlated with each other and use that to reduce the number of false positives.
You would then only need a relatively small validation set; perhaps 1000 genotypes + phenotypes, to validate the predictor.
We might be able to source this from the SSC community itself: get a bunch of people to take a standard IQ test or something and see what percentage of variance we could explain with the constructed predictor.
I am hesitant to take on this project myself because I have other projects I am already working on, but if anyone with a decent background in statistics or computational biology or just programming is interested in taking this on, feel free to reach out to me. I can put you in contact with some others who are interested in working on this. My email is morewronger@gmail.com.
In regards to the post, I also have one general comment:
> EA and IQ correlate well enough that it’s rarely worth examining them separately.
I take your general point that EA is a better-than-nothing proxy for intelligence if you have no other phenotype, but I don't belive to be true in general. If it were, we would expect both traits to be equally hertiable, which they are not (intelligence is substantially more hertiable than educational attainment). We would also expect both to show the same degree of "genetic nurture" effects, which is a way of saying that the genes of the parents have a large influence on the educational attainment of the child. But that's not what we see: there is significantly more genetic nurture involved in educational attainment than intelligence.
You can see further evidence that these phenotypes are not the same in studies like this one from Malanchini et al., who isolate specific genes that contribute to educational attainment: "We found that genetic effects associated with cognitive skills accounted for between 21% and 36% of the total variance in academic achievement"
Link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10103958/pdf/nihpp-2023.04.03.535380v3.pdf
Researchers have used educational attainment as a more politically acceptable proxy for intelligence in the past, but GWAS are now reaching scales at which these two traits diverge.
It’s clearly a bad idea to use a blurry stand-in for the thing you actually want to measure, intelligence. Seeing which genes affect intelligence is hard enough without the Gaussian blur!
Regarding the language-tutorial book; if it was web based you could just mouse-over a word and have it be explained using a tooltip which drew from a central database of definitions or explanations. That would be much more convenient and immersive.
Has anyone found a way to leverage lidocaine insensitivity in people with ADHD into a workable diagnostic test for ADHD? Could we make such a test objective by measuring galvanic skin response before and after administration?
Re. #6, as a long-time software developer I suspect the software part is actually the easiest, and the relevant pieces (website, authentication, reliable long-term storage, backups, redundancy, statistical algorithms for various measures of correlation between data sets, and so on) have already been solved in different areas many times over. The tricky parts are the "business rules".
Take privacy: a dating site needs a lot more strict and user-friendly control over who gets to see what about you than something like Facebook. If everybody can see everything about everybody else, I suspect only people who are extremely extrovert will want to use it, severely limiting the user base. Conversely, if you shield everybody maximally from everybody else, it's going to be really difficult to learn enough to make the leap into real life, selecting only for people willing to spend a lot of time fighting the platform to be able to do what they actually came for. People have different thresholds for what they're comfortable sharing with different groups, and you very quickly get into multi-dimensional matrices of permissions.
Or payments: who pays what, when, and how? If you make everything free the place is going to be all bots, all the time, so that's out. But as soon as you charge for any specific thing, it completely changes the incentive structure. Do you charge a simple monthly fee? Then people are incentivised to try to contact as many potential others as possible. If you instead charge per contact, the incentive flips completely to contacting very few people. This may sound like a good thing, since people will be more careful with whom they contact, but the network effects could be devastating: you might get an extremely sharp L-curve of a small handful of people with profiles tailored for mass appeal getting inundated with requests, while more casual users very rarely get any. A large fraction of people looking to be contacted would get very little attention, and would probably leave soon.
Of course, this is just barely scratching the surface. Even if you could ask 10,000 users (or 100 developers) of 2011's OkCupid why it was great I suspect you'd probably get a pretty useless dataset, because incentives are so complex and sensitive to details.
How about having price-per-message adjusted dynamically, based on some LLM's prediction of whether it's more likely to lead to success or a burnt bridge? Start by training it to recognize the difference between basic civility and overt harassment or trolling, then refine with data on actual relationship outcomes as it becomes available.
Recipient gets a portion of whatever the algorithm charged the sender, as "store credit" usable for their own messages, other in-app purchases, or even counted toward monthly fee, if there is one. Sorting incoming messages by how much you're being paid to read them might separate the wheat from the chaff for those with too many admirers, while searching users by predicted receptiveness to a particular message could solve the "looking to be contacted" problem.
Re #8 (A good primer on political change) a good place to start might be a recently published book
"The SAGE handbook of electoral behaviour", by K Arzheimer, et al; SAGE (2017), all 1100 pages of it!
It is available on Amazon, price $370 (ouch!), and a table of contents can be found at:
https://sk.sagepub.com/reference/the-sage-handbook-of-electoral-behaviour
I'm ashamed to say I downloaded a huge PDF of it from a Russian ebook website. But hopefully, publicizing it here will partly atone for my sins!
On the topic of online dating sites (#6), I wonder if there could be any mileage in one with a sort of "peek-a-boo" portrait system, whereby a profile viewer initially sees the viewee's portrait either blurred or mostly blocked, and the viewer has to click on choices from a pre-configured list of what they consider to be their own good points, to progressively reveal a sharper or more complete portrait if their chosen good points match the preferences of the viewee.
I suggest the viewee's preferences would not be shown either, because after all in real life when meeting a stranger for the first time one doesn't know these to start with. The viewee could choose a style of portrait concealment as part of their profile, e.g. foliage, clouds, blur, array of small squares that would (if all went well for the viewer) gradually show more of the portrait.
The viewer's choices for a given viewee would have to be irrevocable, because otherwise they could obviously experiment and likely eventually come up with a favourable but insincere selection. Also, a bad choice (relative to the viewee's preferences) would be retrograde in that it would re-blur or cover more of the portrait!
In other words, rather than skimming through profile pics one after another, left, left, right, left, etc, making instant snap judgements based pretty much solely on appearance, they have to work a bit harder to see a sharp and fairly complete image of the person of potential interest, and this can be attained only if their preferences match or are complementary.
Such a system would obviously be uncongenial to impatient users with the attention span of a goldfish. But that in itself might be an advantage, in discouraging casual superficial users. Also, having to work somewhat to be "rewarded" with a clear profile image might have some beneficial psychological effect, such as maybe more incentive to message the person of interest.
But the flip side is that this effort, in fixing the viewee's portrait more firmly in the mind, could also give obsessives and potential stalkers extra commitment and determination to contact them.
As #4 mostly with word ordering begins, would it be fun, it in German to do. So can you effortlessly German word ordering learn. But I ask myself, if word ordering really the challengingest feature of a language is?
I’m very skeptical that you can learn a language without aggressive vocabulary memorisation- grammar and word order can be difficult but if you don’t know the vocabulary you won’t even have the context to apply it.
I doubt that you can even learn the German word order like that, because a German word is not always written contiguously…
I recall from looking into commercialization of various psychological tools everything tends to be copyrighted in every way imaginable. That causes, for example, commercially available HR tools to be even worse than they have to be.
Usually it's done via owning exact questions and scoring mechanism, since you can't (?) own an experiment design. It tends to be a big deal because it's the specific test that gets validated and using anything else can't claim any power coming from those validation.
It is very hard for me to guess which parts of IAT are owned by Harvard or Project Implicit. Surely they own specific words/images used in their experiment, exact instructions and implementation of the scoring algorithm. But do they own name IAT? What else is there to even own?
The IAT itself is quite easily doable and, as Kosinski taught us, people will share any psychological results you give them, but the legal uncertainty is kind of scary.
Something like #4 already exists (language teaching via books that gradually substitute in more words from the target language).
I used to get Facebook ads for it. The books were directed at children, which does limit how far they could take someone. The example given was for learning Spanish. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the company.
For number 8 go to Ayn Rand and the Ayn Rand Institute.
Architecture hobbyist here! I believe the dichotomy between styles such as classical, art deco, and art nouveau versus modernist, minimalist, and brutalist doesn’t quite capture the essence of good or bad architecture. I think I understand why people feel aversion to the brutalist/minimal/modern architecture. I may have crossed some weird aesthetic exposure and our aesthetic sensitivities won’t ever align. But I wonder if actually going and and seeing some sites in-person may change how one may attempt to define the essence of good/bad architecture. So here is my list:
I highly recommend visiting Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation in Marseille, France. It’s one of my favorite buildings. It’s a site that includes colorful internal streets, shops, double-height living rooms, and a striking concrete roof garden with kids playground, a theater stage, and a swimming pool.
Other modern and brutalist buildings I loved. (I believe that photographs seldom do justice to architecture. Instead of Google searching, save them on Google Map for an in-person visit)
* Convent La Tourette by Le Corbusier in Lyon, France (tour)
* CopenHill by BIG in Copenhagen, Denmark (go skiing in winter)
* The Barbican Centre in London, UK (go to exhibit/theater)
* Casa de Musica by OMA in Porto, Portugal (go to a concert or take the tour)
* Arcosanti by Paolo Soleri, 1h North of Phoenix, AZ (stay there, details on their site)
* Lobe Block, Berlin, Germany (go for a yoga or get food at the the canteen)
* Casa Gillardi by Louis Barragan, Mexico City (tour)
I think sometimes the buildings themselves are better than how they look in the neighborhood and the ambiance they create.
We had an ACX meetup in Barbican once, I admit it was architecturally pretty fascinating, though not exactly my thing.
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
Is there any way to buy insurance that would indemnify me in the event that my prenup doesn't accomplish what it says on the tin? Or more generally, is there anyone insuring people against damages that occur due to bad governments failing to enforce contracts?
Problem with that is the insurance is, itself, based on a contract which the government might then choose not to enforce - or actively prohibit - as part of doubling down on their previous decision.
If uncertainty about the legal/financial risks of getting married reduce marriages by 2% and births by 1% then the government gets a ~1% gdp boost in ~40 years just by allowing this kind of insurance to exist. Prediction markets could perhaps be used to hedge any legal risks that traditional insurance companies are unable or unwilling to underwrite.
Very few politicians make decisions based on investments which, even in the best case, won't pay off until decades after they've left office.
Re: #7, the beautifying architecture proposal, I'm a visual artist with a focus on architecture and specifically architectural detailing (though not an actual architect, to be clear) who has thought quite a bit on what a modern design style for the ornamentation of a modern classical architecture would look like. Happy to share examples/create demos of what it would look like, or just talk with people who are looking beautifying architecture this way.
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
#7 made me recall the origins of Art Deco, which was oddly a specific push by a guild, the Société des Artistes Décorateurs who very intentionally promoted decorative arts, it was not a totally organic and natural emerging preference for ornamentation.
+1 to number 8. Political change is accompanied by a bunch of idiosyncratic features like the single issue rule. so once you get a lobbyist to support your boutique cause of, say, increasing funding for law libraries, your next step is to simply propose a bill for funding law libraries.
Haha, no, that would never get traction.
Your next move is to sit and wait for a bill on a vaguely related topic, such as on educational funding, the legal profession, or maybe inner city youth programs or something you can just squint and draw a connection to. Then you push like crazy to get your bit added to the larger bill and hope you tied your trailer to a star.
These are not stupid questions at all, the system is full of absurd corners like this and I too want this collected in a book somewhere.
This is notably complicated by the various forms of political change in the country, to include lawmaking and executive orders, but also the quiet dominance of administrative rulemaking. A proper treatment would balance the impact of all of these.
I don't think your questions are stupid at all, I think you have a great instinct for the non-obvious corners in lots of areas, including here. My dream version of this book would include a series of interviews, one with a professional lobbyist, one with a congressional staffer, one with an administrative law judge or maybe someone who has run a notice and comment process for an executive agency, one with a lawyer who has had to interpret EOs maybe in the intel community or adjacent, a longtime DC journalist, then some coverage or state and local lawmaking and where they fit in. My book's corpulent title would be something like "The civics they never taught you: The unwieldy billion and one paths to making new laws in America (and why none of them really work but maybe that's mostly ok)."
I would love to quit my job and go on an interview tour but I have a family to support and lack any reputation that would land me any of these interviews. How do you hire somebody to write a book to spec?
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
#4, the language learning idea, is bad. Sometimes you’ll have too few foreign words and you’ll waste time not learning much. Sometimes you’ll have too many foreign words and you’ll have trouble figuring out what they actually mean.
The real deal is the Listening-Reading method. You listen to an audiobook in the foreign language and you follow the written version of the same text in your native language. 100% of what you hear is foreign and 100% is comprehensible. It also teaches you the hardest skill, listening comprehension.
Also what’s underrated is just memorizing a lot of words, and spaced repetition is the best way of doing that.
I just installed a strobe light app and flashed it at different frequencies at nutrition labels and tried to read them. Super easy at 12hz and very hard with 5,6,7,8,9,10,11,13,14, or 15!!!
Pretty sure number 8 is a moving target - by default, people who are already in power don't want political change to be easy, since that could be a threat to their position, so whenever an effective, generalizable strategy starts to be become widely known, they set up specialized countermeasures.
Number 7 wouldn't solve the underlying problem of the incentive structure of free market capitalism. Beautiful cities are a common good which the capitalists will happily burn for more profits. We would need a state intervention, something like a pigouvian tax on ugly buildings (which could fund a pigouvian subsidy for beautiful buildings) to give them an incentive to start caring about it.
How would you determine who gets the subsidy and who the tax? Obviously a commission would be immediately bribed so a vote by the residents of the city is the best I can come up with.
https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
I want to correct my mistake and rewrite what i wished.
„I just want You and Me (WE) cooperate together to be happy any way You wish. We are for You and You are for We. Let’s have fun together and experience whatever feeling we want.
Together We Are Complete.
We can make new rules and new exceptions.
We will decide later.
We know what We want.
We will do it.”
This is my only and true wish.
All rest is commentary.
❤️
(If You don’t understad it just read further. This is my wish after all :)
Re: the language learning idea, in my personal experience (with Latin) this is something teachers incorporate a lot already, if not actually in the particular way you suggest. When teaching indirect statement (for instance, reported speech), teachers will often encourage you to translate literally in your head and then rework it into good English next. So 'secuturos se ducem responderunt' would be literally translated as 'they replied themselves to be about to follow the leader' which becomes 'they replied that they would follow the leader'. I can't speak for Japanese or other languages more difficult for Anglos than Latin, but I suspect that the book iteration idea could never be more than a peripheral element of language learning. Picking up different word orders and structures is surely the least time-intensive part of learning any new language, even a tricky one like Japanese, what there really is no substitute for is knuckling down and learning your vocab etc.
I'm maybe biased here, because as someone who had a relatively 'traditional' education in Latin, and, though not to the same standard, French, I am a fully bought and paid member of the grammar-memorisation-industrial complex.
Does anyone find it morally questionable to support embryo pre-selection based on predicted IQ scores? I certainly do, especially if one considers the robust correlation between IQ scores and race! But even if you don't agree with my moral intuition, since the relationship of IQ and happiness is mediated by SES, social security systems seem to play a huge role https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/can-intelligence-buy-you-happiness/
Why doesn't Scott support simple, yet powerful and lasting interventions that increase IQ instead? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41465-020-00187-z
I'm unclear on how differences in IQ scores between races is relevant to embryo selection. The child is going to be the same race as the parents regardless of which embryo you select.
> Why doesn't Scott support simple, yet powerful and lasting interventions that increase IQ instead? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41465-020-00187-z
I am not an expert in this, but I have seen many times that the studies on this type of "training-based improvement" to IQ usually don't replicate, or are equivalent to training on an IQ test.
I can't think of many examples of an intervention improving the g factor other than those which address nutritional deficiencies or eliminate exposure to pollutants like lead. I guess the closest thing might be pharmaceutical interventions, but those only work for some people.
Actually I am a psychologist who has studied this stuff. For all it's worth, there is a robust evidence base. And I'm not the only one thinking that: https://stevenchayes.com/a-brand-new-way-to-boost-your-intelligence/
It's a just another step from iq-based selection of embryos on a family level to a race-based selection on a broader level. Especially since the average differences on iq between black and whites are 15! points, not just 3-5 as mentioned in the post above. Even thought the importance of iq across different domains may be correct, iq-based embryo selection is a road to hell.
"It's a just another step from iq-based selection of embryos on a family level to a race-based selection on a broader level"
Well, it's a pretty big step, though, right? In fact it's a series of big steps of different kinds to go from de-selecting embryos who lack a certain characteristic to de-selecting living adults who lack it. How do we deselect those with lower IQ's? Kill them? Sterilize them? You think *that's* just a step away? We currently do not sterilize even people with disabilities that produce an IQ of 30, or murderers, or child molesters, or people who are chronically psychotic. We execute a tiny percent of murderers. but overall kill very few, and do not kill any of the other undesirables.
Also if our goal was to raise the average population IQ, wouldn't we be likely to do it in the most effective way, i.e. test families for IQ, then kill or sterilize those family lines who average low? Black IQs may be lower on average than white, but there are plenty of below-average whites and above-average blacks.
Your worry doesn't seem much more plausible than worrying that if we select embryos for thinness we'll start executing fat people.
Edit: Here's a better analogy. So far, the thing the medical establishment and probably much of the public cares most about is cancer risk, and that's what the companies that do the screening are looking for genetic signs of. OK, so did you know that non-Hispanic whites are diagnosed with cancer at a slightly higher rate than non-Hispanic blacks? (Fewer whites die of cancer, probably because of earlier diagnosis and better care, but more develop cancer.). In fact, the ratio of white cancer risk to black cancer risk is almost identical to the IQ ratio -- about 5% higher if you accept the figure mentioned in an earlier post here.
"It's a just another step from iq-based selection of embryos on a family level to a race-based selection on a broader level. ." So do you think that it's just another step from cancer risk-based selection of embryos on a family level to a race-based selection on another level? (https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/disparities.html). Are we likely to do to whites, to reduce population cancer risk, whatever it is you think we might do to blacks to reduce population low-IQ risk?
Elsewhere in this thread I suggest that a better target in embryo selection would be resistance to depression. Many people's actualization of their smarts is greatly reduced by depression. Even if your goal is to improve the productivity and scientific advancement of the population I think you'd get more benefit from reducing depression than from increasing IQ.
Sorry for being kind of late to respond to this. Low depression risk is already used as part of the selection criteria, at least by Genomic Prediction.
In fact, you can make better general mental health (lower risk of depression, bipolar, schizophrenia) a part of your selection criteria.
Nominative determinism strikes again, I see!
I don't know of an intervention to improve IQ either, but there sure are a lot of smart people whose smarts mostly go to waste because of mental illness. I think depression is the worst offender. It's less gravely disabling than schizophrenia, but. makes up for that by being far more common. I think either better depression treatment or embryo selection for resistance to depression would raise the effective IQ of the population quite a lot.
If the embryos being selected among are siblings, it would be very unusual for them to be of different races, much less socioeconomic status. Killing or forcibly sterilizing non-fetal humans on the basis of race - or, y'know, *at all* - is already broadly illegal, and to the extent that those laws aren't being followed, I seriously doubt that hindering tangentially-related medical research would be the most efficient solution.
#5 Really excites me because it was similar to something I worked on for myself a while ago, though it was more like a super-CBT/affirmation tool: a game where you try to choose the positive fill in the blank answer quickly, theoretially training you to have more positive automatic thoughts.
The "theoretically" their is obviously doing a lot of work, but I usually felt a bit better after playing it.
This post motivated me to brush it off and get it working again:
https://implicit-associator-acx.s3.amazonaws.com/HappyGame.html (works best on mobile)
This is a pure-front-end-web-app with all the sentences hard-coded. I don't see any issue with getting accurate timing: the timing could be done client side (as others have said) and I really think even a web-app like this would be high-fidelity enough for human-scale interactions. The only issue is security. I don't think you could make a web-app that's secure against someone cheating if they really wanted to. If we're measuring biases people might be trying to hide, this would be an issue. The solution would be to make a native app of some sort. I'd probably use one of the tools which lets you build native apps for iPhone and Android.
As others have stated, a CRUD for creating the tests wouldn't be hard, though we'd have to think about how exactly the configurability would work. And then there would be adding identification and authorization, which I would probably implement with AWS Cognito.
AI integration would be an interesting feature, both for generating images and for creating phrases or gathering a certain class of words ("Give me a bunch of phrases that are reflective of crime").
valmikirao+acx@gmail.com, if you want to talk about developing this more.
#5: I'm quite interested in the Automatic Implicit Association Generator, but am starting a big personal project and won't have time to add another one. But if anyone does work on this, I have a lot of ideas -- would be happy to pass them all on to you, and to consult if there's some way I can be useful (I'm a psychologist).
On #4 I agree with most comments here that it's a little unworkable due to one book not being nearly enough time to learn a language, but how about a translation slider? Put a bar on every web page that gradually translates it from one language to another, starting with word order, then swapping out the most common words, and eventually the tricky ones too. For instance:
0% I have eaten my dinner
30% I have my dinner eaten
60% Ich habe mein evening-food eaten
100% Ich habe mein Abendessen gegessen
That way you could learn your target language by reading _anything_ written in _either_ language, simply by sliding the bar to where you're currently comfortable. I'm not sure how much more work on machine translation would be required to create arbitrary combinations of two languages, but it seems reasonably doable (albeit with occasional screw-ups).
On #7 if you're interested in this then one of the best things you can do is support Donald Trump. He issued an executive order in 2020 decreeing that Federal buildings should be built in a neoclassical style https://www.npr.org/2020/12/21/948926995/keep-it-classical-says-trump-order-on-federal-architecture while Biden immediately rescinded it upon taking office and as far as I know no buildings were actually built under this order.
But of course this shows the real problem, traditional forms of architecture are currently oik-coded, you have little chance of convincing the sorts of peope who actually make decisions about zillion-dollar projects to look like oiks. Your best shot might actually be local governments, because surely there's a town out there somewhere whose city government needs a new town hall or public library, has a bit of money to spend, and is willing to take the pro-oik side in the culture war.
So I'm having kids using embryos (first implantation likely next year), and my doctors tell me that it's not actually possible to get an embryo's genotype: there isn't really enough genetic material to see the whole genome, just part of it, with existing technology. Yet I continue to see this sort of "genotype selection" stuff from people I trust, like Scott. Does anyone know how to resolve this? Are my doctors wrong?
EDIT: To clarify, I'm told that you can't take very much of an embryo's cells away from it to analyze without putting it in danger. They mostly take from cells that will become the placenta. With such a small sample of cells, it's not really possible for current technology to get a whole genome snapshot. Is this true?
I was curious myself, so googled around a bit. Found this article https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-say-they-can-read-nearly-whole-genome-ivf-created-embryo
According to article, you can't safely take enough cells from an embryo to determine the whole genome, but you can determine it pretty accurately by taking the partial info you get from the embryo itself and using it in combination with parents' genomes. "The advance depends on fully sequencing both parents’ DNA and “reconstructing” an embryo’s genome with the help of those data."
"The researchers had a handy way to see whether their reconstruction was accurate: Check the couples’ babies. They collected cheek swab samples from the babies and sequenced their full genome, just as they’d done with the parents. They then compared that “true sequence” with the reconstructed genome for the embryo from which the child originated. The comparison revealed, essentially, a match: For a 3-day-old embryo, at least 96% of the reconstructed genome aligned with the inherited gene variants in the corresponding baby; for a 5-day-old embryo, it was at least 98%. (Because much of the human genome is the same across all people, the researchers focused on the DNA variability that made the parents, and their babies, unique.)"
This article is 18 mos. old, so technology may have advanced a bit since then. Anyhow, upshot is that it's possible, but you have to use this method, which at least at the time of the article was the invention of the experimenters and not used anywhere else.
Yeah, this is old. Orchid Health just released a whole genome sequencing product for embryos a few months ago.
The predictors right now use mostly SNP data so IMO the main benefit is screening against really rare de novo mutations that can cause serious developmental issues. I think the prevalence of the ones they can screen for is like 0.3% though
So how is Orchid Health doing whole genome sequencing. Are they using the clever and laborious-sounding method described in the paper? It would be possible to tell from their description on their site, right?, because site would say that part of the process is sequencing the parents' genomes too. Or is Orchid using another method? And, excuse the basic questions -- this is not my field: Are full exome sequencing or a cross-genome selection of SNP's the same thing as whole genome sequencing? I just looked up both and staggered through some technical info, and it sounds to me like neither is. However, I suppose one or both could be as good for all practical purposes as a whole genome sequencing. *Is* one or the other just as good for practical purposes? And what I mean by practical purposes is is that one could use it to screen for anything: So if it had just been determined that there are 5 spots on the genome that together predict a propensity for extreme violence, it would be possible to tell how many of the 5 an embryo had.
I don't know that many details about how their sequencing process works (and indeed I suspect such information is private since it forms part of their core IP), but I do know they are able to do whole genome sequencing perhaps 3-7 cells.
I don't believe Orchid requires sequencing of the parents but I should double check on that.
> Are full exome sequencing or a cross-genome selection of SNP's the same thing as whole genome sequencing?
Full exome sequencing is when you sequence the subset of the genome that codes for proteins.
A SNP array (one of the most common methods of sequencing used by 23&Me, UK Biobank and others) is when you look at the places in the genome that most commonly differ between people regardless of whether they code for a protein. A pretty standard SNP array will look at about 500k - 1 mil points on the genome which where at least 1% of some reference population has a different letter or sequence at that spot.
And whole genome sequencing is when you read the value of every single spot in the genome (or at least nearly all of them. I think there are still some highly repetitive regions that standard WGS doesn't measure).
> However, I suppose one or both could be as good for all practical purposes as a whole genome sequencing
For the purposes of embryo selection the main difference is whole genome sequencing can catch some rare de novo mutations (meaning mutations that don't come from the mother or father). These de novos are responsible for a significant portion of developmental disorders. I believe the absolute prevalence of serious genetic conditions that can be caught with Orchid's testing is <1%, though I don't know the exact number.
But as far as polygenic risk scores go, SNP arrays are just as good as whole genome sequencing.
If you're interested in this for the purpose of IVF, I actually have an advisory service. You can email me are morewronger@gmail.com if you'd like to use it. I've got info about the quality of IVF clinics as well as more about testing.
No, I'm not planning on doing IVF. I have a grown daughter and am done with having babies. I just got curious about the topic. Something else I'm curious about, if you haven't run out of patience, is how you get genetic material rfom embryos prior to implanting them in the woman. Looked up number of cells in human embryos, and after 72 hrs. they have 7-10 cells. And I think that's about the point where they are implanted. How can it be safe to trash even 1 cell -- that's 10-15% of the embryo! Is it that the cells are completely undifferentiated at that point, 7-10 identical cells, so deleting one does not take anything unique from the embryo, just decreases its mass?
Biopsies are usually taken after 5 days not 3. At that time embryos typically have around 100 cells. Roughly 5 are removed from the outer layer of the embryo called the trophectoderm. That part later becomes the placenta.
But yes, the embryo seems to be able to completely replace these missing cells, which is pretty remarkable.
I think this is false, Orchid Health offers full exome sequencing for embryos and some other companies like LifeView do a good cross-genome selection of SNPs. See https://www.orchidhealth.com/ .
(EDIT: Just read Eremolalos' comment, maybe that explains the discrepancy?)
I would be worried about throwing a lot of money at the architecture problem. Survey results are notoriously unreliable judges of what people actually want; they often require great care and precision in the wording of the question to avoid biasing results. I feel like something like "classical art" is especially vulnerable to this sort of thing: it might well be that people are responding that they like the idea of it, as opposed to the thing itself. The "successful tourist attraction" reasoning is similarly tenuous: lots of things are much better to visit than to live/work in.
As for the "how to political change" document, I would be very interested in that. It's my understanding that they key is to effectively lobby, and to consistently show up. Reaching out to some current or ex-lobbyists might be an effective strategy.
I can't see that anyone else has flagged this, but #4 sounds quite like the method used by Joseph Jacotot, as described by Jacques Rancière in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Basically, Jacotot was a celebrated lecturer who had to flee France for political reasons. He found refuge in Louvain where there were many students who wanted to learn from him. The problem was that he didn't know Flemish and many of the students didn't know French. He ended up assigning the students a bilingual version of the utopian novel Les aventures de Télémaque by François Fénelon. He asked them to read it through over and over again until they understood the French text without the accompanying translation. Then he asked them to write an essay about the book in French. Apparently, the essays were good: "He had given no explanation to his 'students' on the first elements of the language. He had not explained spelling or conjugations to them. They had looked for the French words that corresponded to words they knew and the reasons for their grammatical endings by themselves. They had learned to put them together to make, in turn, French sentences by themselves: sentences whose spelling and grammar became more and more exact as they progressed through the book; but, above all, sentences of writers and not of schoolchildren." Sounds like a proof of concept!
I was planning to talk about the exact same thing!
A notion for a dating site: match people with similar styles of arguing. This may work better than matching people who agree with each other, or at least should be included.
#1 is very unlikely to hold up in my opinion, sorry.
The main result as shown in figure 2 of the paper (the graph included in the blog post) compares three groups. I downloaded the processed data from the Apollo repository and was able to reproduce exactly the results reported by the authors. However, these results rely entirely on omitting the fourth group, which was the control group.
In figure 2, we see that the "T-Match" group had a learning rate of about 0.03; the "T-Nonmatch" group had a learning rate of about 0.00, and the "P-match" group had a learning rate of about 0.01. In the supplementary figure S2.1 we find the control group and we can see that it had a learning rate of about 0.01.
Because the control group data were omitted also from the file that I used to replicate the analysis, I was not able to try it while including the control group. (The description of the control group in the methods section is unclear, but as best as I can tell the experiment was designed with 2x2 factors for 4 groups and should be analysed accordingly.)
This kind of research has enormous analytical flexibility. There are many ways to operationalise learning in the data from this experiment. The results were weak, with one of the main comparisons showing a p-value of 0.045 - just barely below the conventional threshold of 0.05. The preexisting analytical flexibility, nonstandard analysis, and barely statistically significant p-value would already cause me to bet heavily against reproducibility of the reported results. Additionally, the research was not preregisterred and it was also heavily underpowered with 20 participants per cell.
I suggest that a first step for anyone wanting to dig deeper into this would be to request the raw data and re-run the analyses while including the control group. Other robustness checks would also be indicated, including different ways to operationalise the main outcome of learning. But in my opinion even that would likely be a waste of everybody's time.
My background: I am a researcher in neuroscience and metascience, involved in the EEGManyLabs project already mentioned by another commenter, and I co-lead the EEGManyPipelines project, which is a large-scale big team science project on analytical robustness of EEG data.
On Idea 4. Language teaching -
I was listening to a podcast for learning French, and one of the ideas that stood out was - don't memorize vocabulary lists, speed up your learning by learning phrases and sentences and deploying them immediately.
I wondered if we can do something similar with this translation approach, except we use an LLM model to generate each paragraph from one language to the other, slowly adding in phrases and sentences. I suspect the syntax > grammar > vocabulary > full translation approach is too difficult for beginners because of people's propensity to want to get it right vs wanting to understand what is changing. Plus you're adding in 3 steps where the translation is incorrect between the two correct versions in the two languages, giving more chances to people to fixate on some erroneous approach in the middle. ChatGPT/etc will need a lot more training to get those nuances right.
I think it would need to start with simple sentences at first, and simpler books, but I think it could work very well as a way of learning.
The cat in the hat. El Gato en El sombrero... oof. I tried doing it and it's difficult to do it one sentence or even one word at a time. my spanish is very basic, in any case...
the sun did not shine. it was too wet to play. so we sat in the house. all that cold, cold, wet day.
my version - El sol no (estaba soleado?), fue muy lluvioso para jugar, sentamos en la casa, Todo El dia tan frio, frio y mojada.
chatgpt - El sol no brillaba. Estaba demasiado húmedo para jugar. Así que nos sentamos en la casa. Todo ese frío, frío, día húmedo.
It's older, but a good book that already exists for your "primer for political change" topic is Robert Heinlein's _Take Back Your Government!: A Practical Handbook for the Private Citizen Who Wants Democracy to Work_. It's at least a good general place to start even if something more adapted to the current social media age is needed now.
Ugh I've never liked Hindu (Indian?) architecture. The highly textured/crenulated surfaces always make the buildings seem more like growths than structures IMO. And not in a good "organic, natural" sense - more like a grotesque fungal, tumorlike sense. The walls seem more excreted than engineered. The Hindu temple pictured above, for example, looks more like a giant termite mound than a human building to me. Which is a shame because otherwise it's an impressive building.
Anyone else have that reaction?
Re: language learning, an Irish company called Weeve does this (almost) exactly as described.
They sell printed books:
https://shop.weeve.ie/pages/shop
And there is a an app / Chrome extension so you can do it while browsing the web:
https://www.weeve.ie/
I have an alternative dating app idea that I've been mulling over for a while. I think it's good but don't have the bandwidth/skills to implement. If anyone wants to collaborate or take elements of this I would be down!
The app would be called Friend of a Friend, and it would involve getting your friends to matchmake for you. You (the singleton*) would make a basic profile. Your matchmaker friend would talk to you about what you're looking for. Then, the matchmaker would go on the app, which would hook into their social media, probably mostly facebook but could be others as well. They would look for other matchmakers, and see if they are representing someone you could potentially be compatible with (based on the basic profile). Then, they would talk to the other matchmaker about whether, knowing both parties, they think you'd be compatible. If so, they set you up on the date. After the date, they ask you how it went, and adjust their strategy for the future if necessary.
The idea is that, if you're not lucky enough to have found a partner in your immediate friend group or among acquaintances, you shouldn't be relegated to just go fish. You should search within your extended social network. The matchmakers are vehicles for this extension. But, they are also a layer of safety and dignity for the singleton. It's creepy to be matched with someone you know on a dating app (early tinder tried this I think). But if someone else is setting you up, I think most people would consider that okay. The matchmakers could ask questions of each other that are awkward to ask yourself (why is this person still single? what's their income? how autistic are they?) and quickly suss out incompatibilities. Plus, because this person is from your extended social network, and you know you will be asked about the date, and some version of what you said can get back to the person you went on a date with, you are less likely to ghost, dismiss out of hand, or just generally treat them as disposable. To top it off, you will have someone who is talking through the process with you. Dating sucks and no one should have to do it alone.
Objections:
- what's in it for the matchmaker? I envision a reward agreed upon by the singleton and matchmaker upon marriage to a person they were set up with. Could be money, a wedding speech, the name of their firstborn, whatever they decide. This could be mediated through the app, or not. In general, I find my married friends to be very interested in my dating life, and they say they would love to participate. I had a friend volunteer and take over my hinge for a few months with nothing in it for her. Some people do love matchmaking.
- wouldn't this result in very few, or zero, dates? You could have many matchmaker friends. I also envision a mechanic where the matchmaker gets access to other matchmakers once removed on the friend network, or twice etc. This could cost extra (the singleton would foot the bill ofc). But also, having fewer but higher value dates is kind of the point.
- wouldn't you need a looot of people to sign up before this yielded any matches? Yes. This is the biggest issue in my view. I think it could be aleviated if people from some large social group (errr rationalists? EAs?) were the first adopters, so there would likely be several ppl within the same network.
If anyone wants to work with me on this let me know! Or some version of this that you think is better. Or constructive criticism is also welcome. I have basic programing skills but not app dev skills, so may not be super helpful in this regard. I also do not have influence with 1000's of women. My only asset is being a woman. Maybe they're more likely to listen to me than to a man. I've got a few somewhat well-connected acquaintances though.
*I recognize that not all people who are looking for dates are single. But, I needed a word. Also, not all people who want more money are starving, but maybe the starving ones should get priority :P
ps. Basically instead of drawing inspiration from 2011 OKC, I'm drawing inspiration from Indian arranged marriages. But with friends instead of parents, and the power of social media networks instead of the village yenta.
pps. There could also be a mechanic where some people who are very well-connected become a matchmaker for a lot of people, like a yenta. They could charge to represent you.
The language-learning
idea runs contrary to the best known -way to learn language, which is immersion, with your brain working in multiple modalities at once (speaking, listening, reading, writing, and explicit lessons in vocabulary and grammar rules). Basically you want the most signal-rich stream of training data, not a stream that contains only one feature like word order.
The reason that most adults don't do immersion is that it's painful: it gives you culture shock, curtails the autonomy you expect as an adult, and might require changing your residence.
For this reason, I don't expect immersion to become more popular. But I do think that a whole-language approach is closer to immersion than your idea, and hence more likely to work fast.
Small contribution to #8:
Nobody knows or cares what NOTA is, so instead of promoting "Coalition to Modify NOTA", promote "Tax Credits for Kidney Donors" or something equally quick at getting the message across.
And, nobody knows or cares what NOTA is, so instead of linking to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-left-kidney and then expecting people to find the one sentence talking about it, link directly to https://www.modifynota.org/
We're working on #8! Our team at Rise (https://risenow.us/) has passed 69 laws for rape survivors and we've coached others to pass 19 laws for their own communities. We're working on a workbook to open-source our blueprint for change to help other people get involved in the legislative process and pass their own laws. Let's connect! Send us a note: info@risenow.us
I believe the biggest source of 20-dollar bills on the ground, w.r.t. stranger-dating mechanics, is to apply solid economics to the matching. E.g., creating artificial scarcity (you only get contact info for one or two people a week, tops), and solving scarcities with bidding (doesn't have to be real money; the scarce pipeline of actual contacts makes bidding with time important too).
I have other applications of econ, but won't share out of information hazard, and playing coy. 📞me?
> "pharma companies don’t care relatively less about their profits in developing markets (where there’s not much money anyway)"
Presumably, "don't" shouldn't be there?
More on the point, there are all sorts of reasons 4 wouldn't work. Scarcity of the corpus (one chapter of a regular book is not terribly much), differences in grammatical features (for instance, if I were to make this from Russian to English, I don't even really know what I would _use_ as the Russian translation for article), and, frankly and most importantly, the target audiences just aren't children anymore, the acquisition mechanisms we use as small children are closed by the time we can read something like that, period - the grammar will not be _acquired_, only _learned_, using Weeve's terminology. (I am not impressed with Weeve's approach, either, but note that they don't seem to be doing _quite_ the same.) Grammar-memorization-complex is good, actually, if you want to be able to speak so that you don't sound like Hagrid.
To expand on this a bit, everyone acts like learning a language is learning its words, whereas where languages are both incredibly similar and incredibly different is grammar. It is trivial to replace first with premiere and ass with derriere, but you'll still be speaking English not French. It is far less trivial to obey, say, French Person-Case Constraint (and I expect many of you won't even know what this is...).
Hi Scott - I'm Phil from www.prismatext.com, which has been mentioned above a few times already re: your language learning idea above.
Our offering is very similar to what you've described, and we've actually tested what you outlined exactly before as well. We're currently working with over 30 publishers and aiming to add a new range of features and practice options in coming months.
We'd love to chat further if you're interested! Please shoot us a note if so:
phil [at] prismatext [dot] com.
My team and I at More Monuments are already working on #7!! We're here to kickstart the American Renaissance: https://twitter.com/MoreMonuments
#7: Asked my wife (Elsbeth Geldhof: http://www.linkedin.com/in/elsbeth-geldhof, a heritage professional and historical conservator what she thought. Her response follows
> Two thoughts:
> 1) The Institute for Classical Architecture (https://www.classicist.org/) is doing exactly this - so support this institution and help them develop and expand, rather than putting funds and energy and expertise into establishing a second ICA. Also initiatives such as the National Campaign for the Historic Building Trades (https://historictrades.org/) are tapping into building knowledge and expertise that is connected to Classical Architecture among other architectural building typologies and styles. If you feel really strongly about this, then support those institutions, they are doing great work and they need the support to continue doing this and make a movement and a difference.
> 2) The USA and many of their citizens like Classical Architecture so much, because the USA was founded as a fresh, new nation following what was at the time thought to be the highest standard of political infrastructure: the Classical Greek World. Thomas Jefferson cs went on a Grand Tour of Europe to study the classical and neo-classical architecture, to literally give shape to those ideals. Which resulted in all those lovely neo-classical state and government buildings.
> Instead of Classical Architecture in the USA (that is already studied extensively by excellent institutions, see above) - why not expand one's taste and knowledge and help the education, preservation and support of heritage in general in the states? Including difficult or uncomfortable narratives that are connected to this heritage. There are numerous, numerous, numerous wonderful architectural and industrial heritage gems waiting to be studied, preserved, cared for and loved. And better even, why not start with supporting a couple of the major statewide or national preservation institutions that are exactly doing that?
> I am happy to help find people heritage organizations that they didn't know about yet and might want to support and be involved with. Anyone interested can contact me via my linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/elsbeth-geldhof and I am happy to help.
There's fortunately an open-source polygenic risk score calculator for many GWAS studies, including various intelligence studies, already available (I've used it on myself, friends, and family members). It's easiest to use when run locally via command line but the academic group that makes it has a website that isn't super friendly and the interpretation isn't super straight forward. Impute.me used to be free and open-source until the founder decided to make it a company/closed-source (the WayBackMachine could perhaps find the old Github repo it was in).
I'd be willing to whip up the academic command line tool into a more user-friendly website if you don't need it super fast (I'm currently spending most of my time right now studying the MCAT to apply for medical school). I do want to advise though about some of the potential dangers of using such a tool to promote the wide spread use of embryo selection because there are some robust epigenetic differences that can be detected between artificially reproduced children and naturally conceived children that can potentially predispose such children to chronic diseases. My suspicion is that an easily accessible polygenic tool would probably be more useful on a societal level (i.e. people without reproductive issues) to use in a dating app, or to facilitate mate selection in "natural surrogacy" (i.e. when sperm donors have natural sex with surrogate mothers).
Links:
https://github.com/kauwelab/PolyRiskScore
https://prs.byu.edu/calculate_score.html
Re. "1. Replicate brain entrainment learning results." -- That study sounds very similar conceptually to Ngo, Martinetz, Born, & Moelle 2013, "Auditory closed-loop stimulation of the sleep slow oscillation enhances memory", Neuron 78:545-553. It also used an EEG to sync up with the subject's brain waves, though with the "sleep slow oscillation" (< 1Hz) instead of the alpha wave. It stimulated with sound rather than light, and while asleep rather than while awake. The average measured "retention score" in the stimulus group was 22; the average in the sham group was 12.
Regarding the architecture thing. I think Scott incorrectly uses "older". What we are talking about is not "older" vs "newer", but "ornamental" vs. "Form follows function." I look forward to seeing new forms of ornamental architecture. What's so wonderful about nouveau/deco is how it is simultaneously modern and ornamental.