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Regarding #20 on public awareness campaigns: I feel like the obvious answer is that awareness campaigns work when they're crusading against things that people actually dislike (bullying, drunk driving) and not when they're crusading against things that people do like (sex, drugs).

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The negative educational impacts on premature babies is a go-to example for me when discussing the fact that there can be educational variables which are not heritable but which are nonetheless not (necessarily) mutable, which in turn connects to some of the tortured discussions I have to have about the very topic of genetic parentage and educational ability.

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"If any commenters here would describe themselves as in this group, I’m interested to hear your reasoning." I'm not in that group but I am a professional pollster. Asking people this sort of question is usually misleading and the reason is just time discounting. People do not have a capacity in my experience to reason reliably about how they would change their mind about some measure in the future. I would read these results more as expressions of concern about Covid-19. Which is still interesting - a large amount of the population is still highly concerned and worried about the disease.

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>8: This month in Chinese propaganda

Wow. That's up there with Soviet era Pravda political cartoons in demonizing the US. Nobody is going to accuse them of a subtle cunning.

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Regarding the poll in link 2. See this financial times article (archive link to bypass paywall) https://archive.is/wzPtR which has a similar poll with very different results based on changes to the wording.

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On 26: Amazon wants your money, and isn't too fussy about the format.

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founding

> If any commenters here would describe themselves as in this group, I’m interested to hear your reasoning.

My group house just had a cold sweep through it (more than half of people showing symptoms, about a week of lost work all told). A bunch of people took COVID tests and they were all negative, so we're pretty sure it wasn't COVID.

But also... it was really nice to have a year where this basically never happened, and I think the steady state rate of it happening (when we were open) was probably like once a quarter. (Definitely when I was going to CFAR workshops, I would have something cold-like about once a month, tho it rarely bothered me much, but sometimes spread out in a way that did seem bad). And so I sort of want to go back to being a hermit because it pays for itself? Or, like, adopt the Quarian lifestyle, and the thing where everyone wears masks in shops forever seems maybe worth the annoyance.

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Ever since my 6th grader started school, I've been really struck about how much they do anti-bullying stuff.

Everything from normal classroom stuff to special things where the kids all leave the classroom and go to some other room wherein the school counselor talks about bullying being bad to take home handouts about anti-bullying stuff.

It certainly seems like everyone in the school has really bought in to the whole dealio...

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Regarding 16, Stephen wrote an blog post in 2012 about this phenomenon, which he named "artificial stupidity".

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/04/overcoming-artificial-stupidity/

I work for Wolfram|Alpha, though not on the parser. Natural language is hard to interpret, yo. We try to improve, bit by bit. "Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

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#26: I assume Amazon is trying to see if there is a feasible way for them to accept cryptocurrency payment on Amazon. This would be a pretty big leap, since as far as I nkow they don't even accept things like Paypal (at least not directly). I'm curious to see how well this works out for them.

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I'm surprised the 10 pm Curfew didn't poll better, since that seems like it would be especially appealing to people that hate fun. Anyone that's lived in a city and has had trouble sleeping due to the noise must have at least considered it!

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#8 reminded me of how The Onion used to make fun of (at the time) conservative cartoons in the early 2000s. Hilarious

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Regarding #2, I could get behind the masks (two reasons, a) I have always hated seein people on public transport, b) I am immune-suppressed and barely had a cold for the year until June this year) and the vaccination for travel (well, anything to get vaccination rates up is good in my book).

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That robot baby story made me laugh. Thanks for sharing that, Scott.

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Re

> I wondered if pushing land distribution might be an effective altruist intervention.

I'm a gray tribe techie who left the Boston area 8 years ago and moved to rural land where I raise vegetables and livestock (in addition to doing remote work at startups). TLDR: living on the land and doing farm stuff is HARD and COMPLICATED (to the point where I recently wrote ~ 1,400 pages on the topic, to give a brief introduction to all that's involved https://www.amazon.com/Escape-City-1-Travis-Corcoran/dp/B093BC3K1T ).

Making good use of the land is hard and requires a ton of knowledge ( this ties into seeing like a state issues: you know who ELSE doesn't know how to farm? People who've spent a generation or more off the farm! ).

I'm skeptical of land reform even though politically I like it (for right wing reasons, not left wing reasons like many: I like the idea of more people being self-reliant and being less cancellable, which I think encourages little-r republican virtues).

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Regarding 24, the counterexample I like is climbing Everest. First done in 1953, and that involved a nation-state project (from a poorer nation than the US, ie the UK, and not on the NASA scale, but still big and expensive) and was being done by rich people within 20 years. But it's still dangerous and expensive after another 50 years.

Could space end up being different? Sure. But it could also be a $100k joyride to suborbital and a few million to orbit for decades to come.

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Regarding #14 - it reminds me of my favorite Black Mirror episode - White Christmas.

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I feel like there's a pretty significant difference between leaving a bike sitting out with a small lock, vs saying "hey, suspected thief, the bike over there is unlocked". I'm not sure where the point of entrapment is, but I'd say a honeypot bike is more analogous to a governor that posts their schedule while saying that their security is taking the week off.

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The interventions that work: that which aim to stop activities that violate the consent of others. For instance, drunk driving may kill other non-consenting people and bullying harms other non-consenting persons.

Interventions that don't work: that which restrict the freedom of individuals to do what they like without harming others. Drugs, alcohol etc are surely examples of this.

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Bully and drunk driving are bad. Premarital sex is super cool. Drugs are pretty cool. The difference is clear.

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Regarding #12, I'm very disappointed that the map ignores exclaves. Most significantly, it ignores how the Old and New Worlds are joined at French Guinea, which is a full part of France. Also, Spain borders Morocco, and the Netherlands borders France (in the Caribbean). These points would hugely change the diagram.

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Re #13. I think there is a huge and fatal flaw in Matt Shapiro's lockdown analysis.

> In the end, there are two kinds of people when it comes to COVID restrictions:

> The people who are going to do what they think is appropriate regardless of government mandates

> The people who wanted to be less careful than they were being, but were coerced by government rules into being more careful

> I think group 2 is a really small group.

However this ignores two vital parts of lockdown (I'm typing from a UK perspective).

The first is that lockdown was very very effective to get businesses to change their behaviour. Even if you wanted to be less careful, and were willing to break government rules, you can't go to the pub if the pubs were shut. I think the number of people who stayed home because there was nothing to go out for is large enough to have an impact on epidemic spread.

The second is the furlough scheme and other forms of government support. I think a very large group of people would want to be more cautious than their financial situation allows them to be. When the government steps in with a support package their behaviour shifts to the amount of caution they want.

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>20: This Twitter thread on delegitimation of the high school...

I'm a long way from high school but hope this is really true. It would be up there with the widespread acceptance of gay rights with things I wanted but never expected to see in my lifetime.

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27. "So when he got to the gospels, he assumed that they actually happened sequentially: that Jesus was in a sort of Groundhog Day time loop in which he experienced slightly different versions of the same set of events four different times, dying at the end of each version. (I guess it would make sense that final loop was John, which is significantly different from the other three.)"

This is really wonderful. When I was a devout Catholic teenager, I got very into the theological niche of literary analysis of the Gospels, trying to trace back the hypothetical common sources that Matthew, Mark & Luke drew from based on which events in the life of Jesus which they do & do not have in common. Experiencing those synchronicities & recurrences from a naive reader's point of view in a _Rashomon_-like way, particularly once you get to the very different account of John, would be enormous fun.

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BlackMirror has an episode on #14. Which is terrifying, as most BM episodes are, of course.

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re #15 - even if the cost-benefit ratio isn't quite right for current preterm-birth prevention strategies, maybe this research topic should be of much greater interest to the rationalist community? Premature births are associated with a 12-point IQ drop and a host of other behavioral problem. There is a ton of excitement (not to mention venture capital funding) devoted to polygenic screening (maximum IQ benefit estimated at 3 points), where are the start-ups seeking to develop safe interventions to prevent preterm birth? Are there rationalists studying this topic?

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>one of the proposals is to plant honeypot bikes in easily-watchable areas and arrest the people who steal them until maybe eventually San Franciscans get the message that bike-stealing can have negative consequences

Another unfortunate consequence of the reaction to George Floyds killing, along with the arson and theft:

There were a spate of carjackings in the months that followed. Black teenagers were grabbing peoples car keys and wallets and phones and going for joyrides. Usually whacking the victim with a pistol and occasionally saying "Black live matter" to victims as they drove off.

Hey kids, being a knuckle head is not going to help matters.

It got bad enough for the Minneapolis police to use honeypot cars and drones to catch the culprits.

This crap seems to have died down but it was one more element in the hit parade of misfortunes of 2020. Pandemic, lockdown, rioting and then this.

A year I am very glad to leave behind.

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Source for #12 The Topologist's Map of the world

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/gxwn5r/oc_the_topologists_map_of_the_world_a_map_showing/

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Regarding 23, Chris Morris' most recent film, _The Day Shall Come_, which I haven't yet seen, is on precisely this theme.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_Shall_Come

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I'm not sure I'm on board with Balajis' tweet on space, space travel is not an electrical appliance. There are some good reasons to believe that we could see widely available commercial space access in the coming decades, but 'space travel is like a dishwasher' isn't one of them.

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23. As a liberal, you'd may think identifying "types of people" that may commit crimes, even though they didn't actually commit any crimes and their typing is done by the government - who is never mistaken in segregating people into types and figuring out which type is evil - and then spending the whole power of federal government into ensnaring them into some situation that could be presented as setting up for a crime - as a liberal, you may think this completely abhorrent. Or maybe not, "liberal" means so many things nowdays... Sometimes it means "types of people that government says are evil should definitely be jailed by any means necessary".

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Put me in the permanent lockdown camp! I certainly don't need government enforcement to help me live my newfound joyously hermit lifestyle, but some social buy in certainly helps pull it off fairly effortlessly. Lockdowns have reminded me about how much I care about social wellbeing in the abstract, and how uninterested I am in interacting with my fellow social beings in the here and now. The emotional comfort masks give me are fairly similar to noise cancelling headphones, except without cutting out the environmental sensory cues that are important for moving around without getting bumped into by moving objects. I am not only in my own world, but I am a safe 6ft (really, I prefer a nice, spacious 20ft bubble) from any other stranger that I'd really just rather not interact with, pandemic or no.

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I think this is as good a place as any to leave this comment. Please correct me if not the case.

As a long time reader, I'm surprised to see how little Scott now posts outside an increasingly narrowing Overton window of what is acceptable. This has affected how much I read here. The content is still high quality, but it's less bold, interesting and novel because it's competing with the thousands of other smart people who are operating in the same window. Now especially there's opportunity if not need for people to fearlessly challenge and increasingly hegemonic orthodoxy. Unfortunately (from my perspective) Scott no longer seems to be interested in that challenge. Or perhaps (more charitably?) his own views have changed to situate him within the orthodoxy he once critiqued.

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27. The real haymaker here is that these Brits didn't know fiction existed at all. "Ghost stories, highwayman stories, fairy tales, Paradise Lost, and Daniel Defoe were all equally credible. [...]'I had no idea at the time I read Robinson Crusoe that there were such things as novels, works of fiction, in existence.'" These quotes from The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 2nd Edition, page 96. Also mentioned is that they believed in a literal Pilgrim's Progress, Jack the Giant Killer, and Robin Hood, and "contrasted their probability with that of other wondrous things which I had read in books that 'it were a sin to disbelieve.'"

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The bullying link doesn't seem to work. It seems to just link to an individual tweet.

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#2: I'm glad that there is some evidence that those survey results are ~nonsense, I've seen lots of people claiming it confirms our status as a nation of curtain-twitchers but it just doesn't seem plausible to me. Like sure, I can believe there are a significant number of boomers who hate fun and want a 10pm curfew. But that's the one with the lowest level of support! "Having a 10 day quarantine after returning from abroad" as a policy even post-covid seems obviously insupportable, and I think that's enough to conclude there must be something dodgy about all of them.

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"Joe Kent, a Republican running for Washington’s 3rd congressional district, has said that “the government must open jobs to those with non-traditional educational backgrounds”

I am sceptical about this, and you know why? Because this says precisely nothing, it's pure politician for "we're already doing this but if I make a big splashy announcement I can sound like this is a new initiative driven by me".

Out of curiosity, I went looking for civil service jobs in Washington State. And here's a very typical entry level one (the Irish equivalent is Grade III): https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/washington?sort=PostingDate%7CDescending

"Office Assistant Three (OA3)

Full-Time, Non-Permanent

Cedar Creek Corrections Center (CCCC)

The ideal candidate will be an accomplished office professional who has a proven track record of establishing new processes for an organization or new work environment within an organization. Someone who exercises sound judgement, able to problem solve, thinks critically, and overall possess excellent communication skills in their administrative wheelhouse.

Consideration: As this presents a “foot-in-the-door” type of opportunity to explore state employment, your excellent work performance may provide additional work opportunities as they become available.

Qualifications

REQUIRED:

High School diploma or GED

AND

Two (2) years of progressive clerical experience in the following competencies:

Proficient computer skills - including basic skills in Microsoft Outlook and Word.

Basic proficiency level with Adobe Acrobat Pro and Microsoft Excel.

Highly organized multi-tasker who work wells in a fast paced environment.

PREFERRED/DESIRED QUALICATIONS:

Six (6) months or more experience using copy machines and scanners.

Professional work experience using OnBase or a similar scanning/archiving system.

Professional level Intermediate proficiency with Adobe Acrobat Pro and Microsoft Excel.

Professional WA State experience archiving and destroying records utilizing the WA state records retention guidelines.

Professional work experience with SharePoint."

This is fairly basic requirements stuff that I've seen myself in similar civil/public service jobs in Ireland. There's no mention of a degree, because this is (as they say above) a 'foot in the door' position. What matters is experience in a similar role. And if they get a ton of applicants for this, then yeah, anyone with a degree or more experience or "worked in the civil service before" will be preferentially treated just for winnowing out purposes.

Now, a position like this will let you work your way up the scale to a certain point. But if you want to advance beyond that point, then yeah - you *will* need a degree.

Here's more basic, clerical level, "don't need a degree but you will need at least two years work experience in a similar role" for Washing State University: https://hrs.wsu.edu/clerical-series/

And all this is before even touching the civil service exams which are the next step between "submit application" and "get called for interview".

Here's a company trying to flog test prep for civil service exams: https://www.jobtestprep.com/civil-service-exam-wa

"Why is scoring high on WA State civil service exams so important? In most agencies in Washington State, only the top ten highest scorers are considered eligible for job vacancies; the other candidates who pass but fall beneath this ranking may be considered for future openings.

JobTestPrep’s team of experts has worked hard to ensure that our civil service practice tests will give you the tools, knowledge, and skills you need to successfully pass your exam."

Yeah, they're trying to sell a product, but this is standard procedure: you advertise a position, call people in to take the test, form a panel, and interview/recruit off that (I've done similar myself).

So the bould aspiring Representative is re-inventing the wheel, as it were. If he gets elected and if he gets a resolution passed, it will simply be one more piece of nuisance paper that the Department sent out, where the civil service reads it, says "yeah we're already doing that, Joe" and ignores it. What he is doing is the equivalent of "teach coal miners to code". I was on an upskilling training scheme a few years back and there was one guy on it who was an ex-butcher (repetitive strain injury in his hands meant he had to give that up). He'd been sent on a "computer skills" course for re-training and inclining him to a new job, and he had absolutely zero interest in office work or clerical work or computer work. He was just doing the course in order to comply with unemployment benefit rules until he could find work for himself that he wanted to do.

A lot of Representative Kent's good intentions are going to lead the same way: people who don't want to do office work being pointed in the direction in order to fill the requirement that "the government open jobs to those with non-traditional educational backgrounds". And as you can see, you may not need college degree but you do need to have stuck it out to high school graduation and picked up clerical computer skills as well.

"Further, I will set aside one third of the jobs on my congressional staff for those who do not have a traditional educational background, and one-third for those from the district. "

Sweet Heart of Jesus, Font of Love and Mercy, I hope he does *not* get this through. Have you any idea of the amount of nepotism, favouritism, and pull that will be involved if this is passed? 'Jobs for the boys' won't be in it! And then when the one-third *can't* be filled because the potential candidates do not have the necessary job skills (not the paper degree, the skills to do the job), then HR will fall back on the usual applicants and this is just one more hoop to jump through before filling the position.

Do I sound cynical? Yes, because I've *been* that minor minion (Grade III, Acting) who has seen the result of politicians making grand announcements like this and layering on an *additional* step on the ladder to add atop the pile of regulations already in place around hiring for government jobs.

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It's surprising how many derogatory terms originally meant someone living in the countryside. A heathen lives on a heath. A villain lives in a village. A pagan lives in the countryside (pagus).

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Re. 20: I caught the shift in reactions to bullying after columbine (I was in middle school at the time), and it kinda checks out.

It used to be I would get the shit kicked out of me (on account of being lightly dusted with autism) every couple weeks, and learned to do the prison thing of always coming back twice as hard to stop it.

Thusly, By then end of elementary school it was such that I would respond immediately with violence if anyone touched me for any reason that I didn't like .

Highlights include getting knocked around by three guys in the locker-room, then finding one latter during recess and beating the shit out of him infront of everyone until he was crying on the ground,

choking a guy mostly unconscious in bus line after school after he jumped me in the library,

and (not my proudest moment) knocking a kid half-way out by smashing him into the railing on the stairs a couple times after he threw shit at me and said something about my momma in math class.

I want to emphasis: these are the highlights, but I was getting into at least one for real knock down drag out fistfight every month.

During all these, the worst punishment I ever received was a bunch of in-school suspension and some anger management classes after BASHING SOMONES HEAD AGAINST A METAL RAILING DIRECTLY INFRONT OF A TEACHER.

I probably got some brownie points with admin. because I wasn't a discipline problem other than getting fights all the time, but this was some serious life-time movie bullshit, and it wasn't just me. I was just the only kid autistic enough to not internalize the pecking order and just suck it up.

This changed real fast after 1999. Immediately after columbine went down, enforcement changed instantly. Part of it was that I had put on 60 pounds by then and went from tall and skinny to a 20" neck, but most of it was incredibly rigorous enforcement of existing rules.

If the teachers found anyone fighting for any reason, they would make your parents come in from work to pick both of you up, which is 20 time the punishment of any amount of suspensions; and repeat offenders actually started getting expelled or suspended for weeks/months.

I really think it's all down to a bunch of kids dying in school all at once on and then ending up in TV, instead of in onesies and twosies after school in private.

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#2 lockdown forever poll:

responders likely don't mean this very literally. they're trying to say keep the look down and don't cop out of it with excuses like "COVID is coming is under control and that's the numbers etc"

to illustrate look at Israel. 2 months ago they had practically zero cases, huge percentage of vaccinated. so the reasonable person would say you can open up, open the airport blah blah. this is exactly what these people tell you: do not open up no matter what. Indeed, now in Israel there is a fourth wave thousands of cases every day etc

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Re: Botox. What does that say about the condition colloquially known as "resting bitch face"?

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#2: I misread the chart as "clubbing seals" instead of "sealing clubs" and assumed this was a piece about horrible Canadian seal hunting practices.

#20: I'm not sure if it's campaign, or change in zeitgeist but smoking. Oh boy, in the 2000s we used to smoke in the corridors of the university, in bars, pubs, cafes, restaurants. There were smoking and non-smoking inter-city bus services. I used to have an ashtray on my bedside. It was super normal to smoke inside, and even though being a very smell-sensitive person I was ok with that and even did myself.

8 years ago I quit smoking but even then it was a huge taboo for me to smoke inside. If somebody smoke inside like once a week ago, I'd smell it and hate it. Maybe it was the campaigns that turned me so much, or maybe me for some reason becoming kinda obsessed with cleaning but I see it wasn't only me. Indoor smoking bans from being something that everybody laughed at for being unrealistic to being something that's widely accepted in less than a decade is interesting. By the way the country is Turkey.

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#20: one anecdote that surprised me, just today a 15 year old told me that he never really saw bullying in his life.

This surprised me as he's an introvert guy who likes math and programming; the kind I would expect to be picked on at least somewhat. He's gone to the same school (an expensive international school in São Paulo, Brazil) since he was little, it holds awareness campaigns every year which he seemed to feel were unnecessary (but maybe they were effective?).

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Also, "Domstack" gave me a great laugh.

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Dominican Republic. Easy. Baseball. Dozens of Dominicans have come to the US and gotten very rich playing baseball. They may not return permanently, but they do do things like building fancy houses back on the Island that injects capital into the economic system.

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#3 meditation also lack active control studies.

a few studies by Richard Davidson found no effect from meditation (music therapy was the active control) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Richard+davidson+meditation+active+control&btnG=

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Speaking of ἔθνος, I'd like to register my extreme displeasure with the etymology of Wales, Galois, Vlachs, Walloon and Rotwelsch.

Derived from the proto-germanic *Walhaz, possibly the name of a celtic tribe also known as the Volcae, it has been used to refer to all sorts of 'foreign' peoples, especially those who speak romance or celtic languages. Can the germanic peoples not think up a better exonym? It's a bit lazy simply calling everyone else the foreigners.

Also Welsh onions, which are Chinese.

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founding

Entrapment is a really interesting field of law, and one in which (disclaimer) I am by no means an expert. It's basically the only aspect of criminal law that isn't Constituionalized. That is, almost everything that pertains to criminal procedure has an underlying constitutional right that almost necessarily will result in an effective remedy (such as dismissal of the case, overturn of conviction, release from prison, attachment of jeopardy such that re-prosecution is impossible, or any of them) if they are sufficiently proved up.

Entrapment is different. There's no Constitutional right not to be entrapped. The means it's basically a pure issue for the jury (or grand jury, or even possibly preliminary hearing, which is the equivalent of a grand jury in most states but presided over by a judge). If those governappers want to use that defense, they'll need to make it directly at trial, more or less.

As to whether this is good, I'm on the fence. Crimes vary in both their punishment and the procedure that is due. Misdemeanors are punishable by up to a year in jail, felonies by more than a year, and then there are special classes of felonies in many states with increased ranges/minimums of incarceration when there's violence, sexual violence, guns, drugs, etc. The more minor the offense, and the less punishment possible, reduces the amount of process. For example (and don't quote me on this I'm not a criminal lawyer) jury trials aren't required for misdemeanors punishable by less than 6 months in jail.

I don't see why this framework couldn't be applied to entrapment. As the punishment increases, the constitutionality of entrapment decreases. If it's for a misdemeanor DUI or theft (stealing bikes), sure go for it. If it's for a felony DUI or felony theft, maybe it would depend from case to case (that kind of vagueness could have other issues, both constitutional and in terms of police procedure; that is, would the possibility of having a minor felony conviction thrown out for entrapment make cops more or less likely do it? Because on the other hand, the judge might agree and they might have an easy conviction. I don't know, but I tend to suspect police will do institutionally whatever is maximally bad).

If you're entrapped into committing a violent felony, gun felony, sex felony, death penalty, life imprisonment, 25+ years, sex offender registry, forfeiture of functionally your entire worth, etc., then case dismissed.

Thoughts?

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21: Haiti vs DR divergence

I don't buy that there was a divergence. It just looks like a divergence because the data starts in 1960, and the handle on the hockey sticks always look small. But when you just look at Haiti vs DR GDP in the year 1960, DR has 3x Haiti's GDP.

Haiti vs DR GDP/cap from 1960 - 1970: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?end=1970&locations=DO-HT&start=1960

3x GDP/cap is the difference between Mexico and Spain, and also life expectancy in Spain is 8 years greater than in Mexico. I think is going on is that DR's growth trajectory was to Haiti's in 1960 what Spain's growth trajectory is to Mexico's today. At this rate Spain will have 15x Mexico's GDP in 60 years too! Do you think people in 2080 will look back at Spain and Mexico today and call 2020 a divergence too? Because it's not; Spain has been richer than Mexico for centuries. So DR was probably richer than Haiti for centuries before 1960 as well.

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#14 reminds me of "CopSpace" from Charlie Stross's "Halting State", although democratised to non-cops too.

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founding

Based on past things I've seen like it I absolutely would not trust shinigami eyes.

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#25 - I'd be interested to compare analysis of land reform in Asia with land reform in Africa. I have seen several opinion articles over the years that have argued the redistribution of large farms owned by white descendants-of-colonialists to small farm owned by black descendants-of-colonised-peoples has not worked and has led to falls in productivity. Zimbabwe is often cited as an example.

Sorry, I don't have references to cite and I don't know whether the arguments in either case (Africa or Asia) are valid, or what differences may exist between the two.

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founding

i wonder the reaction would have been if it was a real baby?

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#3: As a therapist who has to read a lot of therapy research, I agree with everything in that twitter thread. My favorite part:

"* the relationship between the patient and the therapist, and a host of NONSPECIFIC factors, make up the majority of psychotherapy value, but it has huge value!

* the guild wars within brand of therapy do not put the patient first and are embarrassing" (he has a cute GIF of a bunch of kangaroos punching each other in the face)

I found the guild wars over brands of therapy to be totally embarrassing within my first month in practice, particularly knowing how lame a lot of the research is. I'm glad to see someone say it out loud. I often struggle for words in how to convey this to patients for whom all the gobbledygook with acronyms is either entrancing or horrifying, when really it's just a huge distraction.

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Regarding #3, Bruce Wampold does an excellent review of these critiques in The Great Psychotherapy Debate and provides a framework for his beliefs about what makes psychotherapy work (which he calls "The Contextual Model" and contrasts with "The Medical Model") and what research needs to be done to improve psychotherapy based on these beliefs. If these critiques and potential solutions to them are of interest to you, I highly recommend checking out The Great Psychotherapy Debate.

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Anecdata: I was intensely, though in ways not super visible to teachers, bullied in high school (2007-2011). The bullies rarely caught any flac for it, and it was widespread - as opposed to just one or two kids and their posses, I was a general "punching bag" for the whole school (in quotes because it was never actually physically violent - the most physical it got was people throwing staples and wads of gum and various junk at the back of my head during class, trying to get it to stick in my long, thick, wavy hair because straight hair was the fashion and me not straightening mine was a faux pas in need of aggressive correction apparently)

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#1 - Why wouldn't the obvious answer be that botox makes you look younger and prettier, which is precisely what people who are paying for botox wanted to achieve, which then makes them less depressed? People pay hundreds of dollars for botox because it improves their appearance. Improving one's appearance will make you feel better, compared to getting a placebo which does nothing to your appearance when you wanted to look better. Is that just too obvious for these researchers or what?

I found this amusing, because I get botox on other areas of my face, but I purposely do NOT get botox on my glabellar muscles because I want to preserve the ability to frown. I consider the ability to look bitchy and disapproving to be very important, and I don't want to lose that useful ability.

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Regarding entrapment, recall that the FBI was using the same tactic a decade ago against Islamic terrorism, and that there was concern that this was racial profiling. I think pretty much all of the same arguments apply here.

Bullying and teen pregnancy are dependent on pretty different character flaws, but I suspect part of it is that bullying mostly needs to happen in public so putting pressure on authority figures gives easy results, whereas sex is much easier to hide until its too late.

The only thing I recall about Haiti/DR is that Haiti had 25% of the land and 75% of the people, and also there were some racial tensions going on between the two countries and that this went a long way in explaining the disparities. This was from AJ+, though, which has a pretty strong left-wing bias.

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Anecdote warning: one of my close family members got Botox as a treatment for depression. The number of injections, in a single session, in order to accomplish it was something astounding like 20-30. Ultimately it didn't really work - if it did, it was outshone by the conventional anti-depressants. At least their skin is smooth and free of wrinkles?

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https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMdnvb4sR/ on the uncanny-valley effect, vs autism

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...Shinigami Eyes? Really? Lit. "death god eyes", and the Death Note ones let you see someone's birth name and kill them more easily.

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Regarding #3, Issues with Psychotherapy research. There's more to say about it:

1. things like alpha control, "primary outcome" and "secondary outcome" only appeared in the last, say, 10 years. Before, p-hacking was the rule rather than the exception.

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2. Proper handling of missing data and dropout is still an issue. Many studies now use "Multiple imputation" or some other method based on the missing-at-random assumption, stating that one can fill the gaps from e.g. dropout using the available data from that patient and other patients. Most often, the results of an MAR analysis do not differ from the analysis of the protocol population, so this is not more than a fig leaf.

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3. Questionable use standardized effect sizes for reporting the results and meta-analysis. Standardized effect sizes have no unit. Really. Such numbers are meaningless for measurement.

For illustration, consider two outcomes, self-report (Beck depression inventory, BDI) with the Hamilton rating scale (HDRS). For illustration, BDI is kg, and HRDS is meter. Study 1 found 5 kg advantage for Therapy A, Study 2 found 6 m benefit for Therapy B. I guess, outside psychology, no one would try to average 5 kg and -6 m [it's not even clear why one would put a minus sign here]. Psychologists say, no problem, we'll just calculate Hedges g (= hide the unit) and then the problem magically goes away.

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(last one on #3)

5. In the unlikely case that the therapists have been randomized and are, thus, able to deliver both therapies: Any ethically working therapist will always try to provide the "best" intervention in a given situation. In other words, we have a perfect null hypothesis.

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4. Most often, therapists aren't randomized, just the patients. So the "evidence" gathered is observational.

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#5: In Russian, heathen is translated as "язычник" (yazychnik), derived from "язык" (yazyk). In contemporary Russian язык means language, but in Old Russian that word meant "the people, ethnos", so "язычник" had indeed been borrowed from Greek ἐθνικός (related to [other] peoples)

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The "lockdown" poll results don't particularly surprise me, as most of this falls into the category of things some people would want anyway. People mad about noise at nighttime might want a curfew indefinitely. People who are liking not getting sick might like masking indoors indefinitely. They might see post-travel quarantine as a way to prevent future pandemics, and think of it as low-cost if they don't travel much themselves. And so forth. The only one that really surprises me is contract tracing. Not sure what that's about.

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https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00324-2/fulltext#seccesectitle0013

"People who had recovered from COVID-19, including those no longer reporting symptoms, exhibited significant cognitive deficits versus controls when controlling for age, gender, education level, income, racial-ethnic group, pre-existing medical disorders, tiredness, depression and anxiety. The deficits were of substantial effect size for people who had been hospitalised (N = 192), but also for non-hospitalised cases who had biological confirmation of COVID-19 infection (N = 326). Analysing markers of premorbid intelligence did not support these differences being present prior to infection. Finer grained analysis of performance across sub-tests supported the hypothesis that COVID-19 has a multi-domain impact on human cognition."

"The scale of the observed deficit was not insubstantial; the 0.47 SD global composite score reduction for the hospitalized with ventilator sub-group was greater than the average 10-year decline in global performance between the ages of 20 to 70 within this dataset. It was larger than the mean deficit of 480 people who indicated they had previously suffered a stroke (−0.24SDs) and the 998 who reported learning disabilities (−0.38SDs). For comparison, in a classic intelligence test, 0.47 SDs equates to a 7-point difference in IQ."

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Well congratulations from me to Tom Chivers- been reading his stuff on Unherd for a while now, which I started reading as a bubble-breaking exercise to counter my heavy reading of The Guardian and The Economist.

I just hope he doesn't read too much into the comments on his articles on Covid, as there's a big freedom-at-all-costs-no-vaccines-for-us-its-a-massive-hoax contingent that comes out every time and ignores whatever he's written.

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Do you know of any movies showing cave art in firelight?

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A little self-promotion: #14 (Shinigami Eyes) is like a plot point in my book "In My Memory Locked", but with the filtering based on attractiveness and not political leanings. Rather than highlighting people the user wished to avoid, neural implants would smudge-out the unattractive to beautify the world around them.

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One way to give placebo psychotherapy would be to have earnest non therapist like me try to help the patient as best they can.

This should factor out the value of a therapist education.

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After watching the Ace Attorney video, it feels like a hoax. I just can't believe that was written by AI.

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Re #20: my highschool had one of those "zero tolerance policies" where you would get suspended if you hit your bully back. If you're the kind of nerd that gets bullied (like I was), then this actually didn't just seem like an empty threat. And it always felt super unfair. The (school) awareness campaings weren't particularly good either. I find it hard to believe children are no longer bullied at school, but if it's true this is great. Given the glorification of bullying in popular media (see most US sitcoms, some specific examples: Jerry in Parks in Rec, Jerry in "Rick and Morty", Andy in the Office (for a while, at least)), I find it hard to believe that suddenly bullying has become uncool...

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[Epistemic status 75%] I usually like AliceFromQueens' takes on twitter, but I rather disagree with her staunch approval of the downfall of bullying. I was, like many people, once a nerdy kid who had confrontations with would-be bullies. My review of the institution is not totally negative. I found a way to adapt to people who exhibited a desire to want to bully me in a way that I feel led to personal growth that I may not have had otherwise. If you're trying to optimize for not getting bullied in the future, you have to think about the bully's incentives. What is the bully getting out of this interaction? What does he/she find gratifying in this experience? And can I deny that for them? (Obviously I think this only applies to non-physical bullying, no one ever tried to beat me up, and I think I agree that that kind of bullying probably has no silver lining. You can't really control how strong you are in middle school.)

This taught me a lot of practical empathy, and of modeling other people's perception of their social status and what they think they are supposed to do to elevate it. Stuff I would not have been remotely interested in paying attention to if not for bullies finding a way to make it my problem.

I would argue that the modern version of bullying just doesn't come from individuals. It has to come from groups. All that negative energy has just found new outlets, things like oblique shaming (e.g. "don't people who do X realize that they're hurting cause Y?"), sub-tweeting, etc. I strong doubt that childhood social interactions have become panaceas of friendship, camaraderie, and altruism now that bullies are uncool (but I don't know any children so maybe I am just wrong). At least old-school bullies had a narrow scope.

I'm 27 and I remember the anti-bullying campaigns from when I was in high school and I did not think they were moving in the right direction. The kids that were chosen by the faculty as the anti-bully ambassadors were just mean and cruel in novel ways, now officially sanctioned. I draw a straight line from this to the nerd-shaming that still goes on under the guise of "Big Tech Bad."

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I’d have to double check the statistics, but I’m pretty sure that public awareness campaigns regarding *gun safety* have been successful as well. I think people are trying to expand this into more general anti-gun awareness campaigns which are clearly not working (lots of previously anti-gun liberals became gun owners, indicating that a growing number don’t believe the ‘crime is increasing but you don’t need to protect yourself because the police, who are White supremacist mass murderers who kill innocent people all the time’ hype; imagine that).

This indicates that whether a large percentage of the public fundamentally believe the assumptions of the public awareness campaign makes a difference.

Perhaps a lot of it is the recognition that ‘I always thought {drunk driving / bullying / smoking with children in the room / shooting handguns into the air at weddings as a celebratory act} was wrong but I didn’t want to be rude, but now I know it’s not rude.’

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A lot of the push back on #20 is strange to me.

First, bright line or zero tolerance rules seem naturally better for the less popular/athletic/cool kids, all the things that make a student a target for bullying also make it more likely that administrators and teachers and will side with the other student in any conflict.

Second, schools are operating with limited resources/time/expertise, they can't realistically investigate every conflict between students to any serious degree, listening to other students is naturally going to once again favor the popular/athletics/cool kids over the bullied, and everyone involved can be assumed to present a version of events that is favorable to themselves.

Third, zero tolerance policies are almost always the best policy in schools, the difference between zero tolerance quiet reading time and "sorry I had to borrow a pencil from the person next to me" quiet reading time, is that one is not actually quiet at all. Students will always have an excuse for any rule breaking and will attempt to litigate said rule breaking for as long as they possible can. Again resources and time are already limited trying to adjudicate cases is a massive burden (see, the courts).

Obviously a zero tolerance policy is not a perfect solution, and yes the policy will catch false positives, but literally any policy is going to have trade offs along this dimension, simply stating that the false positive trade off exists and dusting your hands off isn't enough.

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> And I think about things like how many people get their bikes stolen in the Bay Area, and how police never do anything about it, and how one of the proposals is to plant honeypot bikes in easily-watchable areas and arrest the people who steal them until maybe eventually San Franciscans get the message that bike-stealing can have negative consequences - and this has a lot to recommend it over just letting bikes get stolen (or governors get kidnapped) every so often.

This seems like a bizarre argument. The bike theft crimes are actually happening and require no encouragement or funding or entrapment to get people to steal them. How exactly is that comparable to the governor's political kidnapping plot (a crime that never happens), likely wouldn't have even been thought of had the FBI informant not suggested and pushed it repeatedly, and almost certainly would never have even happened had the FBI not funded travel expenses, food, drink, lodgings and more.

Then consider the cost of such stings: in one case it's the cost of a bike with irrefutable video evidence securing a conviction, in the other, tens of thousands of dollars for the expenses to set up the arrest, and it will likely cost millions of dollars to try them, and a conviction is far from certain due to the questionable circumstances.

Finally, deterrence is clearly possibly by arresting bike thieves, but what deterrence do you expect for a crime that the FBI invented? If anything, this would encourage the FBI to create more terrorists (which they've been doing routinely since 9/11).

Honestly, I'm having trouble seeing how you can consider these circumstances even remotely similar so as to suggest any meaningful lessons of one might be transferrable to the other.

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20. I think a lot of this "bullying has gone down" stuff is a shift in how bullying happens. High school locker room style bullying might have declined but Twitter style bullying is definitely up. I think the other thing that shifted was I remember the old model being a maintain the keep-the-peace model (which favors the aggressor) and the new model is a punish the aggressor model (which favors the victim). This also means there's an incentive to play the victim which undoubtedly reflects a lot of out of school dynamics as well.

21. Analysis of Haiti gets marred a lot by racial politics. There's a strong desire to portray the Haitian revolutionaries and the only modern state founded by slave revolt as good. But they really weren't: they established an aristocratic military dictatorship. While they freed the slaves they also forced them to work on government run plantations to produce goods for export. The profits were assigned to noblemen who gained their nobility through fighting for the regime as officers. These officers formed aristocratic families that are still around. They massacred their political enemies. They tortured former slaves who didn't agree to work on the totally not plantations. They attempted to forcibly integrate the Dominican Republic against their will repeatedly. These attempts included cultural destruction like trying to drive the Spanish language off the island.

If I had to do a single factor analysis (and I don't think it's ever wise to do so) I'd say the military gets the lion's share of the credit or discredit on both sides. The Dominican military never tried to dominate the country the way the Haitian military did. While they sometimes subverted the republic in coups they never allowed the republic to actually end. It was always "temporary" and the republic's institutions always continued to exist. The Dominican military tells itself stories about how it tried to fight off the United States to protect Dominican self-determination despite it being a hopeless fight. The Haitain military doesn't exist because the country decided having one around was more dangerous than not having one. (The recent President trying to revive the military was seen as a clear sign of a move towards dictatorship.) The Haitian military supported establishment of personal rule by dictators and literal monarchies.

The Dominican military's story is national myth-making. But it points to the different cultures and willingness to rule directly. Trujillo was a military dictator but he had to deliver some degree of good governance and civil institutions. Papa and Baby Doc did not. In particular, you can look at their propaganda. Trujillo consistently portrayed himself as an incredibly hard working servant of the people. Duvalier portrayed himself as an almost divine being in quasi-monarchical style. As recently as literally right now, Moise's rule was personal and unconstitutional in a way that just isn't imaginable in the DR's political culture. It wasn't even possible during the mid-20th century at the highpoint of the Dominican dictatorship.

This has all sorts of downstream effects on things like rule of law. For example, the Dominican Republic's laws actually were pretty consistently enforced by a judiciary throughout the dictatorship. They weren't in Haiti. The most visible effect of this is environmental damage. The Dominican Republic has more forests than Haiti even controlling for land. When illegal logging started in DR the loggers were prosecuted under various commercial and environmental laws. When they failed to comply police were sent. Attempts to bribe either the dictator or local officials didn't work so they attacked the police instead. The regime saw this as a rebellion and sent in the military. And because it was a military dictatorship, the military dropped napalm on logging camps and massacred the survivors. In Haiti there was no expectation top to bottom the law actually mattered. Various bribes allowed logging companies to operate openly. Likewise, Dominican street gangs have much less free reign than Haitian ones. Even under Trujillo, a gang couldn't just be in favor with the ruling party and be immune to prosecution. This is still how it works in Haiti.

Another difference is that the bogeyman of Haitian politics are Haitians who aren't sufficiently racially pure. The bogeyman of Dominican politics are the Haitians. It's an internal vs external enemy. There were 20th century anti-Haitian riots in the DR. These get portrayed as racist by a lot of American analysts. And they were racist. But they weren't racist in the Black vs white sense. It was Dominicans vs Haitians. Black Dominicans participated as rioters against people who were part or fully Haitian. I'm not sure how different the effects of that actually are: both lead to racist xenophobia and internal attacks on minority populations. The equivalent attacks in Haiti were against people who (supposedly) had too much white ancestry. This was part of Duvalier's noiriste philosophy and an attack he leveled against his lighter skinned political rival.

22. I've seen people try to recreate this. It does work: in flickering light some basic cave painting techniques make things look like they're moving. Animals legs move, spears throw (not from the hand but back and forth), that kind of thing. If you put them in sequence you get an effect kind of like a moving comic book.

25. An easier angle of attack would be to help marketize land ownership. If you can make it easier to buy and sell land then you lower the barriers and land ownership will naturally flow to more productive uses. Some of this is legal interventions but some of it is just friction caused by archaic processes. It's also economically sustainable because you can charge for the service. Also, you can always look at providing capital goods into capital poor economies.

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> I am constantly mystified by which awareness campaigns work extraordinarily well (eg drunk driving, maybe bullying?) vs. fail (eg premarital sex, drugs, etc)

Strikes me that the former example group has "real" moral weight, while the latter gives off "arbitrary adult rules" vibes.

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#25 I wonder if the question of large farm yields vs small farm yields is really about the business models.

There is a current conversation in the US about how to run farms that feels relevant, though it doesn’t address the question of redistribution at all.

The conversation is about land management, and more specifically soil management. The pitch is that the best way to farm is to focus on healthy soil, which most places means actively making the soil healthier. There are two prongs to this conversation, and the one with the most headlines is climate change (the climate story is that healthy soil stores a lot of carbon, and if everyone worked on building healthy soil, it would pull enough carbon out of the air to get us to net zero and maybe wind back the damage of industrialization. These are interesting claims, but not germane). The second one seems relevant to the yield question though, which is: focusing on the soil leads to a better business model for the farmer.

There’s a farmer from North Dakota named Gabe Brown, who seems to be the primary articulator of this perspective. He tells a story about being forced into this model out of desperation: cash crops went bust four years in a row due to hail (uninsured, naturally), and he couldn’t afford to buy the fertilizer he needed for the next year. So then he goes searching for a way to make stuff grow without buying a lot of fertilizer, and lands on books about soil health. Through a series of serendipitous events, Gabe concludes that he should measure success by profit per acre. By contrast, other small farmers focus on raw yield as their metric (because they mostly grow subsidized products), and large corporate concerns focus on net profit.

There are a lot of details involved, but the shape of the story eventually boils down to this: big farms (in the US) focus on growing one cash crop at a time on land very intensively, which degrades the land; when doing things focused on soil health, lots of stuff needs to be grown simultaneously. This (can) increase net yield, but more importantly keeps yields stable because you don’t go broke when prices fall for a single crop, or get hurt as badly by floods/hail/wind/etc. This leads to a lot more direct-to-consumer activity, like farmer’s markets. In a business context, this means the smaller farm has diverse revenue streams, fewer expenses, and less exposure to catastrophic risks.

It occurs to me that in developing countries the same type of mechanism might obtain: small farms grow what they need and sell the surplus more locally; large farms use a lot of hired labor, focus on a few cash crops to simplify management, and can sell to regional/global markets. The yield differences in this view are sort of just the ecological consequences of the business model.

I do note that there is no reason at all that an arbitrarily large farm cannot deploy the exact same techniques. It just seems that they don’t; my guess would be for legibility reasons.

Where I heard this from:

- Kiss The Ground | Netflix | This is a moderately cheesy piece of advocacy for the climate change angle.

- The Biggest Little Farm | Netflix | This is a self-made documentary about a couple who started a farm with the goal of being sustainable and traditional, and wound up doing a bunch of the same stuff Gabe Brown did. Also cheesy.

- Dirt to Soil | Amazon (Book) | Written by Gabe Brown. Recommended for basically being repeated cycles of direct experimentation and following through on the results, even if agriculture isn’t your thing.

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Bike theft is a regular problem, unlike kidnapping governors.

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Haiti wasn't notably more dysfunctional and poor than other Caribbean and Latin American countries until fairly recently which seems to undermine the French indemnity argument (still a dick move on their part though). The most politically incorrect explanation for Haiti's lack of success vis a vis the Dominican Republic since the 1950s is Duvalier driving out the mulatto elite in Haiti while the Dominican Republic under Trujillo attracted many Jewish refugees in the 1930s since no one else was willing to take them.

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(#21) "It’s still a minor mystery why DR has done so much better than the rest of Latin America" Has it? World Bank data has similar GDP per capita as Latin America+Caribbean (latter was higher as recently as 2015), DR has lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality, lower poverty, overall seems a wash. I thought this might be skewed by some high scores in tiny island countries, but no-- DR has lower life expectancy and infant mortality than all the big countries in the region, and slightly-above-average GDP as far as I can tell. FreedomHouse gives it a 67/100, "Partly Free", which seems on the low side for Latin America (much of which is fully free). So it seems to me the question is why Haiti is such a mind-boggling outlier for the region, while DR is just a foil for the regional average, no? 

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Re #2, I would say none of the options listed fits the description of "permanent lockdown", at least not as the term "lockdown" has mostly been used here in the UK.

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Regarding the FBI’s role in the kidnapping effort, there’s a significant difference between placing a bicycle in public in San Francisco and arresting anyone who tries to steal it, versus using undercover informants or agents to affirmatively encourage people to commit crimes.

As to the former, “the fact that government agents ‘merely afford opportunities or facilities for the commission of the offense does not’ constitute entrapment.” Sherman v. United States, 356 U.S. 369, 372 (1958). https://www.leagle.com/decision/1958725356us3691677

As to the latter, “[e]ntrapment occurs only when the criminal conduct was "the product of the creative activity of law-enforcement officials. To determine whether entrapment has been established, a line must be drawn between the trap for the unwary innocent and the trap for the unwary criminal.” Id. In other words, entrapment happens “when the criminal design originates with the officials of the Government, and they implant in the mind of an innocent person the disposition to commit the alleged offense and induce its commission in order that they may prosecute.” Id.

I don’t think that this distinction works all the time. It leads to all kinds of conjecture regarding whether the defendant was already predisposed to commit the crime prior to inducement by the government, which invites a determination of guilt or innocence based on grasping speculation about what someone might have done in a different situation that’s not in evidence. I think that’s generally very hard to square with the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In addition, a lot of the time the evidence of independent predilection towards crime to overcome an entrapment defense consists of non-criminal (if distasteful) speech, such as anti-government statements or policy arguments that are protected by the First Amendment. Using constitutionally protected speech to argue someone would have committed a crime absent government encouragement can have uncomfortable implications, and seems inconsistent with recent assurances that “the FBI holds sacred the rights of individuals to peacefully exercise their First Amendment freedoms.” https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Wray%20Witness%20Testimony3.pdf

But however you want to slice the entrapment question, and where the line should be drawn in terms of what level of government inducement towards criminal activity should be tolerated in finding people to prosecute, I think there’s an easy and clear distinction between (1) watching a honeypot bike, which involves no affirmative inducement to commit crime beyond creating an occasion for someone to express their own disposition towards theft, and (2) using a leadership position within an organization to enmesh it in a criminal conspiracy.

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Regarding the FBI’s role in the kidnapping effort, there’s a significant difference between placing a bicycle in public in San Francisco and arresting anyone who tries to steal it, versus using undercover informants or agents to affirmatively encourage people to commit crimes.

As to the former, “the fact that government agents ‘merely afford opportunities or facilities for the commission of the offense does not’ constitute entrapment.” Sherman v. United States, 356 U.S. 369, 372 (1958). https://www.leagle.com/decision/1958725356us3691677

As to the latter, “[e]ntrapment occurs only when the criminal conduct was "the product of the creative activity of law-enforcement officials. To determine whether entrapment has been established, a line must be drawn between the trap for the unwary innocent and the trap for the unwary criminal.” Id. In other words, entrapment happens “when the criminal design originates with the officials of the Government, and they implant in the mind of an innocent person the disposition to commit the alleged offense and induce its commission in order that they may prosecute.” Id.

I don’t think that this distinction works all the time. It leads to all kinds of conjecture regarding whether the defendant was already predisposed to commit the crime prior to inducement by the government, which invites a determination of guilt or innocence based on grasping speculation about what someone might have done in a different situation that’s not in evidence. I think that’s generally very hard to square with the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In addition, a lot of the time the evidence of independent predilection towards crime to overcome an entrapment defense consists of non-criminal (if distasteful) speech, such as anti-government statements or policy arguments that are protected by the First Amendment. Using constitutionally protected speech to argue someone would have committed a crime absent government encouragement can have uncomfortable implications, and seems inconsistent with recent assurances that “the FBI holds sacred the rights of individuals to peacefully exercise their First Amendment freedoms.” https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Wray%20Witness%20Testimony3.pdf

But however you want to slice the entrapment question, and where the line should be drawn in terms of what level of government inducement towards criminal activity should be tolerated in finding people to prosecute, I think there’s an easy and clear distinction between (1) watching a honeypot bike, which involves no affirmative inducement to commit crime beyond creating an occasion for someone to express their own disposition towards theft, and (2) using a leadership position within an organization to enmesh it in a criminal conspiracy.

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Typo in that UK COVID survey - they don't want permanent lockdown by sealing clubs, but to be permanently clubbing seals. Their domestic champion, Sean Locke, can take four at a time - two hammers and a pair of hobnail boots. Some describe it as like a supermarket trolley-dash: https://youtu.be/0Q9IRpFGgPY?t=79

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I'm travelling and don't have a lot of time to elaborate on this, but #21 was wrong:

Claim: The Dominican Republic is doing much better than the rest of Latin America

This is false. The Dominican Republic's current income per capita is $8282 which makes it #17 out of 32 countires in the region, slightly below average. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1066610/gross-national-income-per-capita-latin-america-caribbean/

Claim: Haiti and the Dominican Republic were equal in 1960.

Not true. In 1960, Haiti's GDP per capita was $70 and the DR's GDP per capita was $204, a difference of 3x, per the world bank data that pops up when you google <country gdp per capita>.

The elephant in the room is that the Dominican republic is genetically 52% european, which is again slightly below average among Latin American countries.

See figure 4 in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4374169/

Meanwhile Haiti is reported to be >95% African ancestry (after the slave revolt there was a genocide against white Haitians). Whether we use genetic or cultural explanations we should expect the more-European country to perform more like Europe and the more-African country to perform more like Africa.

I don't have good data on this, but I'd bet a lot of money that if representative samples were taken, they'd find a higher average IQ in DR than in Haiti and that explains some of the difference in speed of development.

Rather than only looking for environmental factors that might have held Haiti back post-1960, we should also look for environmental factors that might have held DR back pre-1960 to explain why the gap was only 3x then.

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22: Wait, does this mean cave paintings are the first recorded instance of animated GIFs?

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That Chinese propaganda is cool and accurate.

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Regarding #17 on David Friedman on Noah Smith on Adam Smith: Friedman's response seems pedantic and fussy to me. Noah might be overstating Adam's progressive tendencies a little, but I disagree that he "would have to be deliberately dishonest" or not have read the book to write what he did. For one, he never even claims that Adam is "arguing for antitrust law". I could go on, but only at the risk of sounding even more pedantic and fussy.

At the end of the day, who cares what Adam Smith has to say? He was no more a prophet than Karl Marx. His ideas either happen to be right or they happen to be wrong. They are not right or wrong by virtue of being his ideas. And I saw the purpose of Noah's piece as being to undermine the (usually dogmatic) people who tend to cite him as an authority rather than actually evaluate how various economic ideas play out in the real world in the 21st century, where dogmatic ideas tend to be unworkable or insane.

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#27 - Marvellous idea about the gospels. I await with interest the discovery of a fifth gospel containing the ‘good ending’, which Jesus was only able to get once he looked up the walkthrough.*

#18 - Lovecraft on Hayek - really good to have a quote from Lovecraft’s later letters, after he had stopped thinking of fascism as temptingly similar to his own ideas about civilisation and race. The impression I got was that Robert E Howard was a big part of arguing him out of this - their last letters are heated (not to mention long!) with Howard fiercely arguing that Nazism and Lovecraft’s own fondness for “civilisation” relied on a sanitised fantasy of history. Their letters are often interesting reading, actually, since they were both very smart, widely read, articulate and eccentric. Lovecraft was probably on the spectrum; I suspect (but have never seen it properly discussed) that Howard had ADHD. There is something very sweet about Howard breaking off from chatting about language groups and migrations to tell Lovecraft about his visit to a massive cave and saying ‘it was just like one of your stories, you would have loved it’.

#9 - Dominic Cummings’ blog / substack is v interesting. Even if you don’t agree with all his views, he is v civil, reasonable and interested in all sorts of interesting things. As you say, it is extremely unusual for someone that high up in government to, essentially, turn himself into an amiable poster. Although I wonder how many of them have alts!

#23 - FBI encouraging domestic terror plots: have you seen the Chris Morris film ‘The Day Will Come’ on this topic? It is a companion piece of sorts to his earlier ‘Four Lions’ - ‘Four Lions’ is about four UK men who are hopeless idiots, but genuinely want to commit a terrorist act; ‘The Day Will Come’ is about a probably schizophrenic black Muslim in America who really doesn’t want to be a terrorist and who is manipulated and manoeuvred by FBI agents because it will serve their careers to ‘stop’ a ‘terrorist plot’. Both are very funny and sad. In both, the interviews with Chris Morris are also interesting.

* weirdly, this idea is v similar to an extremely successful series of Japanese visual novels called Higurashi no nako koro ni (‘When the Cicadas Cry’) about a Japanese rural town with a lot of dark secrets, which seems to be locked in a time loop. It eventually becomes apparent (spoilers obvs) that this is all the result of a local deity and her priestess who would really quite like to find a sequence of events that doesn’t end with a horrible massacre in which she dies. Given the number of shady things going on, this is harder than it sounds.

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I'm quite sure that someone already wrote that, but since the german word for heathen is "Heide" and that words means heather as well as heathen, I would be *very* surprised if the there is a correlation to "ethnic".

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You should be much more concerned about the FBI issue., You're not understanding the risk. The FBI did this all the time in the COINTELPROL days. You're looking at as "people who were likely to commit crimes were baited" when its "potentially non-violent political activist groups are radicalized by undercover FBI agents who understand how to manipulate group psychology and then are baited into being accomplices to crimes those FBI agents planned as a means to suppress political activist groups because we cant just outright say "we dont like your view, you're under arrest"

Added "Shigami Eyes" and so far no one, including trans friends, is color coded, so some question how well this oarticular app actually works.

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What on earth is placebo psychotherapy? When they ask you how that makes you feel, are they only pretending to have a degree? Are they only pretending to care? Are they lip-syncing to a recording of aaking you how that makes you feel? Are they secretly lizard-people hopped up on sugar?

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The original (I think) digits tweet:

https://twitter.com/excitedstate/status/892137581592403968

W|A's answer is correct in the vigesimal numeric system, however it is trivial to convert into decimal by ignoring the distinction between fingers and toes (or, alternatively, right and left).

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