I've seen a lot of complaints about Substack's comment handling, so I went and created an extension that helps with some of the issues. Features include options to load all comments, highlight new comments, jump to the parent comment when collapsing a thread, and use the old SSC styling. You can find it at https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks.
It's weird that we don't talk more about age. I'm in my mid thirties and a lot of what I used to see as something like "deep flaws and inadequacies in humanity and society" are actually more parsimoniously explained by "there are a lot of young people who have not yet experienced the world yet nonetheless have opinions and the capability to act in the world". Young people, of course, have a right to exist, but I wish that I could filter (or sort) Internet comments sections for poster age, or, even better, for how many books the poster has read.
Hey Scott, I loved the taxometrics post! I'm excited to go through the Paul Meehl papers that Beauchaine summarizes. I have a question about something you wrote:
> a few [psychiatric disorders] may be objective distinct categories, especially schizophrenia, narcissistic personality, and endogenous depression
Can you elaborate on why you think NPD belongs on this list?
I am not 100% sure if the etiquette here but here is a link to a podcast I did talking to Kyle Harper about the Fate of Rome. You may be amazed to learn how many Romans died in the plague of Justinian (spoiler alert) ie 50% or more. And then climate change. As Kyle says ‘they couldn’t catch a break’. Anyway hope it’s ok to promote it here.
I assume this shouldn't be possible, so what's the trick? Did they have hundreds of stock-picking services and only advertise the one that worked (seems unlikely, both of the analysts involved beat the market individually while also working together, which should make this harder to pull off)? Are they lying outright? Something else?
At the end of the comment from Anna Stansbury, she says she would be open to doing a guest piece on your blog. Is it possible to reach out to her about that? Wage stagnation is an especially fascinating topic to me and I've been curious about it since you posted the initial piece.
Has there been a thread yet about not-coincidental anagrams of Astral Codex Ten? (It's not an anagram of Slate Star Codex, so old threads from there don't count.)
During the first few months of COVID I got back into researching old blues music via YouTube and Spotify. I read Ted Gioia’s Delta Blues which I highly recommend. His book inspired me to write up my journey into appreciating old country blues music, the deep blues, in hopes that it might help someone else learn to appreciate them too. Part one is about the greatness of Son House.
How likely is it that the far future will be terrible, and what do you all think are the most plausible S-risks, i.e. risks of extreme suffering being created in the far future? Also, what do you all think of Brian Tomasik's list of his top donation recommendations?
I've been dipping into Brett Weinstein's podcast. One thing he harps on pretty frequently is making distinctions between the word "theory" and "hypothesis." His line is that "theory" should be used for things like "the theory of evolution" and not for "string theory."
This is an argument I might have made against creationists in 2009, but it strikes me as a little obtuse these days. It would certainly be nice if everybody agreed to use common terminology, but I don't think you can really prevent meanings from drifting.
Furthermore, I don't think Weinstein's definition matches scientific usage. "Theory" in many fields seems to mean something like "model" or "framework," rather than hypothesis. Or, more verbosely, "a thing that explains existing data and can be manipulated to generate predictions."
Is anyone else subscribed on gmail getting the weird issue where half the substack updates go to the regular inbox and half go to "promotions"? I'm trying to get them all in the regular inbox but not sure how.
I've only just read for the first time the "Against Steelmanning" article linked from the bottom point. It's old so I'll just post my thoughts on it here.
The idea of "steelmanning" probably is misused and badly-done pretty frequently, but I think there are a few steelman-ish techniques that are more-clearly helpful and can be implemented even if you're not a rhetorical genius:
- If you notice your conversation partner make a deductive error but it's really tangential to their main point, or you know of a different thing they *could* have said that would work better, don't bother attacking it. If they continue to bring it up, make the point that it's just not relevant and try to get back to the main topic. This effectively lets you contend with a more parsimonious version of their argument.
- If they provide outlandish hypotheticals or assumptions as bases for their argument, see if you can offer up equivalent bases that at least *sound* less absurd. This will make it clear (to them and yourself) that you're not winning via personal humiliation or anything like that. This doesn't have to be a condescending thing where you're telling them their argument is silling; it's to help you think through what they're saying, too.
- Sometimes the person you're arguing will misconstrue your argument for a more common, similar-sounding, but different argument. In this case, enthusiastically concede that if that *were* your argument, they would indeed be correct to attack it and you understand why, before explaining what you were *really* saying.
Something I have trouble putting into words: Flying Spaghetti Monster, Flat Earth Society, The Pirate Parties - quite different movements - but there is a rejection of seriousness in them. I have been in a Pirate Party - and they actually try to be serious with just a funny name (like: there isn't any law that a party needs to be entirely serious, we have a funny name, but we are serious about ***) - so maybe this is not an extreme case of it. There were other parties with funny names - in Poland we had a famous Beer Friends Party just after the end of Communism. Flat Earthers seem to pretend to be serious, because this is funny, but I don't think anyone of them actually believes in flat Earth (as in they would really base their actions on that belief if there was no audience).
The legibility vs. fidelity axis is something which can purposefully be selected for based on political needs.
My favorite example is in carbon dioxide emissions reductions. The "cap-and-trade" model is widely promoted by the elites. It's even possible that it's the most [economically] efficient way to perform this task. In contrast, a carbon tax is much more legible. Everybody knows how much everybody else is going to be paying.
Cap-and-trade might be subtly modified by the implementation to benefit preferred groups. The number of credits issued every year becomes a political issue which might have financial implications which can be leveraged by the elites, regardless of whether they provide the benefits to the public they are supposed to.
Cap-and-trade is also popular because it hides the pain from the consumer/voter. If your cost of fuel goes up at the pump from carbon taxes, you notice. And that makes the rabble mad. Instead, if costs become really diffuse via cap-and-trade, it becomes a lot harder for the public to notice or reason about. It's also easier to argue that "you" aren't paying the costs, but some "rich company" is, while ignoring network effects.
This means that the illegible option is preferred because it allows the type of policy desired to be enacted with hopefully less political backlash, and possibly more options for insider dealing by elites.
I was thinking about the same thing about pedophilia. There evidently aren't any reliable statistics about how common ephebophilia and hebephilia are, but it's probably pretty common among men, and blends into pedophilia.
Has anyone figured out how to do a memex for art creation yet?
Since RoamResearch and Obsidian have been gaining momentum as personal knowledge management, I've found it invigorating to take notes in such a connected way. I'm trying to figure out how to move my creative pursuits to those kinds of programs that might let me use association and connections as a building block.
I'm struggling to do things that aren't just text and images. I want to find connections form wonderful fonts with palettes I find striking to write new poetry. I want to connect snippets of songs I love to the sounds and timbre of intruments in my DAW. There seems to be a lot of value there and I'm excited to see if it materializes, but I'm still putting my feet on the ground.
I had a great-uncle that was a little bit like this. He wasn't constantly announcing his internal states to the world (or telling people true-but-rude things about themselves), but he was every day of sixty-five before he realized that "Hey, how are you?" was usually social wheel-greasing and did not require a comprehensive response, and he did not DO small talk. I mean, he was deeply interested in other people and wanted to hear about their families and pets and things, but he'd never be like, "How're your kids?" He'd be like, "How is your son Bob, whom I believe just turned eight, and last time we spoke he was struggling with some bullies at school? How did that work out?"
He had no kids of his own, but he was an absolute Pied Piper to the children of the family. Have you ever been four, or eight, or ten, and had someone take everything you said absolutely seriously and ask you questions to understand your thoughts and answer all your questions as honestly and completely as possible? It. Is. Awesome. Children are such little learning machines and it's almost impossible to be a parent or caregiver and never brush anything off. I mean, I feel like I take children more seriously than a lot of people do, because I LOVE watching how they think and I always have, but I must brush my own children off a dozen times a day (especially in quarantine), because it would not be possible to function as an adult caregiver if I didn't. You have to kind-of pick and choose your moments for deep engagement, and your moments for "Please stop asking questions for ten minutes so I can ensure you have food and clean clothes."
My great-uncle never did that, with anyone. This was fantastically amazing for children, who all worshipped him. In our teenaged years, it alternated between being wildly awkward and embarrassing, and this enormous refuge where even your self-obsession with your own minor and fleeting problems was interesting to him -- although he was highly likely to point out more than a few awkward truths you were trying very hard to avoid. By the time I was in college, I learned what all the other adults in our family knew, which was that you could not toss of throwaway lines around him or bring up a topic you didn't want to spend an hour discussing. (And I think this is one of the lovely functions of having a large extended family, where everyone loves you and is used to accommodating your foibles, and might roll their eyes but don't really mind.) I learned later that he was seen as kind-of a local gadfly, because he'd go to every town council meeting and school board meeting and ask a ton of questions, just because he wanted to know. And he'd been an engineer in the war (one of the last engineers who came up without even a high school diploma, just with learning on the job; he got his GED after he retired), and he used to stop at construction sites on his walks after he retired and strike up conversations with the foremen and grill them about everything going on. Every time he went by. He deeply did not understand why city council members or construction site foremen might not want to have in-depth conversations about everything, all the time.
He was married -- his wife was by nature just pretty chill about everything, and also deeply interested in other people and in deep discussions. (Although she knew how to small talk and grease social wheels.) He built their house himself (and it was some Frank Lloyd Wright-ass shit, which I did not appreciate until much later on, it was fucking gorgeous), and it was like this magical wonderland, they had AN ENTIRE TWENTY-FOOT WALL of bookcases twelve feet high, stuffed full, and every book on them was fascinating and every book on them was well-thumbed and annotated and most of them were stuffed full of news clippings and magazine articles that related to the topic of the book. And we were allowed to read any of them, whenever we wanted (anything inappropriate for kids was probably up high), and if we asked questions, he'd answer. They had an extensive theological library -- they were very serious Presbyterians who were constantly writing letters to their Session and the Presbytery and the Synod and sometimes even the General Assembly, and various scholars, with quotes to applicable theologians, and receiving them back with the same -- and that is 100% one of the reasons I ended up studying theology. I mean, when you let a 10-year-old loose in a library full of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, with news clippings and annotations and letters from eminent theologians, and answer all their questions, and explain that Bonhoeffer got killed for trying to kill Hitler, SHIT HAPPENS AND PEOPLE GO TO SEMINARY.
Anyway, I got a little distracted. Having someone who takes everything seriously and honestly, and is always honest in return, is both an amazing gift AND more than a little exhausting and infuriating. Small talk is important, and being able to dodge questions in social situations is REALLY important! It is legitimately difficult to spend time with someone who just DOESN'T ever lie or elide or smooth over or dodge, because there's a lot of stuff in human interactions that's just better of ignored. Most people don't want to be laid bare ALL THE TIME about ALL THE THINGS.
But it was also legitimately amazing, especially when I was a child, and it changed the course of my life -- and honestly not just mine. Almost everyone on that side of the family had their lives changed by him, because if you said you were interested in photography, he'd talk to you about photography unless and until you said it didn't interest you anymore, and read books about it so he could discuss it with you, and (because he didn't have his own children and so had more disposable income than his siblings and in-laws) buy you your first camera, so you could grow up to be an award-winning photographer for a major American newspaper. Or a lawyer. Or a musician. Or the first Ph.D. in your family, and he'd read your dissertation, and go to the library and interlibrary loan all the books in your bibliography, and read them until he understood what you were talking about. And then ask you about it. At length.
(He was 90-something when he died, and his wife had died 20 years earlier, and I have literally never been at a funeral so large for someone in their 90s, it was not just generations of family but like the whole town council and school board and a bunch of local union guys and every Presbyterian for 50 miles around and he took up dulcimer in his 80s and cut a record and dulcimer nerds came from all over the US and it was CRAZY.)
I don't want to open up the entire can of worms from https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5247#comment-1873899 but I have been curious about one specific point: did President Trump himself ever claim to be holding secret evidence about the alleged electoral fraud, or did that idea originate elsewhere?
What new therapeutic modalities are going to be a big deal in the next 10 years?
So, mRNA vaccines, immunotherapies, oncolytic viruses, antibody drug conjugates, cell therapies, gene therapies and of course CRISPR enabling all of these. Lots of very impressive medicine that is having a real impact on the standard of care from what it was even just a few years ago. The Moderna vaccine (an mRNA vaccine, natch) is maybe the most well known example and I believe it still has the best results against COVID compared to all the other vaccines available now or soon to be.
These are just the ones I know about, that are working their way through trials now and at least some will probably make it to clinics by the end of the decade. I’m curious what’s beyond that, what kind of new types of therapy might be waiting for us after 2030ish. Personally I hold out a lot of hope for a revolution in psychiatric care, maybe the BRAIN initiative will start to pay off by then. Maybe via direct stimulation of discrete neural circuits, something beyond just blasting the basal ganglia for Parkinsons.
(1) Re: Vyvanse, I'm perfectly happy to think it's good reception is based on "uppers plus hype" but that linked study doesn't perfectly convince me because the gap in administration is "one hour later" for the pure amphetamine. The whole point of Vyvanse is that they are making it as non-abusable as possible: you can't grind it, snort it, inject it, etc. for the high, you have to take it by oral administration and you don't get that high.
It comes on slower, (probably) fades away more gradually and doesn't seem to have the same 'quick high then crash' profile, and that is probably a big part of why users like it (even if the lysine has nothing to do with helping anti-anxiety affects). So I don't think the reason is quite as simple as "the secret ingredient is hype" for its popularity.
There's also this little nugget which makes me go "ah, fudge off!" about the methodology:
"To induce greater subjective drug liking and mimic misuse, the selected dose of lisdexamfetamine was relatively high and above the upper recommended daily dose of 70 mg."
So they deliberately gave the participants a much higher dose than people on a prescription would get, with all the attendant effects of a stimulant that entails, then have the bare-faced cheek to go "nah, we didn't see any difference between this and speed"? I'm pretty ding-dong-dang sure if I rounded up a study group and poured a naggin of poteen into them, we'd see "there is little to no difference between this and drinking methylated spirits" but it's not the method you would undertake for the effects of "what about drinking 170 grams of pure alcohol per week" in order to set safe drinking limits (on a tangent, please look up the difference between Irish and British levels - I think Scotland is slightly different and more towards the Irish level, while the USA is more towards the English level):
"In Ireland a standard drink has about 10 grams of pure alcohol. In the UK a standard drink, also called a unit of alcohol, has about 8 grams of pure alcohol.
Some examples of a standard drink in Ireland are:
a pub measure of spirits (35.5ml)
a small glass of wine (12.5% volume)
a half pint of normal beer
an alcopop (275ml bottle)
A bottle of 12.5% alcohol wine has about seven standard drinks."
(2) Re: the technocracy posts, I have to say nostalgebraist is presenting much better what I've been trying to say, at least for this part (even if they don't find the entire argument very convincing even after steelmanning it):
"3. Mechanisms designed by this elite tend to leave out important factors in a way that matters practically. This happens for general “all models are wrong” reasons, but is exacerbated by the elite’s lack of communication with most people.
Even when communication happens, it is delayed by the need to “translate” the opinions of the masses into the language of the elite before the elite can respond to those opinions. And it occurs unreliably, depending on whether someone’s around and willing to do this “translation.”
I have seen this in action, where the Revenue Commissioners went around giving roadshows and seminars on the occasion of bringing in a huge updating and changes to how income tax is reported and deducted in Ireland. For my sins, as part of my job I deal with payroll which is why I got signed up to a couple of these seminars. And there was ONE thing EVERYBODY participating brought up as a potential problem, and it got completely stonewalled by the Revenue representatives. They didn't want to hear about it. The Plan was in place, it was going to be rolled out, and like it or lump it everyone had to adopt it. They didn't want to hear about problems implementing it (this was a human-level problem) and the very strong impression they gave, parroting the party line that "there would be no problems!", was "Man was made for The Plan, not The Plan for Man".
And that's my main problem with "let the technocrats run everything".
I'm curious, what are peoples' thoughts here on climate change? Specifically, certain (cough, technocratic, cough) approaches such as carbon dioxide removal through direct air capture, or more wild proposals such as solar geoengineering by injecting sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere?
Asking out of curiosity, not at all because I'm doing my PhD on the latter topic :)
Nostalgebraist's interpretation seems to be over-emphasizing opensource-style end-user modification as the primary benefit of legibility, whereas (as I understood) Weil's original post was concerned with a broader range of potential benefits of legibility. For instance Weil said that legible approaches were more easily critiqued by a broader communtiy, which all-else-equal presumably encourages the democratic political process to settle on better solutions (i.e. with more feedback and less room for biases/errors to sneak in via obfuscation). Note these benefits have little to do with the local customization concerns Nostralgebraist emphasizes e.g.: "Weyl seems to want mechanisms that are easy to customize for different local circumstances"
Also you might think from Nostalgebraist's interpretation that Weyl was just making a suggeston that technocrats should voluntarily put more emphasis on legibility and perhaps sacrifice some fidelity in the process, which would be a reasonable suggestion, or at least worth considering. But in fact Weyl is pretty clearly suggesting that technocrats should be given much less authority, which seems like a terrible idea (e.g. transitioning control of monetary policy from the fed to congress, would reduce technocratic authority and would surely be a change for the worse).
1 You're So Vain, you probably think this song is about you - um, the song IS about him, in fact it's addressed to him. Am I missing something or are these lyrics really dumb?
2 We Built This City on rock and roll - why does it get so much hate? Not saying it's a good song - on a scale of 1-10 (with 10 = Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone and 1 = Sonny & Cher's I Got You Babe) I'd give it a 3. And the lyrics are pretty dumb. But there's plenty of worse songs that don't seem to draw as much criticism.
Metaculus is a prediction site, where you earn fake internet points for predicting real-world events accurately. Unlike other prediction sites, no money is involved, and this is both a pro and a con when it comes to prediction accuracy. Honestly, at the moment it seems like mostly a pro - predictions there seem just as accurate as anything else, and it's very low-friction since there's no financial regulation involved. It's a lot of fun if you're that way inclined.
However, its userbase and hence breadth of questions, is currently quite limited due to most users being US-based.
For example, it seems that very few users of Metaculus are from Australia. In fact, I think almost all are in the bay area (google trends says 100% of search traffic is from California). When the bay area is asleep, Metaculus is dead, and when they're awake, there is still not much happening on the site pertaining to Australia or other-country-related questions.
I'd like to see this change. So, this is a plug for non-US people interested in prediction markets (though Metaculus isn't strictly a prediction market) to please check out Metaculus.
What artists out there are like Leonard Cohen? Bob Dylan and other folk names are normally suggested, but I feel few have the profundity of lyrics Cohen has. And he doesn't seem to neatly fit into the genre
It is well supported that exercise is beneficial for mental health, but there doesn't seem to be much evidence on what type of exercise is the most beneficial and why. E.g. should one do cardiovascular or strength based exercise, or short and intense vs longer periods. Anyone have any resources or personal experience on this?
Personal and possibly unrepresentative experience: I switched from doing weights and a small amount of cardio at the gym every 2 days to running every 2 days after the pandemic closed the gyms. I find that I need to exercise at about that rate to keep my anxiety at a manageable level. I think the switch to running may be marginally better, but there doesn't seem to be much difference, which is surprising given how different the exercises are. Also as I've gotten better at running over the past 9 months the amount I need to do to get the anti anxiety effects seems to have increased. Which implies that the anti-anxiety effects are tied to the level of exertion to some degree, not the actual amount of exercise done, or calories expended. But obviously there are confounders.
It's been interesting watching the common discourse on the whole GME thing. It feels to me like common discourse has leaned so far into the "revenge against Wall Street" and the "💎🙌🚀" angles that it's gotten very difficult to sort out who has sound financial motives behind their actions and who's just... for lack of a better term... a "zealot".
Like so much of reddit is going hard in on "I'm buying and holding forever, I don't want to make money, I just want to make billionaires lose" and I'm wondering what percentage of people saying that sincerely believe that, while the more cynical part of me wonders how many people are deliberately saying that to try to get other people to "buy and hold" so that they can be the one who sells.
It's very classic "prisoner's dilemma" if I'm understanding the situation right (and it's quite possible that I'm not). It's going to be interesting to see if this keeps the "poor against the rich" dynamic or if it devolves into backbiting if there is eventually a mass-sellout. (As opposed to a more gradual decline)
Politics post. Curious to see what others think about this view on the COVID relief bill:
I think it much more important for President Biden to work with senate Republicans to produce a COVID relief bill less than the $1.9 trillion bill he wants.
Long term, I think showing bipartisanship is possible is much more important than getting exactly the policy you want through congress. It will also give some power and clout to moderate Republicans at a time where they are trying to divorce from Trump.
With regards to the technocracy discussion, I originally intended to mention Singapore's Covid 19 response as a shining example of a technocratic response. As is customary in Singapore, without much public discussion, public health experts quickly implemented strict quarantine and excellent contact tracing rules, with heavy fines for violation. It worked, until it failed spectacularly.
Namely, the public health experts somehow managed to ignore the substantial population of migrant workers living in overcrowded dorms, an obvious and excellent infection ground. Instead of screening them proactively, once infections there became known, they had already spread through the whole migrant population in April. This oversight is not just obvious in hindsight, as activists had been calling for better protection of migrant workers prior to that.
This story illustrates a failure mode that Weyl highlighted (I think), namely that technocrats (and in my opinion elites in general) seem surprisingly blind or indifferent to people different than themselves. This includes the aftermath of the infection surge: after isolating basically all migrant workers for months, they will be allowed to go to places other than their work ONCE A MONTH.
I do not think that Weyl's proposed solutions would have worked so well in this case, as they would have undermined the parts of Singapore's response that did work, but there must be some institutionalised way of making sure both information about and the interest of underrepresented groups is included in these kinds of technocratic decisions, whether those groups are LGBT or unemployed truck drivers.
I've co-written an rpg I'm proud of, which I'm publishing with Cloven Pine Games for Zinequest. In case folks are interested, Back Again from the Broken Land is Tolkien- and LeGuin-inspired and you play small adventurers walking home from a big war. The core of the game is naming and reckoning with the burdens you picked up in your adventures: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/clovenpinegames/back-again-from-the-broken-landzinequest
Does anyone have any idea where one might ask questions to people knowledgeable about psychiatry about “weird mental stuff” that doesn’t rise to the level of meriting therapy?
I have an occasional odd mental experience that only occurs for a couple minutes at a time, months or years apart, and isn’t a particularly big deal when it does happen. But I have never been able to find any explanation for it, or even descriptions that even match it very closely.
Basically, very rarely and for no trigger or reason I have been able to discern, I experience a sort of sudden shift in the quality of all my sensations, where everything becomes somehow harsher - all noise has an edge to it, everything seems suddenly intense and angry. I am completely aware when this occurs that it isn’t ‘really’ happening - it’s like being consciously aware that some kind of a switch got flipped on all my sensations, and that they are not reporting accurately.
And then it goes away again within a couple minutes and doesn’t happen again for months/years.
I’ve looked at likely culprits, but it doesn’t seem to fit most of them. No shortness of breath or sped up heart rate, no sense of panic or anger or anything like that. Just an odd temporary experience of sensations seeming weirdly ‘on edge’ in a way I still find hard describe.
And since it happens so rarely and doesn’t have much affect when it does happen, it always seemed a bit wasteful to go to a therapist and pay to try to diagnose it, but darn if I’m not curious about what the heck it is.
Has Scott blogged about Wake Therapy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_therapy) for depression? I wanted to read his opinion of it. From my reading it sounds pretty great and even better than most first-line drugs prescribed.
I need help with SEIR epidemiological modelling of the impacts of the UK Covid-19 stain. I am looking to show my current results to someone with experience in SIR/SEIR modelling of some real disease. This project was inspired by the excellent TheZvi post with his own model [1].
My plan is to do my own modelling for my country (not US). In case it confirms that the new stain might cause millions of infected around summer months, I will make a publication of it, and take it to the media. Basically, I want to warn my country, because everyone seems to be in the "Covid is done for, we just need to wait a bit!" mentality.
Currently, I am trying to fit a SEIR model to the historical data. I need a model that approximates the old data well, so that I can extrapolate using it. I am getting some confusing results currently. I need to show the current results to someone with experience in SIR/SEIR modelling of a disease, so they could maybe tell me if I am making some obvious mistake.
I've been studying at a German technical university for a few years, and have been steadily confronting myself with the question: why wouldn't more American students follow a similar path?
I have to say, my confusion here has been pretty large, and I can't tell if it's due to:
-A unique situation that made it easy for me compared to the average American student.
-An American education (recommendation) system with a massive blind spot.
-A German visa system with a lack of interest in Americans.
The long and short of the steps that I took to get into this position is:
1. Learned German during an exchange year (not necessary, my university as well as perhaps 200 more German universities have Bachelors as well as Masters in English)
2. Applied for German universities (with a decent GPA/ACT/SAT [specific numbers on request], not much work is required. In fact, I found the 4 American universities I applied to much more difficult than the 10 or so German unis)
3. Was accepted to German universities.
4. Demonstrated a relatively reasonable level of financial stability (8,000€ in a bank account or a German family willing to vouch for you.)
5. Began attending the German university of my choice.
Current monthly costs, living in one of the 5 largest German cities, include:
*300-500€ (for me, just over 300€) rent in a shared flat, also studio apts (WiFi, electricity, heating, and water included).
*100€ food, relatively decadent with fresh vegetables, fruits, cheeses, and occasional meat.
*100€ stunningly inclusive health insurance.
*(You may be wondering, where's the university costs?)
*50€ University costs (this includes texts, computer labs, multiple student workshops, legal insurance, email, cloud service, and most of all, public transportation in the entire state + parts of other states)
*Around 10-50€ for a cell-phone plan. Figure this isn't too different from the states.
So if we're looking for the high-end of what I could pay, I come out with 800€ and 9600€ per month and per year, respectively. Throw one or two international flights home in there, for an extra 500-1500€, and I bump into 11k€. For my entire costs, from year one to year eight if I wanted to spend more time here.
Now, my comparisons to the US are based on anecdotes from friends, as well as a few websites with average cost estimations. Take this with a few grains of salt, but I seem to find $20k a year as a pretty common amount for in-state tuition and associated living costs, and $40k a year with a medium out-of-state tuition (plus living). This is either 100% more than what I'm paying, or 300% more. Not only that, the bachelor at my university (as well as all German universities) is a 3 year program, since GERs (general education requirements? Don't know my American university terms very well) aren't a part of the curriculum. So to get my bachelor, I'm spending 33k€ (to be fair, this is about $40k right now), whereas in-state public is spending $80k and out of state is spending $160k plus an extra year?
I'll assume most of you know someone, either around college age, raising children who will reach college age, or you're planning on having college graduates of your own some day. Reach out to them, let them know it's an option, and maybe save a year of their life and $100,000.
Or critique my comment and let me know exactly how I'm wrong. I welcome both.
Hi everyone, I wrote a long post on on Reddit about using pregnenolone to deal with social isolation. I thought it might align with the interests of SSC readers.
Whats this forms view on the election being stolen? I think it's pretty obviously stolen but I'm also a Trumpist. I just don't get how you can explain out all the discrepancies
In the latest issue of Scientific American, it is claimed that "changes to the environment are forcing animals out of remote habitats and into closer contact with humans, and people, driven by population and economic pressure, are moving closer to wild animals. Aggressive global surveillance for dangerous pathogens that live in these animals is one way to prevent the catastrophes of 2020 from repeating in coming years."
Anyone care to steelman this for me? It seems obviously bogus, like the exact opposite is true, and the average human being has never had less contact with wild animals.
Is there a way to comment without subscribing to email notifications on that comment? I don't mind getting email updates from Substack, but getting an email for every reply is a bit much.
I noticed that the first public open thread and the first hidden open thread have approximately the same number of comments in them (508 vs 510 as of time of writing), which is not at all what I was expecting, especially not with the first public open thread being the first ever ACX open thread and it having a (fairly busy) comment thread devoted to complaining about substacks comment system. I had anticipated the hidden threads in general to be much quieter than the public ones, was that a weird prediction to make?
Also, if any of the paying subscribers could enlighten us scrubs over here, I'd be interested to hear what the general feel of the hidden thread was, relative to the public one.
About two and a half months ago I was feeling depressed. My wife suggested that it was just “my time of the month”. I’m a man, but my wife has often expressed the idea that men have hormonal cycles as well. And I had read a similar idea in a pop science book years ago. I got curious: if my black mood was cyclical in nature that would be a good thing to know. For one thing, if it's not cyclical then I need to figure out what my problem is so I can feel better, while if it is cyclical I can take hope in the fact that I'll probably feel better in a few days at most.
So I created a Google Sheet and laid out a simple five point scale: Depressed, Sad, Neutral, Fine, and Happy (you might think Neutral and Fine are synonyms but from my perspective there’s significant difference between feelin' Fine and not really feeling happy or sad, and since I’m the only one using the measure, well, there you go). Every day I marked which one I was feeling in general. After I had a couple weeks I assigned each mood a score from 1 to 5, and allowed myself to mark two boxes to indicate a halfway mood (Sad and Neutral indicating a 2.5 score, for when I'm feeling kind of Sad but not Sad Sad, you know?). Then I graphed the results.
The results were pretty spikey, so I overlaid a centered average on the graph. After two months it seemed to show a roughly 33 day cycle from sad to happy. Still, I need several more months of data before I come to any conclusions.
I talked to my father in law about the project and he suggested seeing if my cycle is linked to the moon. That kind of threw me: we all have heard the legend that the full moon makes men mad, but I never put any stock in it. I did some research and it looks like the studies are a bit mixed, in both results and quality. Apparently not that many people are interested in studying the effects of the moon on mood, and the ones that are don't aren't always the best at making good studies. But I thought, what the heck, I’ll throw the phase of the moon over my graph. And son of a gun, it matched closely. The nadir of my average mood seemed to line up perfectly with new moons, and the apex of my mood with full moons. Naturally this doesn’t demonstrate a casual relationship, but I was surprised it fit so well.
I plan on continuing the study for at least a year to get more data. Unfortunately I’m afraid this moon phase connection may already have fouled my data collection. Mood is so subjective, and my own judgment of my mood is even more so. Might I find myself erring on the side of happiness when I know the moon is getting fuller? Or become sadder as the moon dims simply because I expect to? I already feel tempted to modify my data to fit the curve: if I'm feeling really crummy on a day when the curve was on an upward trajectory previously I find myself second guessing my judgment: am I really feeling Sad? Might I actually be Neutral, or Sad-Neutral at worse? Whereas if the data matches my expectation I don't think twice about it. It’s a real problem.
Does anyone here know of any fairly easy to use psychological instruments that measure mood more accurately than my simple five point measure? I'd like to make things a bit more objective and scientific (if that's even possible) going forward.
Okay, this blog is good (or at least interesting). Stumbled upon it while looking up something about Swinburne. Come for the Decadent poetry, stay for the Scholastic philosophy! 😁 https://philosophymajor.wordpress.com/tag/thomas-aquinas/
Oh, and on the vexed question of angels and pins, from Diarmaid MacCullouch's "Reformation" about 15th/16th century humanists:
"Humanist scholars could therefore easily portray themselves as practically minded men of ideas closely involved with ordinary life and the business of government, rather than isolated ivory-tower academics, who wasted their time arguing about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin (this famous caricature of scholasticism was invented by humanists)."
So can we please stick a pin in this "everybody know that..." factoid?
The military orchestrated a coup in Myanmar, returning to power 10 years after nominally allowing a civilian government to take power. Civilian leaders, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, were detained. The military claims that the November 2020 election, which the military's party lost overwhelming, was fraudulent. Myanmar has been mired in ethnic insurgencies since the year it gained independence in 1948, and the government closed polling stations in many ethnic minority areas, citing violence. However, I don't know if the military is any more popular there than Aung San Suu Kyi.
Was the election actually fraudulent? What does the future hold for Myanmar?
Regarding pedophilia, this strikes me as almost obvious. Marrying children was a common occurrence in the ancient world. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, if you can impregnate them, you should be at least partially attracted to them. Assuming 12 year old girls can often get pregnant, but are probably prone to serious fertility/birthing problems, it makes sense this would be a spectrum according to different reproductive strategies. Sorry everyone, I didn't invent evolution. We might even take this further and say fans of MILF porn represent the other end of that reproductive strategy spectrum maybe?
What are the constraints on expanding output of vaccines?
I have been saying for a while that it took a week to create the vaccines we are now using, eleven months to get them approved by the FDA and equivalents abroad. A month of challenge trials would have demonstrated effectiveness and at least a minimal level of safety, after which the companies should have been free to sell them to anyone who wanted to buy, which would have save something like a million lives.
But this assumes that the reason the companies were not in a position to provide all the doses we wanted when they did get approved was that they were not willing to make the necessary massive investments in productive ability until they knew they could sell the vaccines. The Russian vaccine, which apparently now turns out to be better than 90% effective, was approved early, but I don't believe all that much of the population has been vaccinated yet, which suggests that there may be constraints to mass production and mass vaccination that I'm missing.
Can anyone fill this in? If a vaccine had been approved after a month of testing, is there any reason why the producer couldn't have provided it by now to everyone who wanted it and was willing to pay for it?
Does anyone have any good examples of when throwing money at a problem have made the problem worse? I would like to find a as clear-cut example of this as possible, where it is as obvious as possible to see that it was the extra money/resources/headcount that made the problem worse and not external factors.
This isn't the first time this blog has cited sources that say bad things about Brasilia, so I wanted to say, as someone who spent a few years living there, that Brasilia is an incredibly awesome city.
I remember Scott's review of Seeing Like a State claiming that Brasilia's roads were arranged as a grid (true), so it was full of street corners (false). In fact, Brasilia is famous for using these weird half-roundabouts ("tesourinhas") for almost all street interceptions, which helps to improve traffic. The city has a strict "no buildings higher than 4 stores" policy, which, combined with wide streets and sidewalks, helps generate a "I'm in a really, really open space" feeling when you're walking around. There are plenty of big, empty grass fields -- which keep the scenery constantly green, and where kids have ample space to play. Plenty of trees to keep the breeze cool and, most noticeably, A LOT of flowers. The city has a terrible system of public transportation, I'll admit that, but the fact that it's tiny and the way it's organized makes it extremely easy to just walk to wherever you're going. It's actually a common feat to walk from one end of the city to the other. Every Sunday, the main road that crosses the city is interdicted so people can take walks and bike and skate...
What about the cold, soulless concrete buildings? I don't know, maybe it's not for everybody, but I always thought Brasilian architecture was beautiful. It's not all right angles, Oscar Niemeyer was actually a big fan of wide curves, and it shows.
This is not to say that Brasilia became a technocratic utopia -- I highly doubt that was it's goal. It's a city built for the middle class and rich, and you're kind of screwed if you're less than that and live there. But I think the critiques made about it's urban planning, it's architecture, it's way of doing things through deliberate design instead of natural growth are actually talking about Brasilia's strengths. After living there, I moved to another Brazilian city, one most outsiders see as a charming example of natural and organic growth, full of history, warmth, chance. It sucked.
Phrase that got an eye-roll - “the morality of administrative law.” I like this critical paragraph -
"In fact, technocratic predictions about human behavior have been notoriously unable to make good on their epistemic claims. One of the most comprehensive studies assessing expert ability to predict human behavior — Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment — found that social scientists were unable to outperform moderately informed colleagues from other fields in predicting futures in their own areas of expertise. As Tetlock put it: “People who devoted years of arduous study to a topic were as hard-pressed as colleagues casually dropping in from other fields to affix realistic probabilities to possible futures.”"
A typical "party game" type question one might be asked is "What would you do if you had a billion dollars?" I've never been quite able to answer in a satisfactory way. That is to say, in an interesting and indulgent way. My real answer is "Invest a great deal of it sensibly to generate at least a steady 10-15% rate of return, spend the vast majority of it on charities, live the lifestyle of someone with 2 million in the bank." But of course that is not the point of the question: the real point is what personally indulgent thing would you do if money was no object. I've always struggled with that question because my desires are cheap. I like good food, but like a ribeye steak good, not fine dining. I like video games. I like books. These things are not hard to acquire.
But I think I finally have one. If I was a billionaire and I had to do something wildly wasteful and indulgent then I would start a special fund. This fund would offer to cover 10-20% of the costs of construction of all new buildings in my city (or another city of my choosing) and to cover up to 50% of the cost of all renovations with only one requirement: that the design of the building is one that I like. Something art deco, or gothic revival, or beaux arts. Anything but the sleek and boring buildings I see built everywhere today. I want decoration, ornamentation, statuary, stained glass, and if I have so much money I'd be happy to foot the bill myself. Maybe I'd take it further: I'd approach whole streets of stores and offer to pay to renovate every building to fit my architectural fancy. Remake entire neighborhoods and boroughs into little architectural theme parks. Remake the city to a piece of art that fits my taste.
Does anyone see any practical obstacles to this plan? The main one is that I think I'd need to be a billionaire several times over to make it work.
Re: cost disease, I saw an interesting but unverified comment on reddit by user "Lortekonto" (https://www.reddit.com/r/UpliftingNews/comments/l5vv6m/billionaire_mark_cuban_just_launched_a_drug/gkx4imk/ ). As I understand it, they translate a letter by a CEO of Novo Nordisk which claims that a practice called "bulk companies" is partly responsible for inflated drug prizes (i.e. when a drug supposedly costs 4000$ but your insurance only pays a fraction for it).
See the comment for the full argument, but roughly, there used to be a legitimate service model of a "bulk company" hired by company A to negotiate discounts on product B by buying in bulk, and these bulk companies got a fraction of the discount as profit.
And so:
> So let us say that Novo-nordic sells a drug for $30. The bulkcompany comes in and say that they can get it cheaper but want 20% of the discount. Over the next decade they demand a greater and greater discount, the manufacture agrees to the discount, but raises the listed price. The listed price of the drug is now $300, but the bulkcompany gets a 90% discount, so the pharmacy can still buy the druge for $30 from the manufacture, but the bulkcompany get 20% of the now $270 discount, which is $54. A cost that is then pushed to the consumer.
I have a question about options and short squeezes. Why don't options have an alternative satisfaction to limit potential losses.
Why does the short contract require that the shorter return the stock as the only option? Why not have the shorter able to either return the stock or thrice the current market value (or some other number)? This would limit potential losses, and protect the person loaning stock to some degree.
This would provide some insurance. It would also come up so rarely that it would have miniscule changes in the price of short contracts..
Among the several things I enjoy are when people do a good rant about something or someone who is WRONG. And here is a great one, from a blog I've newly discovered - the Renaissance Mathematicus. It covers a couple of my favourites: history, religion (Catholicism) and tearing the paper off the wall to fit in all the ways this hapless individual is getting it wrong 😁
First, we have the name of the poor wretch what wrote the book: one Professor Timon Screech. And you thought Charles Dickens was extravagant with his naming schemes! The gentleman in question is a Brummie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brummagem) so that makes it even more delicious. Contemplating whether he is addressed formally as "Professor Screech" or informally as "Timon" by those who must interact with him is a tiny moment of joy.
Secondly, he is an art professor at SOAS (which for those of you like myself who had no idea what this acronym means, is the School of Oriental and African Studies, the older name by which I *had* heard of it) at the University of London. He specialises in Japanese art and culture of the Early Modern Period, which covers roughly the period from the beginning of the 16th century to the early 19th century. He may indeed be the divil an' all when it comes to Japanese art, but when it comes to science and history...
And that leads us on, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, to our third point: the matter in hand, the book what he wrote, " The Shogun’s Silver Telescope: God, Art and Money in the English Quest for Japan, 1600–1625" and the said Renaissance Mathematicus' review of it.
Which is not very gruntled, let me tell you. I urge you to go and read it for yourself, preferably with the beverage and nibbles of your choice, to savour the entire thing. It's always a pleasantly ecumenical experience to read an atheist hauling someone over the coals for getting it WRONG about Catholics/Catholicism, especially when it involves our old pal Galileo. If you need some coaxing to read this, let me whet your appetite:
"I have looked at the phrase, as telescopes became a central battleground between Rome and the Protestant churches numerous times, from various standpoints and different angles and all that occurs to me is, what the fuck is that supposed to mean? It is simply put baloney, balderdash, poppycock, gibberish, hogwash, drivel, palaver, mumbo jumbo, rubbish, or even more simply, total and utter crap! I’m not even going to waste time, space and effort in trying to analyse and refute it, it doesn’t deserve it. Somebody please flush it down the toilet into the sewers, where it belongs."
Now, I'm not recommending this on polemical grounds, though it is a happy accident. Rather I wish to share the enjoyment of real history/science going up against pop-culture history/science. Good luck to all!
Dumb people who think they are smarter than everyone else can refute well researched ideas easily with comments such as "it's all bullshit" and then go on posting wacko ideas on "how it really works" misunderstanding just about everything they just read and feel like they're smarter than everyone else.
One day I will make the greatest video game series ever made and put all the world's initiatic secrets into it for public consumption.
Why did you rename the blog?
I've seen a lot of complaints about Substack's comment handling, so I went and created an extension that helps with some of the issues. Features include options to load all comments, highlight new comments, jump to the parent comment when collapsing a thread, and use the old SSC styling. You can find it at https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks.
It's only compatible with Firefox/Chrome, but if you're a Safari user, you can find some of the pure CSS fixes at https://gist.github.com/Pycea/73eeee25ff4f697b76c0d3d36035c749 and load them yourself.
It's weird that we don't talk more about age. I'm in my mid thirties and a lot of what I used to see as something like "deep flaws and inadequacies in humanity and society" are actually more parsimoniously explained by "there are a lot of young people who have not yet experienced the world yet nonetheless have opinions and the capability to act in the world". Young people, of course, have a right to exist, but I wish that I could filter (or sort) Internet comments sections for poster age, or, even better, for how many books the poster has read.
I would like to see a biopic about Glenn Gould staring Christian Bale. Can someone please get this request to the relevant parties? Much appreciated.
I would like to plug the podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/astral-codex-ten-podcast/id1295289140
Hey Scott, I loved the taxometrics post! I'm excited to go through the Paul Meehl papers that Beauchaine summarizes. I have a question about something you wrote:
> a few [psychiatric disorders] may be objective distinct categories, especially schizophrenia, narcissistic personality, and endogenous depression
Can you elaborate on why you think NPD belongs on this list?
I am not 100% sure if the etiquette here but here is a link to a podcast I did talking to Kyle Harper about the Fate of Rome. You may be amazed to learn how many Romans died in the plague of Justinian (spoiler alert) ie 50% or more. And then climate change. As Kyle says ‘they couldn’t catch a break’. Anyway hope it’s ok to promote it here.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/7554679-the-fate-of-rome-with-kyle-harper
I recently came across this advertisement ( https://traderhq.com/motley-fool-stock-advisor-best-investment-recommendation-service/ ) from Motley Fool which claims that their stock-picking service beat the market by a factor of 5x over almost twenty years.
I assume this shouldn't be possible, so what's the trick? Did they have hundreds of stock-picking services and only advertise the one that worked (seems unlikely, both of the analysts involved beat the market individually while also working together, which should make this harder to pull off)? Are they lying outright? Something else?
At the end of the comment from Anna Stansbury, she says she would be open to doing a guest piece on your blog. Is it possible to reach out to her about that? Wage stagnation is an especially fascinating topic to me and I've been curious about it since you posted the initial piece.
Has there been a thread yet about not-coincidental anagrams of Astral Codex Ten? (It's not an anagram of Slate Star Codex, so old threads from there don't count.)
During the first few months of COVID I got back into researching old blues music via YouTube and Spotify. I read Ted Gioia’s Delta Blues which I highly recommend. His book inspired me to write up my journey into appreciating old country blues music, the deep blues, in hopes that it might help someone else learn to appreciate them too. Part one is about the greatness of Son House.
https://stonewatercontext.com/2021/01/25/deep-blues-son-house-hollers-slide-guitar/
How likely is it that the far future will be terrible, and what do you all think are the most plausible S-risks, i.e. risks of extreme suffering being created in the far future? Also, what do you all think of Brian Tomasik's list of his top donation recommendations?
https://reducing-suffering.org/donation-recommendations/
Also relevant:
https://s-risks.org/
https://reducing-suffering.org/near-miss/
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N4AvpwNs7mZdQESzG/the-dilemma-of-worse-than-death-scenarios
I've been dipping into Brett Weinstein's podcast. One thing he harps on pretty frequently is making distinctions between the word "theory" and "hypothesis." His line is that "theory" should be used for things like "the theory of evolution" and not for "string theory."
This is an argument I might have made against creationists in 2009, but it strikes me as a little obtuse these days. It would certainly be nice if everybody agreed to use common terminology, but I don't think you can really prevent meanings from drifting.
Furthermore, I don't think Weinstein's definition matches scientific usage. "Theory" in many fields seems to mean something like "model" or "framework," rather than hypothesis. Or, more verbosely, "a thing that explains existing data and can be manipulated to generate predictions."
Is anyone else subscribed on gmail getting the weird issue where half the substack updates go to the regular inbox and half go to "promotions"? I'm trying to get them all in the regular inbox but not sure how.
I've only just read for the first time the "Against Steelmanning" article linked from the bottom point. It's old so I'll just post my thoughts on it here.
The idea of "steelmanning" probably is misused and badly-done pretty frequently, but I think there are a few steelman-ish techniques that are more-clearly helpful and can be implemented even if you're not a rhetorical genius:
- If you notice your conversation partner make a deductive error but it's really tangential to their main point, or you know of a different thing they *could* have said that would work better, don't bother attacking it. If they continue to bring it up, make the point that it's just not relevant and try to get back to the main topic. This effectively lets you contend with a more parsimonious version of their argument.
- If they provide outlandish hypotheticals or assumptions as bases for their argument, see if you can offer up equivalent bases that at least *sound* less absurd. This will make it clear (to them and yourself) that you're not winning via personal humiliation or anything like that. This doesn't have to be a condescending thing where you're telling them their argument is silling; it's to help you think through what they're saying, too.
- Sometimes the person you're arguing will misconstrue your argument for a more common, similar-sounding, but different argument. In this case, enthusiastically concede that if that *were* your argument, they would indeed be correct to attack it and you understand why, before explaining what you were *really* saying.
and others.
Something I have trouble putting into words: Flying Spaghetti Monster, Flat Earth Society, The Pirate Parties - quite different movements - but there is a rejection of seriousness in them. I have been in a Pirate Party - and they actually try to be serious with just a funny name (like: there isn't any law that a party needs to be entirely serious, we have a funny name, but we are serious about ***) - so maybe this is not an extreme case of it. There were other parties with funny names - in Poland we had a famous Beer Friends Party just after the end of Communism. Flat Earthers seem to pretend to be serious, because this is funny, but I don't think anyone of them actually believes in flat Earth (as in they would really base their actions on that belief if there was no audience).
Regarding the nostalgebraist post:
The legibility vs. fidelity axis is something which can purposefully be selected for based on political needs.
My favorite example is in carbon dioxide emissions reductions. The "cap-and-trade" model is widely promoted by the elites. It's even possible that it's the most [economically] efficient way to perform this task. In contrast, a carbon tax is much more legible. Everybody knows how much everybody else is going to be paying.
Cap-and-trade might be subtly modified by the implementation to benefit preferred groups. The number of credits issued every year becomes a political issue which might have financial implications which can be leveraged by the elites, regardless of whether they provide the benefits to the public they are supposed to.
Cap-and-trade is also popular because it hides the pain from the consumer/voter. If your cost of fuel goes up at the pump from carbon taxes, you notice. And that makes the rabble mad. Instead, if costs become really diffuse via cap-and-trade, it becomes a lot harder for the public to notice or reason about. It's also easier to argue that "you" aren't paying the costs, but some "rich company" is, while ignoring network effects.
This means that the illegible option is preferred because it allows the type of policy desired to be enacted with hopefully less political backlash, and possibly more options for insider dealing by elites.
I was thinking about the same thing about pedophilia. There evidently aren't any reliable statistics about how common ephebophilia and hebephilia are, but it's probably pretty common among men, and blends into pedophilia.
Has anyone figured out how to do a memex for art creation yet?
Since RoamResearch and Obsidian have been gaining momentum as personal knowledge management, I've found it invigorating to take notes in such a connected way. I'm trying to figure out how to move my creative pursuits to those kinds of programs that might let me use association and connections as a building block.
I'm struggling to do things that aren't just text and images. I want to find connections form wonderful fonts with palettes I find striking to write new poetry. I want to connect snippets of songs I love to the sounds and timbre of intruments in my DAW. There seems to be a lot of value there and I'm excited to see if it materializes, but I'm still putting my feet on the ground.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/01/what-its-like-growing-family-never-lies/617773/
A man was raised in a family where honesty was the default, eventually learned the value of social lying, and has made some compromises.
Very good discussion of the article:
https://www.metafilter.com/190233/Off-puttingly-truthful-growing-up-in-a-family-with-no-filters#8058010
A wonderful memoir from that discussion:
*****
I had a great-uncle that was a little bit like this. He wasn't constantly announcing his internal states to the world (or telling people true-but-rude things about themselves), but he was every day of sixty-five before he realized that "Hey, how are you?" was usually social wheel-greasing and did not require a comprehensive response, and he did not DO small talk. I mean, he was deeply interested in other people and wanted to hear about their families and pets and things, but he'd never be like, "How're your kids?" He'd be like, "How is your son Bob, whom I believe just turned eight, and last time we spoke he was struggling with some bullies at school? How did that work out?"
He had no kids of his own, but he was an absolute Pied Piper to the children of the family. Have you ever been four, or eight, or ten, and had someone take everything you said absolutely seriously and ask you questions to understand your thoughts and answer all your questions as honestly and completely as possible? It. Is. Awesome. Children are such little learning machines and it's almost impossible to be a parent or caregiver and never brush anything off. I mean, I feel like I take children more seriously than a lot of people do, because I LOVE watching how they think and I always have, but I must brush my own children off a dozen times a day (especially in quarantine), because it would not be possible to function as an adult caregiver if I didn't. You have to kind-of pick and choose your moments for deep engagement, and your moments for "Please stop asking questions for ten minutes so I can ensure you have food and clean clothes."
My great-uncle never did that, with anyone. This was fantastically amazing for children, who all worshipped him. In our teenaged years, it alternated between being wildly awkward and embarrassing, and this enormous refuge where even your self-obsession with your own minor and fleeting problems was interesting to him -- although he was highly likely to point out more than a few awkward truths you were trying very hard to avoid. By the time I was in college, I learned what all the other adults in our family knew, which was that you could not toss of throwaway lines around him or bring up a topic you didn't want to spend an hour discussing. (And I think this is one of the lovely functions of having a large extended family, where everyone loves you and is used to accommodating your foibles, and might roll their eyes but don't really mind.) I learned later that he was seen as kind-of a local gadfly, because he'd go to every town council meeting and school board meeting and ask a ton of questions, just because he wanted to know. And he'd been an engineer in the war (one of the last engineers who came up without even a high school diploma, just with learning on the job; he got his GED after he retired), and he used to stop at construction sites on his walks after he retired and strike up conversations with the foremen and grill them about everything going on. Every time he went by. He deeply did not understand why city council members or construction site foremen might not want to have in-depth conversations about everything, all the time.
He was married -- his wife was by nature just pretty chill about everything, and also deeply interested in other people and in deep discussions. (Although she knew how to small talk and grease social wheels.) He built their house himself (and it was some Frank Lloyd Wright-ass shit, which I did not appreciate until much later on, it was fucking gorgeous), and it was like this magical wonderland, they had AN ENTIRE TWENTY-FOOT WALL of bookcases twelve feet high, stuffed full, and every book on them was fascinating and every book on them was well-thumbed and annotated and most of them were stuffed full of news clippings and magazine articles that related to the topic of the book. And we were allowed to read any of them, whenever we wanted (anything inappropriate for kids was probably up high), and if we asked questions, he'd answer. They had an extensive theological library -- they were very serious Presbyterians who were constantly writing letters to their Session and the Presbytery and the Synod and sometimes even the General Assembly, and various scholars, with quotes to applicable theologians, and receiving them back with the same -- and that is 100% one of the reasons I ended up studying theology. I mean, when you let a 10-year-old loose in a library full of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, with news clippings and annotations and letters from eminent theologians, and answer all their questions, and explain that Bonhoeffer got killed for trying to kill Hitler, SHIT HAPPENS AND PEOPLE GO TO SEMINARY.
Anyway, I got a little distracted. Having someone who takes everything seriously and honestly, and is always honest in return, is both an amazing gift AND more than a little exhausting and infuriating. Small talk is important, and being able to dodge questions in social situations is REALLY important! It is legitimately difficult to spend time with someone who just DOESN'T ever lie or elide or smooth over or dodge, because there's a lot of stuff in human interactions that's just better of ignored. Most people don't want to be laid bare ALL THE TIME about ALL THE THINGS.
But it was also legitimately amazing, especially when I was a child, and it changed the course of my life -- and honestly not just mine. Almost everyone on that side of the family had their lives changed by him, because if you said you were interested in photography, he'd talk to you about photography unless and until you said it didn't interest you anymore, and read books about it so he could discuss it with you, and (because he didn't have his own children and so had more disposable income than his siblings and in-laws) buy you your first camera, so you could grow up to be an award-winning photographer for a major American newspaper. Or a lawyer. Or a musician. Or the first Ph.D. in your family, and he'd read your dissertation, and go to the library and interlibrary loan all the books in your bibliography, and read them until he understood what you were talking about. And then ask you about it. At length.
(He was 90-something when he died, and his wife had died 20 years earlier, and I have literally never been at a funeral so large for someone in their 90s, it was not just generations of family but like the whole town council and school board and a bunch of local union guys and every Presbyterian for 50 miles around and he took up dulcimer in his 80s and cut a record and dulcimer nerds came from all over the US and it was CRAZY.)
I don't want to open up the entire can of worms from https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5247#comment-1873899 but I have been curious about one specific point: did President Trump himself ever claim to be holding secret evidence about the alleged electoral fraud, or did that idea originate elsewhere?
What new therapeutic modalities are going to be a big deal in the next 10 years?
So, mRNA vaccines, immunotherapies, oncolytic viruses, antibody drug conjugates, cell therapies, gene therapies and of course CRISPR enabling all of these. Lots of very impressive medicine that is having a real impact on the standard of care from what it was even just a few years ago. The Moderna vaccine (an mRNA vaccine, natch) is maybe the most well known example and I believe it still has the best results against COVID compared to all the other vaccines available now or soon to be.
These are just the ones I know about, that are working their way through trials now and at least some will probably make it to clinics by the end of the decade. I’m curious what’s beyond that, what kind of new types of therapy might be waiting for us after 2030ish. Personally I hold out a lot of hope for a revolution in psychiatric care, maybe the BRAIN initiative will start to pay off by then. Maybe via direct stimulation of discrete neural circuits, something beyond just blasting the basal ganglia for Parkinsons.
What else you got?
(1) Re: Vyvanse, I'm perfectly happy to think it's good reception is based on "uppers plus hype" but that linked study doesn't perfectly convince me because the gap in administration is "one hour later" for the pure amphetamine. The whole point of Vyvanse is that they are making it as non-abusable as possible: you can't grind it, snort it, inject it, etc. for the high, you have to take it by oral administration and you don't get that high.
It comes on slower, (probably) fades away more gradually and doesn't seem to have the same 'quick high then crash' profile, and that is probably a big part of why users like it (even if the lysine has nothing to do with helping anti-anxiety affects). So I don't think the reason is quite as simple as "the secret ingredient is hype" for its popularity.
There's also this little nugget which makes me go "ah, fudge off!" about the methodology:
"To induce greater subjective drug liking and mimic misuse, the selected dose of lisdexamfetamine was relatively high and above the upper recommended daily dose of 70 mg."
So they deliberately gave the participants a much higher dose than people on a prescription would get, with all the attendant effects of a stimulant that entails, then have the bare-faced cheek to go "nah, we didn't see any difference between this and speed"? I'm pretty ding-dong-dang sure if I rounded up a study group and poured a naggin of poteen into them, we'd see "there is little to no difference between this and drinking methylated spirits" but it's not the method you would undertake for the effects of "what about drinking 170 grams of pure alcohol per week" in order to set safe drinking limits (on a tangent, please look up the difference between Irish and British levels - I think Scotland is slightly different and more towards the Irish level, while the USA is more towards the English level):
"In Ireland a standard drink has about 10 grams of pure alcohol. In the UK a standard drink, also called a unit of alcohol, has about 8 grams of pure alcohol.
Some examples of a standard drink in Ireland are:
a pub measure of spirits (35.5ml)
a small glass of wine (12.5% volume)
a half pint of normal beer
an alcopop (275ml bottle)
A bottle of 12.5% alcohol wine has about seven standard drinks."
(2) Re: the technocracy posts, I have to say nostalgebraist is presenting much better what I've been trying to say, at least for this part (even if they don't find the entire argument very convincing even after steelmanning it):
"3. Mechanisms designed by this elite tend to leave out important factors in a way that matters practically. This happens for general “all models are wrong” reasons, but is exacerbated by the elite’s lack of communication with most people.
Even when communication happens, it is delayed by the need to “translate” the opinions of the masses into the language of the elite before the elite can respond to those opinions. And it occurs unreliably, depending on whether someone’s around and willing to do this “translation.”
I have seen this in action, where the Revenue Commissioners went around giving roadshows and seminars on the occasion of bringing in a huge updating and changes to how income tax is reported and deducted in Ireland. For my sins, as part of my job I deal with payroll which is why I got signed up to a couple of these seminars. And there was ONE thing EVERYBODY participating brought up as a potential problem, and it got completely stonewalled by the Revenue representatives. They didn't want to hear about it. The Plan was in place, it was going to be rolled out, and like it or lump it everyone had to adopt it. They didn't want to hear about problems implementing it (this was a human-level problem) and the very strong impression they gave, parroting the party line that "there would be no problems!", was "Man was made for The Plan, not The Plan for Man".
And that's my main problem with "let the technocrats run everything".
I'm curious, what are peoples' thoughts here on climate change? Specifically, certain (cough, technocratic, cough) approaches such as carbon dioxide removal through direct air capture, or more wild proposals such as solar geoengineering by injecting sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere?
Asking out of curiosity, not at all because I'm doing my PhD on the latter topic :)
Nostalgebraist's interpretation seems to be over-emphasizing opensource-style end-user modification as the primary benefit of legibility, whereas (as I understood) Weil's original post was concerned with a broader range of potential benefits of legibility. For instance Weil said that legible approaches were more easily critiqued by a broader communtiy, which all-else-equal presumably encourages the democratic political process to settle on better solutions (i.e. with more feedback and less room for biases/errors to sneak in via obfuscation). Note these benefits have little to do with the local customization concerns Nostralgebraist emphasizes e.g.: "Weyl seems to want mechanisms that are easy to customize for different local circumstances"
Also you might think from Nostalgebraist's interpretation that Weyl was just making a suggeston that technocrats should voluntarily put more emphasis on legibility and perhaps sacrifice some fidelity in the process, which would be a reasonable suggestion, or at least worth considering. But in fact Weyl is pretty clearly suggesting that technocrats should be given much less authority, which seems like a terrible idea (e.g. transitioning control of monetary policy from the fed to congress, would reduce technocratic authority and would surely be a change for the worse).
Couple of pop music questions -
1 You're So Vain, you probably think this song is about you - um, the song IS about him, in fact it's addressed to him. Am I missing something or are these lyrics really dumb?
2 We Built This City on rock and roll - why does it get so much hate? Not saying it's a good song - on a scale of 1-10 (with 10 = Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone and 1 = Sonny & Cher's I Got You Babe) I'd give it a 3. And the lyrics are pretty dumb. But there's plenty of worse songs that don't seem to draw as much criticism.
The Dunning-Kruger effect may be wrong, or at least that’s what this article posits. Curious what others think about this https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-kruger-effect-probably-not-real
TL;DR: I want more non-US people to use Metaculus
Metaculus is a prediction site, where you earn fake internet points for predicting real-world events accurately. Unlike other prediction sites, no money is involved, and this is both a pro and a con when it comes to prediction accuracy. Honestly, at the moment it seems like mostly a pro - predictions there seem just as accurate as anything else, and it's very low-friction since there's no financial regulation involved. It's a lot of fun if you're that way inclined.
However, its userbase and hence breadth of questions, is currently quite limited due to most users being US-based.
For example, it seems that very few users of Metaculus are from Australia. In fact, I think almost all are in the bay area (google trends says 100% of search traffic is from California). When the bay area is asleep, Metaculus is dead, and when they're awake, there is still not much happening on the site pertaining to Australia or other-country-related questions.
I'd like to see this change. So, this is a plug for non-US people interested in prediction markets (though Metaculus isn't strictly a prediction market) to please check out Metaculus.
What artists out there are like Leonard Cohen? Bob Dylan and other folk names are normally suggested, but I feel few have the profundity of lyrics Cohen has. And he doesn't seem to neatly fit into the genre
It is well supported that exercise is beneficial for mental health, but there doesn't seem to be much evidence on what type of exercise is the most beneficial and why. E.g. should one do cardiovascular or strength based exercise, or short and intense vs longer periods. Anyone have any resources or personal experience on this?
Personal and possibly unrepresentative experience: I switched from doing weights and a small amount of cardio at the gym every 2 days to running every 2 days after the pandemic closed the gyms. I find that I need to exercise at about that rate to keep my anxiety at a manageable level. I think the switch to running may be marginally better, but there doesn't seem to be much difference, which is surprising given how different the exercises are. Also as I've gotten better at running over the past 9 months the amount I need to do to get the anti anxiety effects seems to have increased. Which implies that the anti-anxiety effects are tied to the level of exertion to some degree, not the actual amount of exercise done, or calories expended. But obviously there are confounders.
It's been interesting watching the common discourse on the whole GME thing. It feels to me like common discourse has leaned so far into the "revenge against Wall Street" and the "💎🙌🚀" angles that it's gotten very difficult to sort out who has sound financial motives behind their actions and who's just... for lack of a better term... a "zealot".
Like so much of reddit is going hard in on "I'm buying and holding forever, I don't want to make money, I just want to make billionaires lose" and I'm wondering what percentage of people saying that sincerely believe that, while the more cynical part of me wonders how many people are deliberately saying that to try to get other people to "buy and hold" so that they can be the one who sells.
It's very classic "prisoner's dilemma" if I'm understanding the situation right (and it's quite possible that I'm not). It's going to be interesting to see if this keeps the "poor against the rich" dynamic or if it devolves into backbiting if there is eventually a mass-sellout. (As opposed to a more gradual decline)
Politics post. Curious to see what others think about this view on the COVID relief bill:
I think it much more important for President Biden to work with senate Republicans to produce a COVID relief bill less than the $1.9 trillion bill he wants.
Long term, I think showing bipartisanship is possible is much more important than getting exactly the policy you want through congress. It will also give some power and clout to moderate Republicans at a time where they are trying to divorce from Trump.
With regards to the technocracy discussion, I originally intended to mention Singapore's Covid 19 response as a shining example of a technocratic response. As is customary in Singapore, without much public discussion, public health experts quickly implemented strict quarantine and excellent contact tracing rules, with heavy fines for violation. It worked, until it failed spectacularly.
Namely, the public health experts somehow managed to ignore the substantial population of migrant workers living in overcrowded dorms, an obvious and excellent infection ground. Instead of screening them proactively, once infections there became known, they had already spread through the whole migrant population in April. This oversight is not just obvious in hindsight, as activists had been calling for better protection of migrant workers prior to that.
This story illustrates a failure mode that Weyl highlighted (I think), namely that technocrats (and in my opinion elites in general) seem surprisingly blind or indifferent to people different than themselves. This includes the aftermath of the infection surge: after isolating basically all migrant workers for months, they will be allowed to go to places other than their work ONCE A MONTH.
I do not think that Weyl's proposed solutions would have worked so well in this case, as they would have undermined the parts of Singapore's response that did work, but there must be some institutionalised way of making sure both information about and the interest of underrepresented groups is included in these kinds of technocratic decisions, whether those groups are LGBT or unemployed truck drivers.
I am basing this mostly on: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-54082861
I've co-written an rpg I'm proud of, which I'm publishing with Cloven Pine Games for Zinequest. In case folks are interested, Back Again from the Broken Land is Tolkien- and LeGuin-inspired and you play small adventurers walking home from a big war. The core of the game is naming and reckoning with the burdens you picked up in your adventures: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/clovenpinegames/back-again-from-the-broken-landzinequest
Does anyone have any idea where one might ask questions to people knowledgeable about psychiatry about “weird mental stuff” that doesn’t rise to the level of meriting therapy?
I have an occasional odd mental experience that only occurs for a couple minutes at a time, months or years apart, and isn’t a particularly big deal when it does happen. But I have never been able to find any explanation for it, or even descriptions that even match it very closely.
Basically, very rarely and for no trigger or reason I have been able to discern, I experience a sort of sudden shift in the quality of all my sensations, where everything becomes somehow harsher - all noise has an edge to it, everything seems suddenly intense and angry. I am completely aware when this occurs that it isn’t ‘really’ happening - it’s like being consciously aware that some kind of a switch got flipped on all my sensations, and that they are not reporting accurately.
And then it goes away again within a couple minutes and doesn’t happen again for months/years.
I’ve looked at likely culprits, but it doesn’t seem to fit most of them. No shortness of breath or sped up heart rate, no sense of panic or anger or anything like that. Just an odd temporary experience of sensations seeming weirdly ‘on edge’ in a way I still find hard describe.
And since it happens so rarely and doesn’t have much affect when it does happen, it always seemed a bit wasteful to go to a therapist and pay to try to diagnose it, but darn if I’m not curious about what the heck it is.
Has Scott blogged about Wake Therapy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_therapy) for depression? I wanted to read his opinion of it. From my reading it sounds pretty great and even better than most first-line drugs prescribed.
Substack feature request: don't notify me every time someone "hearts" my comment!
The worst part about it is that the subject line for a 'like' says "Comment on [Post]", which is identical to the subject line for replies!
I need help with SEIR epidemiological modelling of the impacts of the UK Covid-19 stain. I am looking to show my current results to someone with experience in SIR/SEIR modelling of some real disease. This project was inspired by the excellent TheZvi post with his own model [1].
My plan is to do my own modelling for my country (not US). In case it confirms that the new stain might cause millions of infected around summer months, I will make a publication of it, and take it to the media. Basically, I want to warn my country, because everyone seems to be in the "Covid is done for, we just need to wait a bit!" mentality.
Currently, I am trying to fit a SEIR model to the historical data. I need a model that approximates the old data well, so that I can extrapolate using it. I am getting some confusing results currently. I need to show the current results to someone with experience in SIR/SEIR modelling of a disease, so they could maybe tell me if I am making some obvious mistake.
[1] https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/01/06/fourth-wave-covid-toy-modeling/
Update to my Covid-19 modelling help request:
Forgot to include my contacts: b.tseytlin@lambda-it.ru.
Reach me out if you want to help, or if you just want to chat on the topic.
P.S.
Unfortunate that substack doesn't have an "Edit comment" button.
I've been studying at a German technical university for a few years, and have been steadily confronting myself with the question: why wouldn't more American students follow a similar path?
I have to say, my confusion here has been pretty large, and I can't tell if it's due to:
-A unique situation that made it easy for me compared to the average American student.
-An American education (recommendation) system with a massive blind spot.
-A German visa system with a lack of interest in Americans.
The long and short of the steps that I took to get into this position is:
1. Learned German during an exchange year (not necessary, my university as well as perhaps 200 more German universities have Bachelors as well as Masters in English)
2. Applied for German universities (with a decent GPA/ACT/SAT [specific numbers on request], not much work is required. In fact, I found the 4 American universities I applied to much more difficult than the 10 or so German unis)
3. Was accepted to German universities.
4. Demonstrated a relatively reasonable level of financial stability (8,000€ in a bank account or a German family willing to vouch for you.)
5. Began attending the German university of my choice.
Current monthly costs, living in one of the 5 largest German cities, include:
*300-500€ (for me, just over 300€) rent in a shared flat, also studio apts (WiFi, electricity, heating, and water included).
*100€ food, relatively decadent with fresh vegetables, fruits, cheeses, and occasional meat.
*100€ stunningly inclusive health insurance.
*(You may be wondering, where's the university costs?)
*50€ University costs (this includes texts, computer labs, multiple student workshops, legal insurance, email, cloud service, and most of all, public transportation in the entire state + parts of other states)
*Around 10-50€ for a cell-phone plan. Figure this isn't too different from the states.
So if we're looking for the high-end of what I could pay, I come out with 800€ and 9600€ per month and per year, respectively. Throw one or two international flights home in there, for an extra 500-1500€, and I bump into 11k€. For my entire costs, from year one to year eight if I wanted to spend more time here.
Now, my comparisons to the US are based on anecdotes from friends, as well as a few websites with average cost estimations. Take this with a few grains of salt, but I seem to find $20k a year as a pretty common amount for in-state tuition and associated living costs, and $40k a year with a medium out-of-state tuition (plus living). This is either 100% more than what I'm paying, or 300% more. Not only that, the bachelor at my university (as well as all German universities) is a 3 year program, since GERs (general education requirements? Don't know my American university terms very well) aren't a part of the curriculum. So to get my bachelor, I'm spending 33k€ (to be fair, this is about $40k right now), whereas in-state public is spending $80k and out of state is spending $160k plus an extra year?
I'll assume most of you know someone, either around college age, raising children who will reach college age, or you're planning on having college graduates of your own some day. Reach out to them, let them know it's an option, and maybe save a year of their life and $100,000.
Or critique my comment and let me know exactly how I'm wrong. I welcome both.
Hi everyone, I wrote a long post on on Reddit about using pregnenolone to deal with social isolation. I thought it might align with the interests of SSC readers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Supplements/comments/l9ypsc/pregnenolone_for_social_isolation/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Whats this forms view on the election being stolen? I think it's pretty obviously stolen but I'm also a Trumpist. I just don't get how you can explain out all the discrepancies
In the latest issue of Scientific American, it is claimed that "changes to the environment are forcing animals out of remote habitats and into closer contact with humans, and people, driven by population and economic pressure, are moving closer to wild animals. Aggressive global surveillance for dangerous pathogens that live in these animals is one way to prevent the catastrophes of 2020 from repeating in coming years."
Anyone care to steelman this for me? It seems obviously bogus, like the exact opposite is true, and the average human being has never had less contact with wild animals.
Is there a way to comment without subscribing to email notifications on that comment? I don't mind getting email updates from Substack, but getting an email for every reply is a bit much.
I noticed that the first public open thread and the first hidden open thread have approximately the same number of comments in them (508 vs 510 as of time of writing), which is not at all what I was expecting, especially not with the first public open thread being the first ever ACX open thread and it having a (fairly busy) comment thread devoted to complaining about substacks comment system. I had anticipated the hidden threads in general to be much quieter than the public ones, was that a weird prediction to make?
Also, if any of the paying subscribers could enlighten us scrubs over here, I'd be interested to hear what the general feel of the hidden thread was, relative to the public one.
Sorry if someone has already asked but I didn't see it in the comments: will there be a SSC Survey this year? (ACX Survey, maby).
About two and a half months ago I was feeling depressed. My wife suggested that it was just “my time of the month”. I’m a man, but my wife has often expressed the idea that men have hormonal cycles as well. And I had read a similar idea in a pop science book years ago. I got curious: if my black mood was cyclical in nature that would be a good thing to know. For one thing, if it's not cyclical then I need to figure out what my problem is so I can feel better, while if it is cyclical I can take hope in the fact that I'll probably feel better in a few days at most.
So I created a Google Sheet and laid out a simple five point scale: Depressed, Sad, Neutral, Fine, and Happy (you might think Neutral and Fine are synonyms but from my perspective there’s significant difference between feelin' Fine and not really feeling happy or sad, and since I’m the only one using the measure, well, there you go). Every day I marked which one I was feeling in general. After I had a couple weeks I assigned each mood a score from 1 to 5, and allowed myself to mark two boxes to indicate a halfway mood (Sad and Neutral indicating a 2.5 score, for when I'm feeling kind of Sad but not Sad Sad, you know?). Then I graphed the results.
The results were pretty spikey, so I overlaid a centered average on the graph. After two months it seemed to show a roughly 33 day cycle from sad to happy. Still, I need several more months of data before I come to any conclusions.
I talked to my father in law about the project and he suggested seeing if my cycle is linked to the moon. That kind of threw me: we all have heard the legend that the full moon makes men mad, but I never put any stock in it. I did some research and it looks like the studies are a bit mixed, in both results and quality. Apparently not that many people are interested in studying the effects of the moon on mood, and the ones that are don't aren't always the best at making good studies. But I thought, what the heck, I’ll throw the phase of the moon over my graph. And son of a gun, it matched closely. The nadir of my average mood seemed to line up perfectly with new moons, and the apex of my mood with full moons. Naturally this doesn’t demonstrate a casual relationship, but I was surprised it fit so well.
I plan on continuing the study for at least a year to get more data. Unfortunately I’m afraid this moon phase connection may already have fouled my data collection. Mood is so subjective, and my own judgment of my mood is even more so. Might I find myself erring on the side of happiness when I know the moon is getting fuller? Or become sadder as the moon dims simply because I expect to? I already feel tempted to modify my data to fit the curve: if I'm feeling really crummy on a day when the curve was on an upward trajectory previously I find myself second guessing my judgment: am I really feeling Sad? Might I actually be Neutral, or Sad-Neutral at worse? Whereas if the data matches my expectation I don't think twice about it. It’s a real problem.
Does anyone here know of any fairly easy to use psychological instruments that measure mood more accurately than my simple five point measure? I'd like to make things a bit more objective and scientific (if that's even possible) going forward.
Okay, this blog is good (or at least interesting). Stumbled upon it while looking up something about Swinburne. Come for the Decadent poetry, stay for the Scholastic philosophy! 😁 https://philosophymajor.wordpress.com/tag/thomas-aquinas/
Oh, and on the vexed question of angels and pins, from Diarmaid MacCullouch's "Reformation" about 15th/16th century humanists:
"Humanist scholars could therefore easily portray themselves as practically minded men of ideas closely involved with ordinary life and the business of government, rather than isolated ivory-tower academics, who wasted their time arguing about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin (this famous caricature of scholasticism was invented by humanists)."
So can we please stick a pin in this "everybody know that..." factoid?
Did I miss the comment FAQ? Is it not possible to show only new replies?
Data Secrets Lox, the forum set up after SSC shut down, has a monthly efforpost contest to encourage long-form writing. The latest, for January, is up at https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,2499.0.html, while the archives can be found at https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,662.0.html.
The military orchestrated a coup in Myanmar, returning to power 10 years after nominally allowing a civilian government to take power. Civilian leaders, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, were detained. The military claims that the November 2020 election, which the military's party lost overwhelming, was fraudulent. Myanmar has been mired in ethnic insurgencies since the year it gained independence in 1948, and the government closed polling stations in many ethnic minority areas, citing violence. However, I don't know if the military is any more popular there than Aung San Suu Kyi.
Was the election actually fraudulent? What does the future hold for Myanmar?
Regarding pedophilia, this strikes me as almost obvious. Marrying children was a common occurrence in the ancient world. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, if you can impregnate them, you should be at least partially attracted to them. Assuming 12 year old girls can often get pregnant, but are probably prone to serious fertility/birthing problems, it makes sense this would be a spectrum according to different reproductive strategies. Sorry everyone, I didn't invent evolution. We might even take this further and say fans of MILF porn represent the other end of that reproductive strategy spectrum maybe?
What are the constraints on expanding output of vaccines?
I have been saying for a while that it took a week to create the vaccines we are now using, eleven months to get them approved by the FDA and equivalents abroad. A month of challenge trials would have demonstrated effectiveness and at least a minimal level of safety, after which the companies should have been free to sell them to anyone who wanted to buy, which would have save something like a million lives.
But this assumes that the reason the companies were not in a position to provide all the doses we wanted when they did get approved was that they were not willing to make the necessary massive investments in productive ability until they knew they could sell the vaccines. The Russian vaccine, which apparently now turns out to be better than 90% effective, was approved early, but I don't believe all that much of the population has been vaccinated yet, which suggests that there may be constraints to mass production and mass vaccination that I'm missing.
Can anyone fill this in? If a vaccine had been approved after a month of testing, is there any reason why the producer couldn't have provided it by now to everyone who wanted it and was willing to pay for it?
Does anyone have any good examples of when throwing money at a problem have made the problem worse? I would like to find a as clear-cut example of this as possible, where it is as obvious as possible to see that it was the extra money/resources/headcount that made the problem worse and not external factors.
This isn't the first time this blog has cited sources that say bad things about Brasilia, so I wanted to say, as someone who spent a few years living there, that Brasilia is an incredibly awesome city.
I remember Scott's review of Seeing Like a State claiming that Brasilia's roads were arranged as a grid (true), so it was full of street corners (false). In fact, Brasilia is famous for using these weird half-roundabouts ("tesourinhas") for almost all street interceptions, which helps to improve traffic. The city has a strict "no buildings higher than 4 stores" policy, which, combined with wide streets and sidewalks, helps generate a "I'm in a really, really open space" feeling when you're walking around. There are plenty of big, empty grass fields -- which keep the scenery constantly green, and where kids have ample space to play. Plenty of trees to keep the breeze cool and, most noticeably, A LOT of flowers. The city has a terrible system of public transportation, I'll admit that, but the fact that it's tiny and the way it's organized makes it extremely easy to just walk to wherever you're going. It's actually a common feat to walk from one end of the city to the other. Every Sunday, the main road that crosses the city is interdicted so people can take walks and bike and skate...
What about the cold, soulless concrete buildings? I don't know, maybe it's not for everybody, but I always thought Brasilian architecture was beautiful. It's not all right angles, Oscar Niemeyer was actually a big fan of wide curves, and it shows.
This is not to say that Brasilia became a technocratic utopia -- I highly doubt that was it's goal. It's a city built for the middle class and rich, and you're kind of screwed if you're less than that and live there. But I think the critiques made about it's urban planning, it's architecture, it's way of doing things through deliberate design instead of natural growth are actually talking about Brasilia's strengths. After living there, I moved to another Brazilian city, one most outsiders see as a charming example of natural and organic growth, full of history, warmth, chance. It sucked.
Timely article on technocracy - https://www.chronicle.com/article/cass-sunstein-and-adrian-vermeules-technocratic-despotism
Phrase that got an eye-roll - “the morality of administrative law.” I like this critical paragraph -
"In fact, technocratic predictions about human behavior have been notoriously unable to make good on their epistemic claims. One of the most comprehensive studies assessing expert ability to predict human behavior — Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment — found that social scientists were unable to outperform moderately informed colleagues from other fields in predicting futures in their own areas of expertise. As Tetlock put it: “People who devoted years of arduous study to a topic were as hard-pressed as colleagues casually dropping in from other fields to affix realistic probabilities to possible futures.”"
A typical "party game" type question one might be asked is "What would you do if you had a billion dollars?" I've never been quite able to answer in a satisfactory way. That is to say, in an interesting and indulgent way. My real answer is "Invest a great deal of it sensibly to generate at least a steady 10-15% rate of return, spend the vast majority of it on charities, live the lifestyle of someone with 2 million in the bank." But of course that is not the point of the question: the real point is what personally indulgent thing would you do if money was no object. I've always struggled with that question because my desires are cheap. I like good food, but like a ribeye steak good, not fine dining. I like video games. I like books. These things are not hard to acquire.
But I think I finally have one. If I was a billionaire and I had to do something wildly wasteful and indulgent then I would start a special fund. This fund would offer to cover 10-20% of the costs of construction of all new buildings in my city (or another city of my choosing) and to cover up to 50% of the cost of all renovations with only one requirement: that the design of the building is one that I like. Something art deco, or gothic revival, or beaux arts. Anything but the sleek and boring buildings I see built everywhere today. I want decoration, ornamentation, statuary, stained glass, and if I have so much money I'd be happy to foot the bill myself. Maybe I'd take it further: I'd approach whole streets of stores and offer to pay to renovate every building to fit my architectural fancy. Remake entire neighborhoods and boroughs into little architectural theme parks. Remake the city to a piece of art that fits my taste.
Does anyone see any practical obstacles to this plan? The main one is that I think I'd need to be a billionaire several times over to make it work.
Re: cost disease, I saw an interesting but unverified comment on reddit by user "Lortekonto" (https://www.reddit.com/r/UpliftingNews/comments/l5vv6m/billionaire_mark_cuban_just_launched_a_drug/gkx4imk/ ). As I understand it, they translate a letter by a CEO of Novo Nordisk which claims that a practice called "bulk companies" is partly responsible for inflated drug prizes (i.e. when a drug supposedly costs 4000$ but your insurance only pays a fraction for it).
See the comment for the full argument, but roughly, there used to be a legitimate service model of a "bulk company" hired by company A to negotiate discounts on product B by buying in bulk, and these bulk companies got a fraction of the discount as profit.
And so:
> So let us say that Novo-nordic sells a drug for $30. The bulkcompany comes in and say that they can get it cheaper but want 20% of the discount. Over the next decade they demand a greater and greater discount, the manufacture agrees to the discount, but raises the listed price. The listed price of the drug is now $300, but the bulkcompany gets a 90% discount, so the pharmacy can still buy the druge for $30 from the manufacture, but the bulkcompany get 20% of the now $270 discount, which is $54. A cost that is then pushed to the consumer.
I have a question about options and short squeezes. Why don't options have an alternative satisfaction to limit potential losses.
Why does the short contract require that the shorter return the stock as the only option? Why not have the shorter able to either return the stock or thrice the current market value (or some other number)? This would limit potential losses, and protect the person loaning stock to some degree.
This would provide some insurance. It would also come up so rarely that it would have miniscule changes in the price of short contracts..
Nice to see that neither the Swiss nor Irish police have anything pressing occupying their time these days 😀
First the Zuger Polizei did this dance challenge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92WKbtocEA0
Then, in response to another tweet, they challenged https://twitter.com/fedpolCH/status/1350072210833207296
the Garda Síochána who stepped up to them https://twitter.com/gardainfo/status/1356554527806259200
And the Swiss were gracious in appreciation https://twitter.com/fedpolCH/status/1356876411181621248
Maybe we all need something silly and harmless for these times!
Among the several things I enjoy are when people do a good rant about something or someone who is WRONG. And here is a great one, from a blog I've newly discovered - the Renaissance Mathematicus. It covers a couple of my favourites: history, religion (Catholicism) and tearing the paper off the wall to fit in all the ways this hapless individual is getting it wrong 😁
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2021/02/03/review-of-a-book-i-have-not-read-and-have-absolutely-no-intention-of-wasting-money-on/
First, we have the name of the poor wretch what wrote the book: one Professor Timon Screech. And you thought Charles Dickens was extravagant with his naming schemes! The gentleman in question is a Brummie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brummagem) so that makes it even more delicious. Contemplating whether he is addressed formally as "Professor Screech" or informally as "Timon" by those who must interact with him is a tiny moment of joy.
Secondly, he is an art professor at SOAS (which for those of you like myself who had no idea what this acronym means, is the School of Oriental and African Studies, the older name by which I *had* heard of it) at the University of London. He specialises in Japanese art and culture of the Early Modern Period, which covers roughly the period from the beginning of the 16th century to the early 19th century. He may indeed be the divil an' all when it comes to Japanese art, but when it comes to science and history...
And that leads us on, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, to our third point: the matter in hand, the book what he wrote, " The Shogun’s Silver Telescope: God, Art and Money in the English Quest for Japan, 1600–1625" and the said Renaissance Mathematicus' review of it.
Which is not very gruntled, let me tell you. I urge you to go and read it for yourself, preferably with the beverage and nibbles of your choice, to savour the entire thing. It's always a pleasantly ecumenical experience to read an atheist hauling someone over the coals for getting it WRONG about Catholics/Catholicism, especially when it involves our old pal Galileo. If you need some coaxing to read this, let me whet your appetite:
"I have looked at the phrase, as telescopes became a central battleground between Rome and the Protestant churches numerous times, from various standpoints and different angles and all that occurs to me is, what the fuck is that supposed to mean? It is simply put baloney, balderdash, poppycock, gibberish, hogwash, drivel, palaver, mumbo jumbo, rubbish, or even more simply, total and utter crap! I’m not even going to waste time, space and effort in trying to analyse and refute it, it doesn’t deserve it. Somebody please flush it down the toilet into the sewers, where it belongs."
Now, I'm not recommending this on polemical grounds, though it is a happy accident. Rather I wish to share the enjoyment of real history/science going up against pop-culture history/science. Good luck to all!
Conspiracy to save the election integrity.
Tl;dr: it was not trivial that USA survived 2020 election without a disaster.
https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
Re: 2 -- a place to figure that out is Afghanistan (tragically)
Now I see what the fuss is about.
Dumb people who think they are smarter than everyone else can refute well researched ideas easily with comments such as "it's all bullshit" and then go on posting wacko ideas on "how it really works" misunderstanding just about everything they just read and feel like they're smarter than everyone else.
Moving on.