I very nearly wrote a review of Mike Lindell's autobiography "What Are The Odds," which is subtitled "From Crack Addict To CEO." But in the end the idea of spending hours of my time reading and writing about a man who would choose a hologram of his own face for his first book seemed like low-hanging fruit. Yes he is a terrible man, but is he worth the effort?
I've really enjoyed the book reviews. IRL conversations with other ACX readers suggest they've really enjoyed them as well. Far from wishing the competition over sooner, I'm sad I soon won't be getting such a volume of interesting precis.
Social Desirability Bias is the general tendency to say things that sound good and don't make oneself look bad. It leads to people over reporting things like charitable giving, church attendance and so forth. Left-leaning people seem to do more so-called "virtue signaling" about racism, sexism and bigotry. Right-leaning people do this sort of social signaling as well but not to the same extent because virtue signaling your right wing beliefs doesn't work as well and may be detrimental to your social standing. Left-leaning people avoid being racist, sexist, transphobic, disbelieving in science and so forth. Right-leaning people like to talk about being responsible, patriotic, Christian and stuff like that.
Have you heard about that factoid that "X% of drivers think they are better than average" where X is much larger than 50%? You don't need to verify their driving skills to know that people are systemically mistaken about their relative beliefs. I propose asking a bunch of people "Are you less racist/sexist/bigoted/anti-science than the average person/poll respondent?" I think the number of yes would be greater than 50%. If you asked a more concrete question like "How often do you use the racial slur [X] relative to the average poll respondent". You could further specify to within groups with "How often are you sexist relative to the average self-described progressive respondent"? You could also do this for conservative causes: "Are you more or less patriotic than the average self-described conservative" or "Do you attend Church more or less than the average conservative poll respondent?"
By looking at the measure of (X% - %50) = error. The error is composed of self-confidence, differing definitions, lying or social desirability. The test would not be perfect but rough. The more concrete questions remove ambiguous definition issues. I think that you could use this to determine a few things by comparing whatever group you want.
1. Which group appeals more to socially desirably answers?
2. Which group has more social desirable beliefs as a whole?
3. What are the least socially desirable beliefs for groups and the whole?
This could be useful information. Social Desirability Bias is everywhere and it is a good reason to be skeptical about what people say. I made a blog post on this issue if anyone is interested.
What's the deal with "objective" theories of value (like the labour theory of value)? What question is these theories supposed to answer? Are they fundamentally ethical, in that they say what the price *should* be, or what the "fair" or "just" price is? Or can they be used to make predictions about real prices, and if so how?
In a prior thread someone brought up Tim Scott as a likely Republican nominee for 2024. I didn't know much about him at the time but I've been looking a bit more into him ever since.
Prediction: if Tim Scott is the 2024 nominee then we will see a quick but stealthy reversal of the trend that Scott noted in https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/ ; we will be back to wall-to-wall religious wars again. At a vague guess, "Christians are responsible for violence against LGBT people" will be the leading narrative.
I've been thinking for a while the answer is probably agency: being able to make decisions for things you find important. I think culture in general is mostly people reacting rationally to the incentives that exist in society they grew up in, before age 25. I think it is 70% that and 30% other stuff. Thus I am biased to thinking that this question will be similar.
This question probably first entered my brain when I found it that in Japan people tend to dislike Bart for his troublemaking ways. But over here in North America, there was Bartmania. There is also a stereotype that being a good kid was cool immediately post war, but by the 60's that was seen as "square" and some kind of rule breaker has been cool since. I wondered what is different that changed that.
I have been thinking for a while now that the core thing is likely agency. You have none as a baby but are expected to get to the normal adult amount by age 18 or so. I suspect then that coolness comes from having more agency than those your age, and uncoolness from having less. Since starting this paragraph it has occurred to me that when I was in school a few kids were lame simply for having overbearing parents. There is also an episode of the Simpson where Bart is teaching Martin how to be cool and one of the lessons is that the potential for mischief varies inversely with one's proximity to the authority figure. I think that rule is coming very close to realizing that agency is the key thing.
I think this can explain why cool went from a good kid at the start of the post-war period to various kinds of rulebreaker. Parents and school stopped rewarding being a good kid with extra agency, mostly for the sake of fairness, while certain kinds of rule breaking have seen their punishments get weaker and/or inconsistently enforced. I think breaking a rule and getting away with it (or with a 'slap on the wrist') is an expression of agency. If you were a kid going to school when I did (90s and 2000s) rule breaking was the only way to have more agency than your peers. I think that is why the culture has shifted to one where troublemakers are generally cool.
To be clear, not all troublemaking is cool. It has to be the kind where you get away with it. For Bart, it seemed like making jokes in class or talking back to the teacher often got nothing more than his name said in a harsh tone. The adult isn't stopping him, so this displays more agency than he should have, so he is cool. When I was a teen, weed served a similar purpose. It was something you can do than was unlikely to get you in trouble but still counted as breaking a rule. Since Canada has legalized marijuana, weed use amongst teens has halved: it no longer makes you cool.
Another big example is in Scott's Review of [On the Road](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-road/) from 2014. I recently read this the first time a week ago, which has brought this topic back onto my mind. To summarize the relevant part of this book and review: the main character is a causes major problems for everyone, always gets away with it, is seen by a messiah for it by the narrator, and Scott really dislikes them both for it. I think the many people would think the main character was cool. The Wikipedia article suggests that was the reception. The book is listed as a defining work for two cultural movements.
I wonder if we wanted to change this so being a good kid, tries in school; kind to others; follows the rules, to be cool again we'd have to change the incentives so that these kids get more agency again. Once, and only once, I got to leave elementary school 15 minutes early because I had been good that day where the class as a whole was worse than usual. Would making small but desirable privileges like that a common thing be able to shift the culture back? Based on my theory that coolness is to do with agency, I think it would. I think a lot of punishments would have to become stricter as well. Having rules that aren't enforced or have punishments that are easily ignored would keep the incentives against this shit strong.
Has anybody examined this? Or is there a better idea on what 'coolness' is that I haven't heard of? Also, I mentioned at the start that in Japan Bart was not seen as cool like he was in North America. If there are some people who grew up in Japan reading this, was good behavior rewarded as a child? Does it seem like American kids could get away with more at school than you could. Bart Simpson often wasn't too far off from what some kids could get away with in school.
> But On The Road is, most importantly, a picture of a high-trust society collapsing. And it’s collapsing precisely because the book’s protagonists are going around defecting against everyone they meet at a hundred ten miles an hour.
Since reading this I've been wondering a few things: do high-trust societies have mechanisms to protect themselves from people who will exploit this trust? If so, what are they and why did they not work in the US (and I think it Canada as well)? If not, are high trust societies doomed to rot from the inside after a few generations?
New York stopped requiring students to wear masks in class last week, then another part of New York sneeringly overruled the first part and decided that no, students DO still have to wear masks during school. My question is about social media.
My wife is a member of a Facebook moms group specific to our town. Shit EXPLODED. Dozens of moms (literally dozens - multiples of twelve. Of moms) posted screaming curse filled rants against the reinstatement of a mask mandate that had been lifted for an entire weekend. Many threatened the school board and particularly the superintendent that they would organize and withhold taxes or something if the school followed the requirements of the DOE, and that they were sending they’re sending their children to school maskless so fuck you. Other people screamed back at them, calling them ignorant garbage and telling them to stop literally murdering people by suggesting they would not mask their kids in the future.
Some moms screamingly compared the lifting then reinstating of the mask requirement to Nazi camps. The Jewish mom screamed that those moms were evil moronic f*cks that should have horrible things happen to them. And so on and so on. Scream-response scream.
At one point a few nearby towns said “fuck it” and told their students they could come in without a mask anyway. Then they took it back when Cuomo threatened to have them all shot. You can imagine the howls during that period.
All this and more went on for days. It’s probably still going on; my wife left the group because it got so nasty.
I’m not on social media. I’m not really capturing how awful and unhinged everyone was - I wish I’d written down some of the posts to use as examples - but those of you who are on FB or Twitter can fill in the blanks. My question is: don’t these people have to meet each other in person? Often? Don’t some of their kids play together? Don’t they talk to the superintendent at some point? It’s not anonymous. You’ll know exactly who the person is who called you an ignorant shit in front of hundreds of people. We all know the name of the mom who called people who don’t put their kids in masks “cunts”. What happens in real life after these blow ups? Isn’t there SOME kind of impact to real life relationships for bad behavior online? I’m completely at sea here.
I was hanging out with some friends recently. Somehow the topic of standardized tests came up. I lamented that colleges are starting to ignore SAT scores for reasons of "equity."
The friends I was talking to, surprisingly, both said that standardized tests are useless and don't tell you anything. And they said that rich people can afford tutors for their kids so it just means you can "buy" higher scores. I doubt many people here agree with that point of view, but I'm curious if anyone does (and what evidence they have.)
I'm sensitive (and biased) about the issue because I grew up in a small town with bad schools. I also got crappy grades (i'd like to have an excuse for it, but mostly: I was lazy). The fact that I got good test scores was the only reason I got into a decent college. And I was able to do well in the years since.
I wondered if the current (what I call) attack on standardized tests comes from people in the opposite position I was in. The current "critique" of the media is that it's a bunch of upper-class white kids that went to exclusive schools that now run our news rooms.
What if those people were the mirror of me: good schools, good grades, low test scores (relatively, anyway). Wouldn't those people have a "stake" in downplaying the importance of these tests? Like, "How can I be part of the intellectual elite if I only got 1200 on the SAT? It must be the tests that are wrong!"
Are there ways a solar system could be arranged that would make it significantly easier for a civilisation that evolved there to engage in interstellar travel?
Suppose we construct a binary system with the two stars very close and therefore orbiting quickly around one another. Would a (powered?) slingshot manoeuvre around one of the suns provide enough of a boost to be a useful start to an interstellar voyage?
As a bonus, let's also throw in a terrestrial planet of a few earth masses a little way out from the habitable planet, so that you can gravity assist your perihelion down to where you need it for the stellar slingshot.
Are we going to get the full results of the book review voting? I mean from the runners-up list? I'm fascinated by what it shows - did the good reviews get a lot of votes? Were the less good reviews recipients of lots of votes by readers annoyed that they had to plough through something unenjoyable. Etc etc.
It would seem quite un ACXish for Scott to say "Oh, these two won the vote, so lets just move on.." Am I alone in being interested in how the whole voting thing panned out? Did any reviews receive no votes at all? Did the two that were promoted to finalist receive the most votes as well as the highest average?
I'm seeking advice on a cybersecurity question. I'm the IT administrator for a small non-profit organization. For the past three years or so, we've had cyber insurance through a major insurance company. This year, they're imposing these requirements on us (see below) before they'll renew the policy. To my mind, point #2 below seems unreasonable. If I'm inside the network and SSHing into a Linux host, do I _really_ need two-factor authentication to get in to the host? I'm not even sure how I would implement that. I've reached out to the networking engineer we use for bigger projects, but I haven't heard back yet.
1. Multi-Factor authentication is required for all remote access to the network provided to employees, contractors, and 3rd party service providers.
2. In addition to remote access, multi-factor authentication is required for the following, including such access provided to 3rd party service providers:
a. All internal & remote admin access to directory services (active directory, LDAP, etc.).
b. All internal & remote admin access to network backup environments.
c. All internal & remote admin access to network infrastructure (firewalls, routers, switches, etc.).
d. All internal & remote admin access to the organization’s endpoints/servers.
I know that math is *virtuous*. And I know that some kinds of math are useful in some contexts. How can I know these contexts aren't as depressingly narrow as the math-deniers assert?
Only in part playing devil's advocate here. I overtly believe in the usefulness of math, but on second glance that belief looks a lot like Belief As Attire. And I think that's a big source of math-related akrasia for me.
Are there any SSC/ACT readers interested or involved in drug development?
I'm the president of a preclinical biotech company called Highway Pharmaceuticals (highwaypharm.com) . We're focused on reusing and recombining generics to treat autoimmune diseases that are difficult or impossible to treat with biologics, including diseases like progressive multiple sclerosis.
We've recently had some promising preclinical results and I'm trying to plan out my IND submissions. I'd love to talk to anyone who's been down this road before (or at least knows the path). Feel free to reply below or contact me through highwaypharm.com .
People of a certain political persuasion sometimes say that there is a supply/demand problem with White Supremacy. WS is something that all right-thinking people abhor, and there is much merit in fighting it, so there is great demand for white supremacists to fight. Unfortunately there are almost no white supremacists around, hence the supply/demand problem.
Now in a market economy, this problem should theoretically be solved by a substantial rise in the price paid to those who can deliver WS, which will then induce an increase in WS.
Questions:
1) is this happening?
1a) if not, why not? And if it's regulated out of existence, would a more libertarian nation then produce more WS?
2) is there a way to stop it from happening, other than reducing demand?
Now that voting is coming up I've been thinking a bit on a somewhat meta-level question on how I am going to pick which reviews to vote for. I have not read most of the books in question myself, so I cannot fairly judge how accurately or completely the books were represented by their reviewers. Also there has already been significant selection applied in that the posted finalists are the top ~15 reviews out of more than 100, so while some may be better than others none are really badly written. That means if I just pick the ones I enjoyed the most, or the ones I think I learned the most from, then my decision will be affected more by which book was reviewed than by the quality of the review. I am not entirely happy with this prospect, because it seems like the judging should be on how well you write a review, not on whether you picked a book that lots of readers will like, but I'm not sure how to avoid it. Does anyone else have thoughts along these lines?
Please keep discussion on the meta-level of the process of judging and do not discuss the merits of specific reviews or which reviews you plan to vote for in order to avoid influencing other people's votes directly.
"Send it from a different address than you used originally, in case the problem was that your emails end up in my spam filter."
You should also request a set phrase, such as "Book Review Contest", be put in the subject line. That way even if they get sent to your spam folder, a keyword search will find them.
Some new results from Spain on Calcifediol, a ward-randomized trial of 984 patients found that those supplemented with calcifediol had a lower ICU admissions rate and mortality rate than the control wards. This is the paper that was heavily criticized when it was released in preprint, but after peer review it looks much better.
"Results: ICU assistance was required by 102 (12.2%) participants. Out of 447 patients treated with calcifediol at admission, 20 (4.5%) required ICU, compared to 82 (21%) out of 391 non-treated (p-value<0.0001). Logistic regression of calcifediol treatment on ICU admission, adjusted by age, gender, linearized 25OHD levels at baseline, and comorbidities showed that treated patients had a reduced risk to require ICU (OR 0.13 [95% CI 0.07;0.23]). Overall mortality was 10%. In the Intention-to-Treat analysis, 21 (4.7%) out of 447 patients treated with calcifediol at admission died compared to 62 patients (15.9%) out of 391 non-treated (p=0.0001). Adjusted results showed a reduced mortality risk with an OR 0.21 [95% CI 0.10; 0.43]). In the second analysis, the obtained OR was 0.52 [95% CI 0.27;0.99]."
This follows a few other calficifediol papers from the same group:
- A large propensity score matched study of 16,000 patients found that calcifediol and cholecalciferol supplementation were associated with large reductions in Covid–19 mortality. (Loucera et al, April 2021)
- A cohort study of 574 patients in Spain found that calcifediol supplementation was associated with a significant decrease in in-hospital mortality with an adjusted odds ratio of 0.16. (Alcala-Diaz et al, May 2021)
- A parallel pilot randomized open label trial of 76 patients in Spain found that the administration of calcifediol reduced ICU admission and mortality. Of the 50 patients treated with calcifediol. 13/26 patients in the control group required ICU care compared with 1 in the intervention group. A subsequent statistical analysis showed that decreased ICU admissions were not due to uneven distribution of comorbidities or other prognostic indicators, to imperfect blinding, or to chance, but were instead associated with the calcifediol intervention. (Castillo et all, August 2020)
A topic that has been on my mind lately, and I'm curious if anyone here has some interesting thoughts:
How can you gain familiarity, competence, or even expertise in an area, without becoming jaded or desensitized to what you find interesting or enjoyable about it? Or phrased another way, how can you maintain a sense of wonder and/or excitement about something even while losing your naivity and "beginner's eyes" towards it?
"Area" above is very broadly defined. I think this question is relevant to everything from technical work, to hobbies, to sexuality, to building and maintaining friendships.
If I had an intuition about this problem, I think it would be super useful to me, because I'm increasingly worried about the long-term unsustainability of constantly searching out novelty and escalation in each area of my life.
Three Venus missions for NASA and ESA! That's good stuff - we've neglected exploration of Venus compared to Mars for a long time, because they thought Mars might have life and it was easier to do a lander there.
You can do a lander on Venus, but it requires either making it out of materials that can stand up to 500 C temperatures and 95 atm pressure (the former is a much bigger problem than the latter), or using active cooling. Active cooling would probably require a multi-kilowatt nuclear power source, AKA expensive.
There's some research and models in the past couple years that suggest that Venus might have had an ocean and possibly been habitable for longer than we thought. Given how similar in size and mass it is to Earth, it'd be good to figure out if it was always screwed from the beginning, or if it started out like Earth but became uninhabitable over time.
Washington, DC SSC/ASX Meetup next weekend, Saturday 6/19, starting at 7PM. The address is 1002 N St NW, near the Mt. Vernon Square metro station. Follow the sign for "Free Utility". The event will be mostly outside, but the house will be open in case of rain.
For further details, join our Facebook group or Google listserv:
I know I'm a couple of months late on the charter city thread, but after reading it..... why don't these charter cities just use the US commercial code, or something similar from another 1st world country like the UK or Germany? The US has the Uniform Commercial Code, for instance, which seems like it would be a great starting point. They could use arbitration to resolve business disputes, arbitration is big business these days and tons of law firms offer it. Maybe a few attorneys would be willing to offer free or reduced services as a charity in the city's beginning years- a number of firms already make their attorneys do x amount of pro bono work, here's a developing country trying to get off the ground, etc.
Prospera seems to be fairly radical- they have a brand new political system, elements of which have never been tried anywhere, some elements of their commercial code seem to have never been tried anywhere, etc. Plus the usual blockchain nonsense, of course. Without weighing in on the specifics- basic intellectual humility tells us that some of these brand new political & commercial codes are not going to work out, or won't work as intended. 'Let's create a radical brand new society with various rules I just made up' is usually a left-wing exercise, of course with a poor track record.
I like the charter city concept and would like to see it succeed- I guess I just don't understand the reasoning for a new legal system when there are perfectly functional alternatives that work right now, today. The Uniform Commercial Code currently runs a $22 trillion economy, whereas whatever Prospera just made up currently runs, uh, absolutely nothing. Which one do you think would be a better choice? (But blockchain etc. etc., of course). I guess I just don't understand the motivation to reinvent the wheel, existing legal systems are one of the big reasons why the 1st world is the 1st world presently. And fast, fair arbitration from experienced US attorneys to resolve disputes- just seems like those are all strengths Honduras could be absorbing
I'm wondering if anyone would be interested in checking out / helping with feedback on our app Meetminder, which lets you ask Friends ( colleagues, friends, and family members ) if they'd like to join your account so that you can see their Zoom status. You can also enter their meeting times and provide an external reminder if they're supposed to be in a Zoom meeting but aren't ( according to their Zoom status ).
I think it's time for Scott to write a post about open borders. He has hinted in the past that he may be in favor of it, saying he has mixed feelings. I'm dying to hear his thoughts on this.
Previously I discussed how the Dutch formation process was interrupted by an accidental leak of a talking point where they wanted to find a new job for a 'difficult' representative, Pieter Omtzigt, who helped uncover a major government scandal and otherwise has a much more critical disposition than most representatives in the respectable parties. Back then it seemed that this might result in the PM, "Teflon Mark" Rutte, to not be able to form a new executive, although it was hard to imagine an alternative, to him or his party. A complicating factor was that the representative in question was at home with a burn out.
Since then, the focus has increasingly shifted to Omtzigt's party, who seemed paralyzed in the formation process. They've been investigating the election loss and the issues in the party. The representative, Omtzigt, was asked to write down his point of view. He wrote a 76 page document, which was leaked, with various accusations. One claim was that a few large donors, whose contribution was not made public, may have had influence on the party program, which was changed in a way that is not consistent, but to the advantage of those donors.
A second claim was that Omtzigt was promised the party leadership, but was passed by. A bit of history: Omtzigt's party decided to hold elections for the party leadership, where Omtzigt was one of the candidates. Unlike American primaries, the only people who could vote are (paid) members of the political party, which is a tiny (and decreasing) part of the people who vote for the party in the general elections. These party leader elections were a mess, where the first election attempt was canceled because the online election could easily be manipulated. During the second attempt, people were told that they had voted for someone else than who they had voted for, including Omtzigt's wife. The party claimed that their audits showed that these votes were counted properly and the election results stood. Omtzigt lost by 49.3% to 50.7% of the votes. The winner was the minister (= secretary of state) for healthcare and thus responsible for COVID vaccinations. His predecessor suffered from a burn out and he it didn't take that long for the successor to decide that he couldn't combine the job of minister with the party leadership. Perhaps the amount of criticism he got due to his performance as minister also played a role, making him fear that if he acted a party leader during the election, his party would be held responsible for the COVID failures. Omtzigt then wasn't promoted to party leader, as he claims he was promised, nor were new elections held. Instead, another person was made leader.
He claims that the ministers of his own party, who were/are part of the executive, refused to defend him. He also claims that the ministers are way more concerned with their own image than with governing well (that was the impression I got too, from the notes of the ministerial meetings that were released).
Omtzigt provided screenshots of Whatsapp conversations between others where people were extremely rude and unprofessional about him. He was called a tuberculosis dog, crazy, a 'fucking glans with Nazi posters', a psychopath and accused of emotional lability. He claims that after the national elections, he was blamed for the loss in a Zoom call. Omtzigts party is calls itself Christian and has very old voters, who may not appreciate this.
The first poster states: 'Justice, also for the little man.' The second states: 'Time for a new social contract.'
After this memo with grievances was leaked, Omtzigt announced that he would leave his party, but will keep his seat. It's unclear whether he will start his own political party, which seems to have a lot of potential, although it is hard to build up a party from scratch.
Meanwhile, it's unclear how well the formation process is going. There is no observable progress. So major COVID-related decisions are made by an executive with merely a caretaker mandate.
What's the best source that explains how to do “good” science that avoids all the pitfalls that we’re now aware of as a result of the "replication crisis"? I’ve found a few websites that kind of have what I’m looking for, but none of them seem to have the completeness that I think the best reference source might have.
First of two culture-war adjacent questions. For both of these, I am looking for falsifiable answers, and less opinions. (Can't tell people how to answer, but this is what I am asking for.)
I have heard repeated references by liberals/progressives regarding the fossilization of race barriers in the USA under the 'one drop rule.' Wikipedia gives a historical perspective (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule) but is pretty scant on the recent use of this rule. I find references to modern activists decrying the historical use of the concept, and using it themselves to classify people into different racial categories.
What I don't find is anyone on the conservative side (USA) using this categorization to define themselves or others, or endorsing it for modern use.
Does anyone have examples of modern conservative (the more mainstream the better, race essentialists are acceptable but should be identified as such) pundits or columnists using this to describe people? (For this, I'd say 'modern' is...within the last 20 years.)
Second CW question - this one's a bit technical and I would appreciate input from medical specialists, especially epi and OB/GYN.
Katie Herzog recently authored a post for Bari Weiss's Substack - https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-doctors-cant-speak - concerning the impact of Woke disruption of the free exchange of ideas on medicine education & practice in America. Among the topics discussed was black-white differences in maternal mortality: "But this is an example of how system-wide bias can harm black mothers, who are two to three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women even when you control for factors like income and education, which often make racial disparities disappear."
(Herzog also interviewed the presenter of a recent inflammatory anti-white psychology lecture here: https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-psychopathic-problem-of-the-white. I am not always a fan of Herzog, but she tries harder than many less leftist columnists/writers I have read.)
In the 200 + comments on the substack article, there was very little grappling with this difference in outcomes. When I went and looked it up (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6835a3.htm) (there are other studies out there) it turns out that there are significant differences between different racial groups not only in death rates, but between causes of death in different groups. Specifically, it seems that Asian/PI women have slightly higher death rates, Hispanic women slightly lower, American Indians markedly higher, and AA women highest of all, compared to white/Euro descent women. This seemed to hold across all economic/education groups and across time.
In addition, the causes of excess death for African American women (over Euro-descent women) weren't the infection or even hemorrhage that I expected for neglect or distain for the people being treated, but cardiovascular conditions. Hispanic women had higher rates of both infection and hemorrhage.
To me, this doesn't sound like a difference in how the women are being treated, but in baseline tendencies towards different diseases in different populations. And if that's true, then "attacking racism" isn't going to stop women from dying. Nor is assuming that there are no biological differences between different genetic groups (aka 'races'.)
Are there physicians in the commentariat, or well-read laymen, who can speak to this?
A thought on unconscious bias and racism. My understanding of proponents' case for this is that we can recognise unconscious bias through scientific testing, a finding which is contentious and disputed, and on which I can offer no informed opinion. But there seems to be an interesting train of thought available from looking at this from a deliberately -naive viewpoint.
Due to the potential significance of the argument and the lack of certainty about the theories ability to provide experimental verification, the debate about unconscious bias tends to immediately descend into standard culture war rhetoric with proponents of unconscious bias arguing that those denying it's efficacy are either ignoring or covering up their own racism, whilst opponents conversely argue that the proponents are pushing a theory with no real evidence for political purposes. It's a typical intransigent argument where both sides assume bad faith on the part of the other: not a particularly useful use of anyone's time to be honest.
But what if we assume good faith should apply? That both sides mean what they say? That become a bit more interesting. In the first place, we can accept the view that some people don't treat others differently on the basis of skin colour, which ties in with the lack of evidence for first-order racism on the part of conservatives in the main. Rather than having a pointless playground "you're a racist", "am not" debate you can at least examine whether the policies your opponent favour might be racist in some way without just assuming they are because of unconscious bias, which might open up the door to more rational arguments (I did say might...).
But the really fun bit of taking people's pronouncements about unconscious bias at face value is simply that it must prove one side of the debate is racist, but that side is the proponents of unconscious bias not the opponents. If these people are content that unconscious bias testing can show that people are racist, in that they make decisions on the basis of skin colour, then their reaction to this has been to think that the accusation sounds right and not to say "hang on; i don't think like that'. So to take support for the contention that unconscious bias testing reveals people are inherently racist in good faith means accepting that the person making this contention is aware that they are in fact racist, for if they feel themselves not to be racist the test must be to some degree be invalid.
The weird thing here though is that for some reason we then let the debate on race be run by the people who are happy they are racist, and who have to assume bad faith on the part of those who oppose them on the basis that these opponents do not see themselves as racist. This seems more than a little bit worrying: if we accept what people say to be broadly true, then the people who do label a human as different due to skin colour are the ones controlling racial politics.
From what I understand, each Bitcoin is encoded with the history of all its past transactions, hence why it is commonly compared to a "ledger." This feature makes it nearly impossible to counterfeit Bitcoins, but it also slows down the Bitcoin exchange network since verifying the authenticity of any one Bitcoin requires sifting through its transaction record. The problem gets worse as time passes, and the Bitcoins' transaction histories get longer as they are traded back and forth more.
Couldn't this problem be solved if the Bitcoin network periodically deleted past transaction histories? I guess the process would involve having one of your Bitcoins, let's call it "Bitcoin ABC" scanned by some kind of central authority that would verify its transaction history was authentic and that it was a valid Bitcoin. Bitcoin ABC would then be deleted and you would be given a new Bitcoin called "Bitcoin XYZ" with no transaction history since you were its first owner, and the entire Bitcoin network would be alerted to what had happened.
The whole network would speed up as people traded in their old Bitcoins this way.
I'm in SF starting Tuesday, then in NYC and Boston - would love to meet with people, especially if you do biology or something related to it - alexey@guzey.com!
Scott's post on cows vs. chickens mentioned that a burger's worth of cow produced <10kg of CO2 equivalent, which costs <10 cents to offset. It feels like there should be lots of people out there who like meat and would eat more of it (and a more expensive variety) if it didn't seem like a Terrible Antisocial Thing that will Destroy Humanity. So, where's the beef company prominently marketing how they're carbon-neutral (or, better yet, carbon-negative)? It exists for ice cream, my local store recently started carrying a brand like that.
Am I wrong about how many people know and care about the impact of cows on greenhouse gases? Or, are carbon-offset burgers a thing (just not a thing I've seen)? For that matter, why don't e.g. tree nuts say "carbon-negative" on the packaging, the way I've seen sugar packaging say "contains no saturated fats"?
Many folks I read are getting increasingly concerned about the possible spread of the COVID "delta" variant worldwide in the coming months, including in the US. If you are a USian who (by your own estimation) follows COVID news more closely than most:
(a) how concerned (or not) are you about the delta variant's impact here and why?
(b) how, if at all, do you anticipate adjusting your personal plans for the coming months as a result of this concern?
(c) what is your % estimate, if you have one, of the probability that the spread of "delta COVID" will cause the reimposition of onerous social distancing restrictions (e.g. indoor dining bans, large gathering bans, schools closing or moving to "hybrid") in at least one US state by the end of 2021?
I comment on Scott's On the Road review below, but I want to make a separate, generalization about it here, because it's relevant, at least to me, in many discussions about novels or art.
In that review Scott says:
- But from a modern perspective, if Jack and Dean tried the same thing today, they’d be one of about a billion college students and aimless twenty-somethings with exactly the same idea, posting their photos to Instagram tagged “holy”, “ecstatic”, and “angelic”. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it doesn’t seem like a good stopping-point for a philosophy.
Before going further I want to point out I'm a huge fan of Scott's writing and thinking and I wouldn't be here otherwise. (I mean here in this comment section. I'd probably still be here on this planet in this same house in this same room.)
It's the word "philosophy" that bugs me. No doubt there are plenty of artists who consider themselves to have "a philosophy", but in my experience artists (including novelists) are different animals from intellectuals who have a philosophy about things. Artists are people who have to forget about having a philosophy.
Consider the case of an actor. A good actor has probably figured out various methods that work for them to be good at what they do. Maybe they follow The Method or maybe they do various other things that work for them to give good performances. They could have a Philosophy of Acting, but that's not the same as a philosophy of living. If they do have a philosophy of living, they aren't likely to be able to express that philosophy -- at least not articulately -- through their acting.
OK, sure, but actors have to read the lines of others. Of course they can't express their philosophy of living through their art.
Now consider the case of stand up comedians. A stand up comedian can write their own material. They can explain their philosophy of life through their comedy, right?
Well, no, they can't, because a stand up comedian needs to be funny -- that's their one job -- and they can't be funny and express their philosophy because philosophy isn't funny. (Admittedly, the recent bull market for political comedy has convinced a lot of comedians that perhaps they are also philosophers, but it hasn't worked out well, at least not for people who like actual comedy.)
So what about the case of the novelist? Don't they have considerably more latitude than the actor or stand up comedian in what they write? Can't they tell you their philosophy within the 1378 pages of their Magnum Opus?
Not if it's a novel they can't. Because a novelist is bound in the same way as a stand up comic or an actor. They have one job. They must not tell you, the reader, what to think.
Can't believe how long it took me to think of this- isn't Myers-Briggs basically just an Implicit Association Test? In which case would it be weird to think of personality types as a kind of bias?
We found out how hard it is to be a professional academic historian, and how little most Americans know about this. Croatians have a better excuse for their ignorance.
A tale of fraud and murder.
A Croatian historian was targeted by a scammer who promised him at entry to a good job at an American university and eventually killed him.
The writer of the article was a friend of the historian and testified at the trial. This is where it comes out that educated Americans don't necessarily know what an archive is.
"I explained how historians can’t get academic jobs through individual merits in the U.S. or Europe. You need networks. I talked about “markets,” the expectations of what CVs (the academic term for resumes) should look like, and how getting noticed by universities is dependent not just on productivity but also on references from people of great esteem. With every explanation I gave, another question came up. What is a postdoc? What is an editor? What is a letter of recommendation? How does anyone get paid?
The questions kept coming because the answers I was giving made no sense to how people imagined someone survived as a professional historian. Weren’t historians like artists or writers? Wasn’t their worth and position dependent on the quality of what they produced? Or maybe they were like journalists, paid per column or through working on producing publications? Or maybe historians were like teachers, their employment opportunities dependent on the degrees they had obtained?"
While I expect horror at the ignorance shown at the trial, I'm also unnerved at how much judges would need to know to do their jobs adequately. I remember the complaints about judges and legislators of a certain age who had no idea about computers and the internet.
Which is fair in a way, but the world is large. How can anyone know enough? Should there be courses on "The World and How to Know Sort of Enough About It?". If not courses, some ideas about how to get a range of knowledge?
Seeing some noise in the Aviation business about "Hydrogen fuel."
I observe that there's no such thing as a "Hydrogen well," so I wonder, given the hostility towards nuclear energy, whether fueling an airliner with Hydrogen might be a net negative in terms of emissions, at least until we get sensible about nuclear, and certainly in terms of the overall energy budget compared with Petroleum.
Leaving aside the difficulty of containing Hydrogen—it has a nasty habit of migrating through many things that can hold Methane just fine. Can we create a reliable Hydrogen tank that isn't too heavy to fly?
My knowledge of the difficulties of isolating and storing Hydrogen is about twenty years out of date. Do we have a better approach now than "Burn fossil fuels to generate electricity for electrolysis?" That was "always" understood as a huge net negative, but technology naturally marches on.
Can anyone explain how something like sexual orientation can be encoded in genes at a basic, mechanistic level.
Obviously there's a cultural/psychological/environmental component to why people are attracted to whoever they're attracted to, but my understanding is that most biologists would consider it a given that genetics play a very large if not predominant role. It's easy to visualize genes encoding proteins that determine the properties of biological structures ("make an eye", "make three fingers") But something in my brain can't quite grok the idea of how genes can encode "become sexually aroused at the sight of a woman/man's genatalia" to become hard wired into the neurology. How can specific *visual* trigger become encoded into genes?
I am currently looking for a collaborator on a small, independent web-scraping and automation project in Python I am working on. I will gladly split the profits of this project (the client is paying a flat fee) with any collaborators based on a mutually agreeable metric. However, for reasons outlined below, I would prefer someone who is equally interested in working on and completing a project as they are in the profit.
I have a moderate amount of development experience from a highly self-taught background and have done numerous similar projects before, but this almost exclusively involves working on my own projects with relatively minimal collaboration. This experience has led to fairly regular contracts doing similar work, but developing software on my own has major drawbacks.
For the sake of my knowledge and career development, I would prefer to offload a portion of this project to a more experienced developer with a more traditional background so that I can gain different perspectives on how to plan and implement projects of this type. In some sense, I'm looking to hire someone who can serve as my boss and a mentor. Note that I'm not expecting a superstar, just someone who has experience taking projects from start to finish, and adept at following good practices.
If interested, my email address is below; the password is 7NjyA3xQYE. The link will expire in one week.
This may be the most trivial question I've asked this community, but I'm kind of stumped: does anyone know an almond butter with the consistency of supermarket peanut butter?
Normally it has that sort of oil-and-bits-of-nuts texture that expensive peanut butter has, but harder to stir. I've been looking in vain for something like Jiff but made with almonds or another hypoallergenic nut.
“I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be linked unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.
The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. 'You're completely crazy,' he said.
Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, thought mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.
Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.
The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.
The wilful filling off a gear teeth, the wilful doing without certain obvious pieces of information -
That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony -
That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love fora a blue vase -
That was how Rudolf Hess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers -
That was how Nazi Germany sense no important difference between civilization and hydrophobia -
That is the closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time.”
Random physics-related-question: Has anyone noticed how gravity and electromagnetism look extremely similar superficially but have extremely different explanations/mechanisms in the modern version? More specifically, in classical physics, gravity and electromagnetism are both 1/d^2 laws of attractive/repulsive conservative forces*. However, in modern particle physics, we have two *completely different* explanations of the two phenomena; gravity is explained as a result of the bending of spacetime, whereas electromagnetism is explained as a result of electrically-charged particles passing virtual photons between each other. How do we know that these mechanisms are assigned to the right force? (If I were an early-20th-century physicist, I would have considered it totally plausible that gravity consists of massive particles passing gravitons between each other and that electromagnetism consists of electrically-charged particles bending the fabric of spacetime.)
*Minor point: Electromagnetism also involves magnetism, which is a rotation-y force that can't do work, and though an analogue of this doesn't exist for gravity in classical-physics-as-generally understood, it turns that an analogue for gravity does exist in the low-energy limit as a consequence of general relativity, and this is known by the extremely uncreative name of "gravitomagnetism".
> I hope this letter finds you in good health. Unfortunately, the topic of this letter is grim. Your $4.4million dollar donation to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is being misused, and you are now among a class of persons being defrauded and mislead by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the Center for Applied Rationality.
> The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in Berkeley and its sister organization, the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), claim to be organizations dedicated to AGI safety and the art of human rationality. However, these organizations are not what they make themselves out to be, and MIRI is in fact defrauding its donors through misleading promises and an ongoing cover-up of statutory rape, blackmail, and fraud.
So, at the end of March, after 1 year with the bars shut down either entirely; or operating under restrictions that made their "meet new people and possibly flirt with them" function impossible; I asked what people thought would be required before I could walk up to a girl in a bar, smile at her and invite her out onto a dance floor.
The responses I got were basically: "When enough people have been vaccinated that they feel safe." My country is now over 60% vaccinated, over 71% vaccinated amongst people over 12; but there is still zero movement towards that goal; politicians are talking about plans that stretch into September with no changes to the restrictions on bars even being contemplated during the summer.
Is this ever gonna end? Or is it just people trying to force everyone into a digital Brave New World I want no part of?
Anyone have any guesses about what it will take now?
I have now learned of the position Applied Futurist, due to a seminar being touted by the firm that provides my workplace's cloud accounting software package. Turning theory into practice!
"Tom Cheesewright is the Applied Futurist, helping people and organisations around the world to see the future more clearly, share their vision, and respond with innovation. Tom will help you and your audience to connect tomorrow’s world to today’s experience, and make sense of what’s happening next, and why. Tom’s clients include global 500 corporations, government departments, industry bodies and charities. Using a unique set of tools that he developed, and now teaches and licenses to others, Tom finds the critical intersections between today’s macro trends and the existing stresses in each client’s organisation and sector. These are the points at which the greatest change will take place. Tom is a frequent presence in the media, his face, voice, and unusual name recognisable from weekly appearances on TV and radio including BBC Breakfast, Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch, 5live, Radio 4, and TalkRadio, and in The Guardian, The Times, and The Evening Standard. Tom’s first book, High Frequency Change, was published in 2019 by LID Publishing and has been shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2020 in the ‘Leadership for the Future’ category. Tom’s second book, Future-Proof Your Business, is out now for Kindle as part of the Penguin Business Experts series. The print edition will be in stores Summer 2020."
Can we genetically engineer human brains to be much more intelligent than regular brains?
Michio Kaku says "No" in his book "The Future of the Mind." Here's the relevant passage:
'So from an evolutionary and biological point of view, evolution is no longer selecting for more intelligent people, at least not as rapidly as it did thousands of years ago.
There are also indications from the laws of physics that we have reached the maximum natural limit of intelligence, so that any enhancement of our intelligence would have to come from external means. Physicists who have studied the neurology of the brain conclude
that there are trade-offs preventing us from getting much smarter. Every time we envision a brain that is larger, or denser, or more complex, we bump up against these negative trade-offs.
The first principle of physics that we can apply to the brain is the conservation of matter and energy; that is, the law stating that the total amount of matter and energy in a system remains constant. In particular, in order to carry out its incredible feats of mental gymnastics, the brain
has to conserve energy, and hence it takes many shortcuts. As we saw in Chapter 1, what we see with our eyes is actually cobbled together using energy-saving tricks. It would take too much time and energy for a thoughtful analysis of every crisis, so the brain saves energy by making
snap judgments in the form of emotions. Forgetting is an alternative way of saving energy. The conscious brain has access to only a tiny portion of the memories that have an impact on the brain.
So the question is: Would increased brain size or density of neurons give us more intelligence?
Probably not. “Cortical gray matter neurons are working with axons that are pretty close to the physical limit,” says Dr. Simon Laughlin of Cambridge University. There are several ways in which one can increase the intelligence of the brain using the laws of physics, but each has its
own problems:
• One can increase brain size and extend the length of neurons. The problem here is that the brain now consumes more energy. This generates more heat in the process, which is detrimental to our survival. If the brain uses up more energy, it gets hotter, and tissue damage results if the body temperature becomes too high. (The chemical reactions of the human body and our metabolism require temperatures to be in a precise range.) Also, longer neurons means
that it takes longer for signals to go across the brain, which slows down the thinking process.
• One can pack more neurons into the same space by making them thinner. But if neurons become thinner and thinner, the complex chemical/electrical reactions that must take place inside the axons fail, and eventually they begin to misfire more easily. Douglas Fox,
writing in Scientific American, says, “You might call it the mother of all limitations: the proteins that neurons use to generate electrical pulses, called ion channels, are inherently unstable.”
• One can increase the speed of the signal by making the neurons thicker. But this also increases energy consumption and generates more heat. It also increases the size of the brain, which increases the time it takes for the signals to reach their destination.
• One can add more connections between neurons. But this again increases energy consumption and heat generation, making the brain larger and slower in the process.
So each time we tinker with the brain, we are checkmated. The laws of physics seem to indicate that we have maxed out the intelligence that we humans can attain in this way. Unless we can suddenly increase the size of our skulls or the very nature of neurons in our brains, it seems we
are at the maximum level of intelligence. If we are to increase our intelligence, it has to be done by making our brains more efficient (via drugs, genes, and possibly TES-type machines).'
I don't think Kaku proves that "the laws of physics" cap the human brain at its present size and intelligence level. Moreover, his bullet-pointed assertions seem to be contradicted by the facts that some animals, specifically elephants and many whales, DO have larger brains than humans, and that birds have smaller, more densely packed neurons in their brains. If Kaku is right, then why don't elephants and whales have problems with their brains overheating? Do birds have problems with their neurons misfiring because they are smaller than ours? If so, the problems don't seem that bad, judging by the success of bird species and their high intelligence.
Steven Hsu even says that genetic engineering could create humans with IQs of 1,000:
'The Social Science Genome Association Consortium, an international collaboration involving dozens of university labs, has identified a handful of regions of human DNA that affect cognitive ability. They have shown that a handful of single-nucleotide polymorphisms in human DNA are statistically correlated with intelligence, even after correction for multiple testing of 1 million independent DNA regions, in a sample of over 100,000 individuals.
If only a small number of genes controlled cognition, then each of the gene variants should have altered IQ by a large chunk—about 15 points of variation between two individuals. But the largest effect size researchers have been able to detect thus far is less than a single point of IQ. Larger effect sizes would have been much easier to detect, but have not been seen.
This means that there must be at least thousands of IQ alleles to account for the actual variation seen in the general population. A more sophisticated analysis (with large error bars) yields an estimate of perhaps 10,000 in total.1
Each genetic variant slightly increases or decreases cognitive ability. Because it is determined by many small additive effects, cognitive ability is normally distributed, following the familiar bell-shaped curve, with more people in the middle than in the tails. A person with more than the average number of positive (IQ-increasing) variants will be above average in ability. The number of positive alleles above the population average required to raise the trait value by a standard deviation—that is, 15 points—is proportional to the square root of the number of variants, or about 100. In a nutshell, 100 or so additional positive variants could raise IQ by 15 points.
Given that there are many thousands of potential positive variants, the implication is clear: If a human being could be engineered to have the positive version of each causal variant, they might exhibit cognitive ability which is roughly 100 standard deviations above average. This corresponds to more than 1,000 IQ points.'
Taking off on a tangent here, but I was wondering if Scott has ever grappled with David Deutsch's critique of libertarianism. I ran across a recent podcast (here: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/david-deutsch/) in which he said the following:
"I think the libertarian movement has, first of all, a revolutionary political agenda. Even if it’s not revolutionary, even if they say, “We want to implement it over a period of 100 years,” they know what they want to implement; they know what the endpoint is going to be in 100 years’ time. They don’t take into account, first of all, that there are going to be errors in whatever they set up. That the correction of those errors is more important than getting it right in the first place — much more important.
Secondly, they don’t take into account that the relevant knowledge is contained in institutions, an inexplicit knowledge that people share. By institutions, I don’t mean buildings like the Supreme Court building or something. I mean the manner of thinking: in the case of the Supreme Court, the manner of thinking that’s shared by hundreds of millions of Americans, that makes them not just behave in a certain way but expect society, the government, the legal system, the state — they expect certain things of those things. It’s those expectations that make up 90 percent of the institution of the Supreme Court.
Libertarians think that’s unimportant and basically want to throw it away, by and large. No doubt there are libertarians who agree with me on this."
I'm interested in the notion of error correction and institutional memory. Do either of those ideas as espoused by Deutsch pose a challenge to most modern libertarian objectives?
I very nearly wrote a review of Mike Lindell's autobiography "What Are The Odds," which is subtitled "From Crack Addict To CEO." But in the end the idea of spending hours of my time reading and writing about a man who would choose a hologram of his own face for his first book seemed like low-hanging fruit. Yes he is a terrible man, but is he worth the effort?
I've really enjoyed the book reviews. IRL conversations with other ACX readers suggest they've really enjoyed them as well. Far from wishing the competition over sooner, I'm sad I soon won't be getting such a volume of interesting precis.
Social Desirability Bias is the general tendency to say things that sound good and don't make oneself look bad. It leads to people over reporting things like charitable giving, church attendance and so forth. Left-leaning people seem to do more so-called "virtue signaling" about racism, sexism and bigotry. Right-leaning people do this sort of social signaling as well but not to the same extent because virtue signaling your right wing beliefs doesn't work as well and may be detrimental to your social standing. Left-leaning people avoid being racist, sexist, transphobic, disbelieving in science and so forth. Right-leaning people like to talk about being responsible, patriotic, Christian and stuff like that.
Have you heard about that factoid that "X% of drivers think they are better than average" where X is much larger than 50%? You don't need to verify their driving skills to know that people are systemically mistaken about their relative beliefs. I propose asking a bunch of people "Are you less racist/sexist/bigoted/anti-science than the average person/poll respondent?" I think the number of yes would be greater than 50%. If you asked a more concrete question like "How often do you use the racial slur [X] relative to the average poll respondent". You could further specify to within groups with "How often are you sexist relative to the average self-described progressive respondent"? You could also do this for conservative causes: "Are you more or less patriotic than the average self-described conservative" or "Do you attend Church more or less than the average conservative poll respondent?"
By looking at the measure of (X% - %50) = error. The error is composed of self-confidence, differing definitions, lying or social desirability. The test would not be perfect but rough. The more concrete questions remove ambiguous definition issues. I think that you could use this to determine a few things by comparing whatever group you want.
1. Which group appeals more to socially desirably answers?
2. Which group has more social desirable beliefs as a whole?
3. What are the least socially desirable beliefs for groups and the whole?
This could be useful information. Social Desirability Bias is everywhere and it is a good reason to be skeptical about what people say. I made a blog post on this issue if anyone is interested.
What's the deal with "objective" theories of value (like the labour theory of value)? What question is these theories supposed to answer? Are they fundamentally ethical, in that they say what the price *should* be, or what the "fair" or "just" price is? Or can they be used to make predictions about real prices, and if so how?
In a prior thread someone brought up Tim Scott as a likely Republican nominee for 2024. I didn't know much about him at the time but I've been looking a bit more into him ever since.
Prediction: if Tim Scott is the 2024 nominee then we will see a quick but stealthy reversal of the trend that Scott noted in https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/ ; we will be back to wall-to-wall religious wars again. At a vague guess, "Christians are responsible for violence against LGBT people" will be the leading narrative.
What is it that kids/teens find cool?
I've been thinking for a while the answer is probably agency: being able to make decisions for things you find important. I think culture in general is mostly people reacting rationally to the incentives that exist in society they grew up in, before age 25. I think it is 70% that and 30% other stuff. Thus I am biased to thinking that this question will be similar.
This question probably first entered my brain when I found it that in Japan people tend to dislike Bart for his troublemaking ways. But over here in North America, there was Bartmania. There is also a stereotype that being a good kid was cool immediately post war, but by the 60's that was seen as "square" and some kind of rule breaker has been cool since. I wondered what is different that changed that.
I have been thinking for a while now that the core thing is likely agency. You have none as a baby but are expected to get to the normal adult amount by age 18 or so. I suspect then that coolness comes from having more agency than those your age, and uncoolness from having less. Since starting this paragraph it has occurred to me that when I was in school a few kids were lame simply for having overbearing parents. There is also an episode of the Simpson where Bart is teaching Martin how to be cool and one of the lessons is that the potential for mischief varies inversely with one's proximity to the authority figure. I think that rule is coming very close to realizing that agency is the key thing.
I think this can explain why cool went from a good kid at the start of the post-war period to various kinds of rulebreaker. Parents and school stopped rewarding being a good kid with extra agency, mostly for the sake of fairness, while certain kinds of rule breaking have seen their punishments get weaker and/or inconsistently enforced. I think breaking a rule and getting away with it (or with a 'slap on the wrist') is an expression of agency. If you were a kid going to school when I did (90s and 2000s) rule breaking was the only way to have more agency than your peers. I think that is why the culture has shifted to one where troublemakers are generally cool.
To be clear, not all troublemaking is cool. It has to be the kind where you get away with it. For Bart, it seemed like making jokes in class or talking back to the teacher often got nothing more than his name said in a harsh tone. The adult isn't stopping him, so this displays more agency than he should have, so he is cool. When I was a teen, weed served a similar purpose. It was something you can do than was unlikely to get you in trouble but still counted as breaking a rule. Since Canada has legalized marijuana, weed use amongst teens has halved: it no longer makes you cool.
Another big example is in Scott's Review of [On the Road](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-road/) from 2014. I recently read this the first time a week ago, which has brought this topic back onto my mind. To summarize the relevant part of this book and review: the main character is a causes major problems for everyone, always gets away with it, is seen by a messiah for it by the narrator, and Scott really dislikes them both for it. I think the many people would think the main character was cool. The Wikipedia article suggests that was the reception. The book is listed as a defining work for two cultural movements.
I wonder if we wanted to change this so being a good kid, tries in school; kind to others; follows the rules, to be cool again we'd have to change the incentives so that these kids get more agency again. Once, and only once, I got to leave elementary school 15 minutes early because I had been good that day where the class as a whole was worse than usual. Would making small but desirable privileges like that a common thing be able to shift the culture back? Based on my theory that coolness is to do with agency, I think it would. I think a lot of punishments would have to become stricter as well. Having rules that aren't enforced or have punishments that are easily ignored would keep the incentives against this shit strong.
Has anybody examined this? Or is there a better idea on what 'coolness' is that I haven't heard of? Also, I mentioned at the start that in Japan Bart was not seen as cool like he was in North America. If there are some people who grew up in Japan reading this, was good behavior rewarded as a child? Does it seem like American kids could get away with more at school than you could. Bart Simpson often wasn't too far off from what some kids could get away with in school.
I recently read Scott's book review of (On the Road)[https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-road/]. There is a key quote I want to talk about:
> But On The Road is, most importantly, a picture of a high-trust society collapsing. And it’s collapsing precisely because the book’s protagonists are going around defecting against everyone they meet at a hundred ten miles an hour.
Since reading this I've been wondering a few things: do high-trust societies have mechanisms to protect themselves from people who will exploit this trust? If so, what are they and why did they not work in the US (and I think it Canada as well)? If not, are high trust societies doomed to rot from the inside after a few generations?
When is it OK to challenge someone’s beliefs?
https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/when-is-it-ok-to-challenge-someones
New York stopped requiring students to wear masks in class last week, then another part of New York sneeringly overruled the first part and decided that no, students DO still have to wear masks during school. My question is about social media.
My wife is a member of a Facebook moms group specific to our town. Shit EXPLODED. Dozens of moms (literally dozens - multiples of twelve. Of moms) posted screaming curse filled rants against the reinstatement of a mask mandate that had been lifted for an entire weekend. Many threatened the school board and particularly the superintendent that they would organize and withhold taxes or something if the school followed the requirements of the DOE, and that they were sending they’re sending their children to school maskless so fuck you. Other people screamed back at them, calling them ignorant garbage and telling them to stop literally murdering people by suggesting they would not mask their kids in the future.
Some moms screamingly compared the lifting then reinstating of the mask requirement to Nazi camps. The Jewish mom screamed that those moms were evil moronic f*cks that should have horrible things happen to them. And so on and so on. Scream-response scream.
At one point a few nearby towns said “fuck it” and told their students they could come in without a mask anyway. Then they took it back when Cuomo threatened to have them all shot. You can imagine the howls during that period.
All this and more went on for days. It’s probably still going on; my wife left the group because it got so nasty.
I’m not on social media. I’m not really capturing how awful and unhinged everyone was - I wish I’d written down some of the posts to use as examples - but those of you who are on FB or Twitter can fill in the blanks. My question is: don’t these people have to meet each other in person? Often? Don’t some of their kids play together? Don’t they talk to the superintendent at some point? It’s not anonymous. You’ll know exactly who the person is who called you an ignorant shit in front of hundreds of people. We all know the name of the mom who called people who don’t put their kids in masks “cunts”. What happens in real life after these blow ups? Isn’t there SOME kind of impact to real life relationships for bad behavior online? I’m completely at sea here.
I was hanging out with some friends recently. Somehow the topic of standardized tests came up. I lamented that colleges are starting to ignore SAT scores for reasons of "equity."
The friends I was talking to, surprisingly, both said that standardized tests are useless and don't tell you anything. And they said that rich people can afford tutors for their kids so it just means you can "buy" higher scores. I doubt many people here agree with that point of view, but I'm curious if anyone does (and what evidence they have.)
I'm sensitive (and biased) about the issue because I grew up in a small town with bad schools. I also got crappy grades (i'd like to have an excuse for it, but mostly: I was lazy). The fact that I got good test scores was the only reason I got into a decent college. And I was able to do well in the years since.
I wondered if the current (what I call) attack on standardized tests comes from people in the opposite position I was in. The current "critique" of the media is that it's a bunch of upper-class white kids that went to exclusive schools that now run our news rooms.
What if those people were the mirror of me: good schools, good grades, low test scores (relatively, anyway). Wouldn't those people have a "stake" in downplaying the importance of these tests? Like, "How can I be part of the intellectual elite if I only got 1200 on the SAT? It must be the tests that are wrong!"
What do you all think?
Here's a random thought I had last week:
Are there ways a solar system could be arranged that would make it significantly easier for a civilisation that evolved there to engage in interstellar travel?
Suppose we construct a binary system with the two stars very close and therefore orbiting quickly around one another. Would a (powered?) slingshot manoeuvre around one of the suns provide enough of a boost to be a useful start to an interstellar voyage?
As a bonus, let's also throw in a terrestrial planet of a few earth masses a little way out from the habitable planet, so that you can gravity assist your perihelion down to where you need it for the stellar slingshot.
Regarding 4, Freud was definitely not a responsible user of cocaine. See for example https://narratively.com/when-sigmund-freud-got-hooked-on-cocaine/ for some stories of his abuses.
Are we going to get the full results of the book review voting? I mean from the runners-up list? I'm fascinated by what it shows - did the good reviews get a lot of votes? Were the less good reviews recipients of lots of votes by readers annoyed that they had to plough through something unenjoyable. Etc etc.
It would seem quite un ACXish for Scott to say "Oh, these two won the vote, so lets just move on.." Am I alone in being interested in how the whole voting thing panned out? Did any reviews receive no votes at all? Did the two that were promoted to finalist receive the most votes as well as the highest average?
I'm seeking advice on a cybersecurity question. I'm the IT administrator for a small non-profit organization. For the past three years or so, we've had cyber insurance through a major insurance company. This year, they're imposing these requirements on us (see below) before they'll renew the policy. To my mind, point #2 below seems unreasonable. If I'm inside the network and SSHing into a Linux host, do I _really_ need two-factor authentication to get in to the host? I'm not even sure how I would implement that. I've reached out to the networking engineer we use for bigger projects, but I haven't heard back yet.
1. Multi-Factor authentication is required for all remote access to the network provided to employees, contractors, and 3rd party service providers.
2. In addition to remote access, multi-factor authentication is required for the following, including such access provided to 3rd party service providers:
a. All internal & remote admin access to directory services (active directory, LDAP, etc.).
b. All internal & remote admin access to network backup environments.
c. All internal & remote admin access to network infrastructure (firewalls, routers, switches, etc.).
d. All internal & remote admin access to the organization’s endpoints/servers.
Is math really useful?
I know that math is *virtuous*. And I know that some kinds of math are useful in some contexts. How can I know these contexts aren't as depressingly narrow as the math-deniers assert?
Only in part playing devil's advocate here. I overtly believe in the usefulness of math, but on second glance that belief looks a lot like Belief As Attire. And I think that's a big source of math-related akrasia for me.
Are there any SSC/ACT readers interested or involved in drug development?
I'm the president of a preclinical biotech company called Highway Pharmaceuticals (highwaypharm.com) . We're focused on reusing and recombining generics to treat autoimmune diseases that are difficult or impossible to treat with biologics, including diseases like progressive multiple sclerosis.
We've recently had some promising preclinical results and I'm trying to plan out my IND submissions. I'd love to talk to anyone who's been down this road before (or at least knows the path). Feel free to reply below or contact me through highwaypharm.com .
People of a certain political persuasion sometimes say that there is a supply/demand problem with White Supremacy. WS is something that all right-thinking people abhor, and there is much merit in fighting it, so there is great demand for white supremacists to fight. Unfortunately there are almost no white supremacists around, hence the supply/demand problem.
Now in a market economy, this problem should theoretically be solved by a substantial rise in the price paid to those who can deliver WS, which will then induce an increase in WS.
Questions:
1) is this happening?
1a) if not, why not? And if it's regulated out of existence, would a more libertarian nation then produce more WS?
2) is there a way to stop it from happening, other than reducing demand?
> the average coca tea drinker in Peru might get about 4 mg *of caffeine*, whereas the average addict gets about 900 mg a day.
Pretty sure that's supposed to be "of cocaine"
Now that voting is coming up I've been thinking a bit on a somewhat meta-level question on how I am going to pick which reviews to vote for. I have not read most of the books in question myself, so I cannot fairly judge how accurately or completely the books were represented by their reviewers. Also there has already been significant selection applied in that the posted finalists are the top ~15 reviews out of more than 100, so while some may be better than others none are really badly written. That means if I just pick the ones I enjoyed the most, or the ones I think I learned the most from, then my decision will be affected more by which book was reviewed than by the quality of the review. I am not entirely happy with this prospect, because it seems like the judging should be on how well you write a review, not on whether you picked a book that lots of readers will like, but I'm not sure how to avoid it. Does anyone else have thoughts along these lines?
Please keep discussion on the meta-level of the process of judging and do not discuss the merits of specific reviews or which reviews you plan to vote for in order to avoid influencing other people's votes directly.
Shameless plug: I wrote this article that's probably pretty generally in line with what y'all are generally into.
https://residentcontrarian.substack.com/p/on-being-antiscience-xkcd-jellybeans
There's usually talk about high trust societies, but maybe the important thing is high trustworthiness societies.
Since I've been on a Chinese history Wikipedia article binge lately, does anyone have strong recommendations for books about either
(a) historical fiction set in china
(b) recent-ish history of China (1975-today)
(C) historical survey on pre-modern Chinese history (what's the deal with all the different dynasties)?
"Send it from a different address than you used originally, in case the problem was that your emails end up in my spam filter."
You should also request a set phrase, such as "Book Review Contest", be put in the subject line. That way even if they get sent to your spam folder, a keyword search will find them.
Some new results from Spain on Calcifediol, a ward-randomized trial of 984 patients found that those supplemented with calcifediol had a lower ICU admissions rate and mortality rate than the control wards. This is the paper that was heavily criticized when it was released in preprint, but after peer review it looks much better.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34097036/
"Results: ICU assistance was required by 102 (12.2%) participants. Out of 447 patients treated with calcifediol at admission, 20 (4.5%) required ICU, compared to 82 (21%) out of 391 non-treated (p-value<0.0001). Logistic regression of calcifediol treatment on ICU admission, adjusted by age, gender, linearized 25OHD levels at baseline, and comorbidities showed that treated patients had a reduced risk to require ICU (OR 0.13 [95% CI 0.07;0.23]). Overall mortality was 10%. In the Intention-to-Treat analysis, 21 (4.7%) out of 447 patients treated with calcifediol at admission died compared to 62 patients (15.9%) out of 391 non-treated (p=0.0001). Adjusted results showed a reduced mortality risk with an OR 0.21 [95% CI 0.10; 0.43]). In the second analysis, the obtained OR was 0.52 [95% CI 0.27;0.99]."
This follows a few other calficifediol papers from the same group:
- A large propensity score matched study of 16,000 patients found that calcifediol and cholecalciferol supplementation were associated with large reductions in Covid–19 mortality. (Loucera et al, April 2021)
- A cohort study of 574 patients in Spain found that calcifediol supplementation was associated with a significant decrease in in-hospital mortality with an adjusted odds ratio of 0.16. (Alcala-Diaz et al, May 2021)
- A parallel pilot randomized open label trial of 76 patients in Spain found that the administration of calcifediol reduced ICU admission and mortality. Of the 50 patients treated with calcifediol. 13/26 patients in the control group required ICU care compared with 1 in the intervention group. A subsequent statistical analysis showed that decreased ICU admissions were not due to uneven distribution of comorbidities or other prognostic indicators, to imperfect blinding, or to chance, but were instead associated with the calcifediol intervention. (Castillo et all, August 2020)
A topic that has been on my mind lately, and I'm curious if anyone here has some interesting thoughts:
How can you gain familiarity, competence, or even expertise in an area, without becoming jaded or desensitized to what you find interesting or enjoyable about it? Or phrased another way, how can you maintain a sense of wonder and/or excitement about something even while losing your naivity and "beginner's eyes" towards it?
"Area" above is very broadly defined. I think this question is relevant to everything from technical work, to hobbies, to sexuality, to building and maintaining friendships.
If I had an intuition about this problem, I think it would be super useful to me, because I'm increasingly worried about the long-term unsustainability of constantly searching out novelty and escalation in each area of my life.
Three Venus missions for NASA and ESA! That's good stuff - we've neglected exploration of Venus compared to Mars for a long time, because they thought Mars might have life and it was easier to do a lander there.
You can do a lander on Venus, but it requires either making it out of materials that can stand up to 500 C temperatures and 95 atm pressure (the former is a much bigger problem than the latter), or using active cooling. Active cooling would probably require a multi-kilowatt nuclear power source, AKA expensive.
There's some research and models in the past couple years that suggest that Venus might have had an ocean and possibly been habitable for longer than we thought. Given how similar in size and mass it is to Earth, it'd be good to figure out if it was always screwed from the beginning, or if it started out like Earth but became uninhabitable over time.
If anyone is interested learning what it's like applying for an NIH grant, I'm documenting my experience here: https://denovo.substack.com/p/applying-for-nih-funding-part-1
Washington, DC SSC/ASX Meetup next weekend, Saturday 6/19, starting at 7PM. The address is 1002 N St NW, near the Mt. Vernon Square metro station. Follow the sign for "Free Utility". The event will be mostly outside, but the house will be open in case of rain.
For further details, join our Facebook group or Google listserv:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/dc-slatestarcodex/join
https://www.facebook.com/groups/433668130485595
I know I'm a couple of months late on the charter city thread, but after reading it..... why don't these charter cities just use the US commercial code, or something similar from another 1st world country like the UK or Germany? The US has the Uniform Commercial Code, for instance, which seems like it would be a great starting point. They could use arbitration to resolve business disputes, arbitration is big business these days and tons of law firms offer it. Maybe a few attorneys would be willing to offer free or reduced services as a charity in the city's beginning years- a number of firms already make their attorneys do x amount of pro bono work, here's a developing country trying to get off the ground, etc.
Prospera seems to be fairly radical- they have a brand new political system, elements of which have never been tried anywhere, some elements of their commercial code seem to have never been tried anywhere, etc. Plus the usual blockchain nonsense, of course. Without weighing in on the specifics- basic intellectual humility tells us that some of these brand new political & commercial codes are not going to work out, or won't work as intended. 'Let's create a radical brand new society with various rules I just made up' is usually a left-wing exercise, of course with a poor track record.
I like the charter city concept and would like to see it succeed- I guess I just don't understand the reasoning for a new legal system when there are perfectly functional alternatives that work right now, today. The Uniform Commercial Code currently runs a $22 trillion economy, whereas whatever Prospera just made up currently runs, uh, absolutely nothing. Which one do you think would be a better choice? (But blockchain etc. etc., of course). I guess I just don't understand the motivation to reinvent the wheel, existing legal systems are one of the big reasons why the 1st world is the 1st world presently. And fast, fair arbitration from experienced US attorneys to resolve disputes- just seems like those are all strengths Honduras could be absorbing
I'm wondering if anyone would be interested in checking out / helping with feedback on our app Meetminder, which lets you ask Friends ( colleagues, friends, and family members ) if they'd like to join your account so that you can see their Zoom status. You can also enter their meeting times and provide an external reminder if they're supposed to be in a Zoom meeting but aren't ( according to their Zoom status ).
Here's the link. Thoughts welcome!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hjA1hpS_gv8DlIpEQcKERpczYY7QDOXDBfFl2djNi8M/edit?usp=sharing
I think it's time for Scott to write a post about open borders. He has hinted in the past that he may be in favor of it, saying he has mixed feelings. I'm dying to hear his thoughts on this.
Does anybody here understand Israeli politics?
ELI5 todays developments.
Previously I discussed how the Dutch formation process was interrupted by an accidental leak of a talking point where they wanted to find a new job for a 'difficult' representative, Pieter Omtzigt, who helped uncover a major government scandal and otherwise has a much more critical disposition than most representatives in the respectable parties. Back then it seemed that this might result in the PM, "Teflon Mark" Rutte, to not be able to form a new executive, although it was hard to imagine an alternative, to him or his party. A complicating factor was that the representative in question was at home with a burn out.
Since then, the focus has increasingly shifted to Omtzigt's party, who seemed paralyzed in the formation process. They've been investigating the election loss and the issues in the party. The representative, Omtzigt, was asked to write down his point of view. He wrote a 76 page document, which was leaked, with various accusations. One claim was that a few large donors, whose contribution was not made public, may have had influence on the party program, which was changed in a way that is not consistent, but to the advantage of those donors.
A second claim was that Omtzigt was promised the party leadership, but was passed by. A bit of history: Omtzigt's party decided to hold elections for the party leadership, where Omtzigt was one of the candidates. Unlike American primaries, the only people who could vote are (paid) members of the political party, which is a tiny (and decreasing) part of the people who vote for the party in the general elections. These party leader elections were a mess, where the first election attempt was canceled because the online election could easily be manipulated. During the second attempt, people were told that they had voted for someone else than who they had voted for, including Omtzigt's wife. The party claimed that their audits showed that these votes were counted properly and the election results stood. Omtzigt lost by 49.3% to 50.7% of the votes. The winner was the minister (= secretary of state) for healthcare and thus responsible for COVID vaccinations. His predecessor suffered from a burn out and he it didn't take that long for the successor to decide that he couldn't combine the job of minister with the party leadership. Perhaps the amount of criticism he got due to his performance as minister also played a role, making him fear that if he acted a party leader during the election, his party would be held responsible for the COVID failures. Omtzigt then wasn't promoted to party leader, as he claims he was promised, nor were new elections held. Instead, another person was made leader.
He claims that the ministers of his own party, who were/are part of the executive, refused to defend him. He also claims that the ministers are way more concerned with their own image than with governing well (that was the impression I got too, from the notes of the ministerial meetings that were released).
Omtzigt provided screenshots of Whatsapp conversations between others where people were extremely rude and unprofessional about him. He was called a tuberculosis dog, crazy, a 'fucking glans with Nazi posters', a psychopath and accused of emotional lability. He claims that after the national elections, he was blamed for the loss in a Zoom call. Omtzigts party is calls itself Christian and has very old voters, who may not appreciate this.
The 'Nazi' posters in question might be these semi-retro posters: https://twitter.com/PieterOmtzigt/status/1367926327274274817
https://twitter.com/PieterOmtzigt/status/1367926995284279302/photo/1
The first poster states: 'Justice, also for the little man.' The second states: 'Time for a new social contract.'
After this memo with grievances was leaked, Omtzigt announced that he would leave his party, but will keep his seat. It's unclear whether he will start his own political party, which seems to have a lot of potential, although it is hard to build up a party from scratch.
Meanwhile, it's unclear how well the formation process is going. There is no observable progress. So major COVID-related decisions are made by an executive with merely a caretaker mandate.
What's the best source that explains how to do “good” science that avoids all the pitfalls that we’re now aware of as a result of the "replication crisis"? I’ve found a few websites that kind of have what I’m looking for, but none of them seem to have the completeness that I think the best reference source might have.
First of two culture-war adjacent questions. For both of these, I am looking for falsifiable answers, and less opinions. (Can't tell people how to answer, but this is what I am asking for.)
I have heard repeated references by liberals/progressives regarding the fossilization of race barriers in the USA under the 'one drop rule.' Wikipedia gives a historical perspective (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule) but is pretty scant on the recent use of this rule. I find references to modern activists decrying the historical use of the concept, and using it themselves to classify people into different racial categories.
What I don't find is anyone on the conservative side (USA) using this categorization to define themselves or others, or endorsing it for modern use.
Does anyone have examples of modern conservative (the more mainstream the better, race essentialists are acceptable but should be identified as such) pundits or columnists using this to describe people? (For this, I'd say 'modern' is...within the last 20 years.)
Second CW question - this one's a bit technical and I would appreciate input from medical specialists, especially epi and OB/GYN.
Katie Herzog recently authored a post for Bari Weiss's Substack - https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-doctors-cant-speak - concerning the impact of Woke disruption of the free exchange of ideas on medicine education & practice in America. Among the topics discussed was black-white differences in maternal mortality: "But this is an example of how system-wide bias can harm black mothers, who are two to three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women even when you control for factors like income and education, which often make racial disparities disappear."
(Herzog also interviewed the presenter of a recent inflammatory anti-white psychology lecture here: https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-psychopathic-problem-of-the-white. I am not always a fan of Herzog, but she tries harder than many less leftist columnists/writers I have read.)
In the 200 + comments on the substack article, there was very little grappling with this difference in outcomes. When I went and looked it up (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6835a3.htm) (there are other studies out there) it turns out that there are significant differences between different racial groups not only in death rates, but between causes of death in different groups. Specifically, it seems that Asian/PI women have slightly higher death rates, Hispanic women slightly lower, American Indians markedly higher, and AA women highest of all, compared to white/Euro descent women. This seemed to hold across all economic/education groups and across time.
In addition, the causes of excess death for African American women (over Euro-descent women) weren't the infection or even hemorrhage that I expected for neglect or distain for the people being treated, but cardiovascular conditions. Hispanic women had higher rates of both infection and hemorrhage.
To me, this doesn't sound like a difference in how the women are being treated, but in baseline tendencies towards different diseases in different populations. And if that's true, then "attacking racism" isn't going to stop women from dying. Nor is assuming that there are no biological differences between different genetic groups (aka 'races'.)
Are there physicians in the commentariat, or well-read laymen, who can speak to this?
A thought on unconscious bias and racism. My understanding of proponents' case for this is that we can recognise unconscious bias through scientific testing, a finding which is contentious and disputed, and on which I can offer no informed opinion. But there seems to be an interesting train of thought available from looking at this from a deliberately -naive viewpoint.
Due to the potential significance of the argument and the lack of certainty about the theories ability to provide experimental verification, the debate about unconscious bias tends to immediately descend into standard culture war rhetoric with proponents of unconscious bias arguing that those denying it's efficacy are either ignoring or covering up their own racism, whilst opponents conversely argue that the proponents are pushing a theory with no real evidence for political purposes. It's a typical intransigent argument where both sides assume bad faith on the part of the other: not a particularly useful use of anyone's time to be honest.
But what if we assume good faith should apply? That both sides mean what they say? That become a bit more interesting. In the first place, we can accept the view that some people don't treat others differently on the basis of skin colour, which ties in with the lack of evidence for first-order racism on the part of conservatives in the main. Rather than having a pointless playground "you're a racist", "am not" debate you can at least examine whether the policies your opponent favour might be racist in some way without just assuming they are because of unconscious bias, which might open up the door to more rational arguments (I did say might...).
But the really fun bit of taking people's pronouncements about unconscious bias at face value is simply that it must prove one side of the debate is racist, but that side is the proponents of unconscious bias not the opponents. If these people are content that unconscious bias testing can show that people are racist, in that they make decisions on the basis of skin colour, then their reaction to this has been to think that the accusation sounds right and not to say "hang on; i don't think like that'. So to take support for the contention that unconscious bias testing reveals people are inherently racist in good faith means accepting that the person making this contention is aware that they are in fact racist, for if they feel themselves not to be racist the test must be to some degree be invalid.
The weird thing here though is that for some reason we then let the debate on race be run by the people who are happy they are racist, and who have to assume bad faith on the part of those who oppose them on the basis that these opponents do not see themselves as racist. This seems more than a little bit worrying: if we accept what people say to be broadly true, then the people who do label a human as different due to skin colour are the ones controlling racial politics.
Wooh! I made comment of the week!
From what I understand, each Bitcoin is encoded with the history of all its past transactions, hence why it is commonly compared to a "ledger." This feature makes it nearly impossible to counterfeit Bitcoins, but it also slows down the Bitcoin exchange network since verifying the authenticity of any one Bitcoin requires sifting through its transaction record. The problem gets worse as time passes, and the Bitcoins' transaction histories get longer as they are traded back and forth more.
Couldn't this problem be solved if the Bitcoin network periodically deleted past transaction histories? I guess the process would involve having one of your Bitcoins, let's call it "Bitcoin ABC" scanned by some kind of central authority that would verify its transaction history was authentic and that it was a valid Bitcoin. Bitcoin ABC would then be deleted and you would be given a new Bitcoin called "Bitcoin XYZ" with no transaction history since you were its first owner, and the entire Bitcoin network would be alerted to what had happened.
The whole network would speed up as people traded in their old Bitcoins this way.
I'm in SF starting Tuesday, then in NYC and Boston - would love to meet with people, especially if you do biology or something related to it - alexey@guzey.com!
Where's my carbon-offset burger?
Scott's post on cows vs. chickens mentioned that a burger's worth of cow produced <10kg of CO2 equivalent, which costs <10 cents to offset. It feels like there should be lots of people out there who like meat and would eat more of it (and a more expensive variety) if it didn't seem like a Terrible Antisocial Thing that will Destroy Humanity. So, where's the beef company prominently marketing how they're carbon-neutral (or, better yet, carbon-negative)? It exists for ice cream, my local store recently started carrying a brand like that.
Am I wrong about how many people know and care about the impact of cows on greenhouse gases? Or, are carbon-offset burgers a thing (just not a thing I've seen)? For that matter, why don't e.g. tree nuts say "carbon-negative" on the packaging, the way I've seen sugar packaging say "contains no saturated fats"?
Many folks I read are getting increasingly concerned about the possible spread of the COVID "delta" variant worldwide in the coming months, including in the US. If you are a USian who (by your own estimation) follows COVID news more closely than most:
(a) how concerned (or not) are you about the delta variant's impact here and why?
(b) how, if at all, do you anticipate adjusting your personal plans for the coming months as a result of this concern?
(c) what is your % estimate, if you have one, of the probability that the spread of "delta COVID" will cause the reimposition of onerous social distancing restrictions (e.g. indoor dining bans, large gathering bans, schools closing or moving to "hybrid") in at least one US state by the end of 2021?
I comment on Scott's On the Road review below, but I want to make a separate, generalization about it here, because it's relevant, at least to me, in many discussions about novels or art.
In that review Scott says:
- But from a modern perspective, if Jack and Dean tried the same thing today, they’d be one of about a billion college students and aimless twenty-somethings with exactly the same idea, posting their photos to Instagram tagged “holy”, “ecstatic”, and “angelic”. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it doesn’t seem like a good stopping-point for a philosophy.
Before going further I want to point out I'm a huge fan of Scott's writing and thinking and I wouldn't be here otherwise. (I mean here in this comment section. I'd probably still be here on this planet in this same house in this same room.)
It's the word "philosophy" that bugs me. No doubt there are plenty of artists who consider themselves to have "a philosophy", but in my experience artists (including novelists) are different animals from intellectuals who have a philosophy about things. Artists are people who have to forget about having a philosophy.
Consider the case of an actor. A good actor has probably figured out various methods that work for them to be good at what they do. Maybe they follow The Method or maybe they do various other things that work for them to give good performances. They could have a Philosophy of Acting, but that's not the same as a philosophy of living. If they do have a philosophy of living, they aren't likely to be able to express that philosophy -- at least not articulately -- through their acting.
OK, sure, but actors have to read the lines of others. Of course they can't express their philosophy of living through their art.
Now consider the case of stand up comedians. A stand up comedian can write their own material. They can explain their philosophy of life through their comedy, right?
Well, no, they can't, because a stand up comedian needs to be funny -- that's their one job -- and they can't be funny and express their philosophy because philosophy isn't funny. (Admittedly, the recent bull market for political comedy has convinced a lot of comedians that perhaps they are also philosophers, but it hasn't worked out well, at least not for people who like actual comedy.)
So what about the case of the novelist? Don't they have considerably more latitude than the actor or stand up comedian in what they write? Can't they tell you their philosophy within the 1378 pages of their Magnum Opus?
Not if it's a novel they can't. Because a novelist is bound in the same way as a stand up comic or an actor. They have one job. They must not tell you, the reader, what to think.
Can't believe how long it took me to think of this- isn't Myers-Briggs basically just an Implicit Association Test? In which case would it be weird to think of personality types as a kind of bias?
https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2021/06/10/historian-murder-trial/ideas/essay/
We found out how hard it is to be a professional academic historian, and how little most Americans know about this. Croatians have a better excuse for their ignorance.
A tale of fraud and murder.
A Croatian historian was targeted by a scammer who promised him at entry to a good job at an American university and eventually killed him.
The writer of the article was a friend of the historian and testified at the trial. This is where it comes out that educated Americans don't necessarily know what an archive is.
"I explained how historians can’t get academic jobs through individual merits in the U.S. or Europe. You need networks. I talked about “markets,” the expectations of what CVs (the academic term for resumes) should look like, and how getting noticed by universities is dependent not just on productivity but also on references from people of great esteem. With every explanation I gave, another question came up. What is a postdoc? What is an editor? What is a letter of recommendation? How does anyone get paid?
The questions kept coming because the answers I was giving made no sense to how people imagined someone survived as a professional historian. Weren’t historians like artists or writers? Wasn’t their worth and position dependent on the quality of what they produced? Or maybe they were like journalists, paid per column or through working on producing publications? Or maybe historians were like teachers, their employment opportunities dependent on the degrees they had obtained?"
While I expect horror at the ignorance shown at the trial, I'm also unnerved at how much judges would need to know to do their jobs adequately. I remember the complaints about judges and legislators of a certain age who had no idea about computers and the internet.
Which is fair in a way, but the world is large. How can anyone know enough? Should there be courses on "The World and How to Know Sort of Enough About It?". If not courses, some ideas about how to get a range of knowledge?
Seeing some noise in the Aviation business about "Hydrogen fuel."
I observe that there's no such thing as a "Hydrogen well," so I wonder, given the hostility towards nuclear energy, whether fueling an airliner with Hydrogen might be a net negative in terms of emissions, at least until we get sensible about nuclear, and certainly in terms of the overall energy budget compared with Petroleum.
Leaving aside the difficulty of containing Hydrogen—it has a nasty habit of migrating through many things that can hold Methane just fine. Can we create a reliable Hydrogen tank that isn't too heavy to fly?
My knowledge of the difficulties of isolating and storing Hydrogen is about twenty years out of date. Do we have a better approach now than "Burn fossil fuels to generate electricity for electrolysis?" That was "always" understood as a huge net negative, but technology naturally marches on.
What do people think about The Sinclair Method of alcoholism treatment? It seems persuasive at first glance but I'd appreciate more views.
The long awaited second part of the episode on the Great Library of Alexandria, over on History for Atheists Youtube channel! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yk9wDX5sp8
A thing I've been working on: http://yevaud.com/
There's ... quite a lot of different things there.
Can anyone explain how something like sexual orientation can be encoded in genes at a basic, mechanistic level.
Obviously there's a cultural/psychological/environmental component to why people are attracted to whoever they're attracted to, but my understanding is that most biologists would consider it a given that genetics play a very large if not predominant role. It's easy to visualize genes encoding proteins that determine the properties of biological structures ("make an eye", "make three fingers") But something in my brain can't quite grok the idea of how genes can encode "become sexually aroused at the sight of a woman/man's genatalia" to become hard wired into the neurology. How can specific *visual* trigger become encoded into genes?
I am currently looking for a collaborator on a small, independent web-scraping and automation project in Python I am working on. I will gladly split the profits of this project (the client is paying a flat fee) with any collaborators based on a mutually agreeable metric. However, for reasons outlined below, I would prefer someone who is equally interested in working on and completing a project as they are in the profit.
I have a moderate amount of development experience from a highly self-taught background and have done numerous similar projects before, but this almost exclusively involves working on my own projects with relatively minimal collaboration. This experience has led to fairly regular contracts doing similar work, but developing software on my own has major drawbacks.
For the sake of my knowledge and career development, I would prefer to offload a portion of this project to a more experienced developer with a more traditional background so that I can gain different perspectives on how to plan and implement projects of this type. In some sense, I'm looking to hire someone who can serve as my boss and a mentor. Note that I'm not expecting a superstar, just someone who has experience taking projects from start to finish, and adept at following good practices.
If interested, my email address is below; the password is 7NjyA3xQYE. The link will expire in one week.
https://pastebin.com/SNmnpshr
This may be the most trivial question I've asked this community, but I'm kind of stumped: does anyone know an almond butter with the consistency of supermarket peanut butter?
Normally it has that sort of oil-and-bits-of-nuts texture that expensive peanut butter has, but harder to stir. I've been looking in vain for something like Jiff but made with almonds or another hypoallergenic nut.
For no reason, here is a Vonnegut quote I like:
(https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/606224-i-have-never-seen-a-more-sublime-demonstration-of-the)
“I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be linked unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.
The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. 'You're completely crazy,' he said.
Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, thought mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.
Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.
The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.
The wilful filling off a gear teeth, the wilful doing without certain obvious pieces of information -
That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony -
That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love fora a blue vase -
That was how Rudolf Hess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers -
That was how Nazi Germany sense no important difference between civilization and hydrophobia -
That is the closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time.”
Random physics-related-question: Has anyone noticed how gravity and electromagnetism look extremely similar superficially but have extremely different explanations/mechanisms in the modern version? More specifically, in classical physics, gravity and electromagnetism are both 1/d^2 laws of attractive/repulsive conservative forces*. However, in modern particle physics, we have two *completely different* explanations of the two phenomena; gravity is explained as a result of the bending of spacetime, whereas electromagnetism is explained as a result of electrically-charged particles passing virtual photons between each other. How do we know that these mechanisms are assigned to the right force? (If I were an early-20th-century physicist, I would have considered it totally plausible that gravity consists of massive particles passing gravitons between each other and that electromagnetism consists of electrically-charged particles bending the fabric of spacetime.)
*Minor point: Electromagnetism also involves magnetism, which is a rotation-y force that can't do work, and though an analogue of this doesn't exist for gravity in classical-physics-as-generally understood, it turns that an analogue for gravity does exist in the low-energy limit as a consequence of general relativity, and this is known by the extremely uncreative name of "gravitomagnetism".
Y'all are back in the news again https://fredwynne.medium.com/an-open-letter-to-vitalik-buterin-ce4681a7dbe
> I hope this letter finds you in good health. Unfortunately, the topic of this letter is grim. Your $4.4million dollar donation to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is being misused, and you are now among a class of persons being defrauded and mislead by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the Center for Applied Rationality.
> The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in Berkeley and its sister organization, the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), claim to be organizations dedicated to AGI safety and the art of human rationality. However, these organizations are not what they make themselves out to be, and MIRI is in fact defrauding its donors through misleading promises and an ongoing cover-up of statutory rape, blackmail, and fraud.
So, at the end of March, after 1 year with the bars shut down either entirely; or operating under restrictions that made their "meet new people and possibly flirt with them" function impossible; I asked what people thought would be required before I could walk up to a girl in a bar, smile at her and invite her out onto a dance floor.
The responses I got were basically: "When enough people have been vaccinated that they feel safe." My country is now over 60% vaccinated, over 71% vaccinated amongst people over 12; but there is still zero movement towards that goal; politicians are talking about plans that stretch into September with no changes to the restrictions on bars even being contemplated during the summer.
Is this ever gonna end? Or is it just people trying to force everyone into a digital Brave New World I want no part of?
Anyone have any guesses about what it will take now?
I have now learned of the position Applied Futurist, due to a seminar being touted by the firm that provides my workplace's cloud accounting software package. Turning theory into practice!
"Tom Cheesewright is the Applied Futurist, helping people and organisations around the world to see the future more clearly, share their vision, and respond with innovation. Tom will help you and your audience to connect tomorrow’s world to today’s experience, and make sense of what’s happening next, and why. Tom’s clients include global 500 corporations, government departments, industry bodies and charities. Using a unique set of tools that he developed, and now teaches and licenses to others, Tom finds the critical intersections between today’s macro trends and the existing stresses in each client’s organisation and sector. These are the points at which the greatest change will take place. Tom is a frequent presence in the media, his face, voice, and unusual name recognisable from weekly appearances on TV and radio including BBC Breakfast, Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch, 5live, Radio 4, and TalkRadio, and in The Guardian, The Times, and The Evening Standard. Tom’s first book, High Frequency Change, was published in 2019 by LID Publishing and has been shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2020 in the ‘Leadership for the Future’ category. Tom’s second book, Future-Proof Your Business, is out now for Kindle as part of the Penguin Business Experts series. The print edition will be in stores Summer 2020."
Can we genetically engineer human brains to be much more intelligent than regular brains?
Michio Kaku says "No" in his book "The Future of the Mind." Here's the relevant passage:
'So from an evolutionary and biological point of view, evolution is no longer selecting for more intelligent people, at least not as rapidly as it did thousands of years ago.
There are also indications from the laws of physics that we have reached the maximum natural limit of intelligence, so that any enhancement of our intelligence would have to come from external means. Physicists who have studied the neurology of the brain conclude
that there are trade-offs preventing us from getting much smarter. Every time we envision a brain that is larger, or denser, or more complex, we bump up against these negative trade-offs.
The first principle of physics that we can apply to the brain is the conservation of matter and energy; that is, the law stating that the total amount of matter and energy in a system remains constant. In particular, in order to carry out its incredible feats of mental gymnastics, the brain
has to conserve energy, and hence it takes many shortcuts. As we saw in Chapter 1, what we see with our eyes is actually cobbled together using energy-saving tricks. It would take too much time and energy for a thoughtful analysis of every crisis, so the brain saves energy by making
snap judgments in the form of emotions. Forgetting is an alternative way of saving energy. The conscious brain has access to only a tiny portion of the memories that have an impact on the brain.
So the question is: Would increased brain size or density of neurons give us more intelligence?
Probably not. “Cortical gray matter neurons are working with axons that are pretty close to the physical limit,” says Dr. Simon Laughlin of Cambridge University. There are several ways in which one can increase the intelligence of the brain using the laws of physics, but each has its
own problems:
• One can increase brain size and extend the length of neurons. The problem here is that the brain now consumes more energy. This generates more heat in the process, which is detrimental to our survival. If the brain uses up more energy, it gets hotter, and tissue damage results if the body temperature becomes too high. (The chemical reactions of the human body and our metabolism require temperatures to be in a precise range.) Also, longer neurons means
that it takes longer for signals to go across the brain, which slows down the thinking process.
• One can pack more neurons into the same space by making them thinner. But if neurons become thinner and thinner, the complex chemical/electrical reactions that must take place inside the axons fail, and eventually they begin to misfire more easily. Douglas Fox,
writing in Scientific American, says, “You might call it the mother of all limitations: the proteins that neurons use to generate electrical pulses, called ion channels, are inherently unstable.”
• One can increase the speed of the signal by making the neurons thicker. But this also increases energy consumption and generates more heat. It also increases the size of the brain, which increases the time it takes for the signals to reach their destination.
• One can add more connections between neurons. But this again increases energy consumption and heat generation, making the brain larger and slower in the process.
So each time we tinker with the brain, we are checkmated. The laws of physics seem to indicate that we have maxed out the intelligence that we humans can attain in this way. Unless we can suddenly increase the size of our skulls or the very nature of neurons in our brains, it seems we
are at the maximum level of intelligence. If we are to increase our intelligence, it has to be done by making our brains more efficient (via drugs, genes, and possibly TES-type machines).'
I don't think Kaku proves that "the laws of physics" cap the human brain at its present size and intelligence level. Moreover, his bullet-pointed assertions seem to be contradicted by the facts that some animals, specifically elephants and many whales, DO have larger brains than humans, and that birds have smaller, more densely packed neurons in their brains. If Kaku is right, then why don't elephants and whales have problems with their brains overheating? Do birds have problems with their neurons misfiring because they are smaller than ours? If so, the problems don't seem that bad, judging by the success of bird species and their high intelligence.
Steven Hsu even says that genetic engineering could create humans with IQs of 1,000:
'The Social Science Genome Association Consortium, an international collaboration involving dozens of university labs, has identified a handful of regions of human DNA that affect cognitive ability. They have shown that a handful of single-nucleotide polymorphisms in human DNA are statistically correlated with intelligence, even after correction for multiple testing of 1 million independent DNA regions, in a sample of over 100,000 individuals.
If only a small number of genes controlled cognition, then each of the gene variants should have altered IQ by a large chunk—about 15 points of variation between two individuals. But the largest effect size researchers have been able to detect thus far is less than a single point of IQ. Larger effect sizes would have been much easier to detect, but have not been seen.
This means that there must be at least thousands of IQ alleles to account for the actual variation seen in the general population. A more sophisticated analysis (with large error bars) yields an estimate of perhaps 10,000 in total.1
Each genetic variant slightly increases or decreases cognitive ability. Because it is determined by many small additive effects, cognitive ability is normally distributed, following the familiar bell-shaped curve, with more people in the middle than in the tails. A person with more than the average number of positive (IQ-increasing) variants will be above average in ability. The number of positive alleles above the population average required to raise the trait value by a standard deviation—that is, 15 points—is proportional to the square root of the number of variants, or about 100. In a nutshell, 100 or so additional positive variants could raise IQ by 15 points.
Given that there are many thousands of potential positive variants, the implication is clear: If a human being could be engineered to have the positive version of each causal variant, they might exhibit cognitive ability which is roughly 100 standard deviations above average. This corresponds to more than 1,000 IQ points.'
Who is right? Kaku or Hsu?
What are the thoughts on this? Three cueing seems intuitively terrible to me but maybe I'm wrong: https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading
Taking off on a tangent here, but I was wondering if Scott has ever grappled with David Deutsch's critique of libertarianism. I ran across a recent podcast (here: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/david-deutsch/) in which he said the following:
"I think the libertarian movement has, first of all, a revolutionary political agenda. Even if it’s not revolutionary, even if they say, “We want to implement it over a period of 100 years,” they know what they want to implement; they know what the endpoint is going to be in 100 years’ time. They don’t take into account, first of all, that there are going to be errors in whatever they set up. That the correction of those errors is more important than getting it right in the first place — much more important.
Secondly, they don’t take into account that the relevant knowledge is contained in institutions, an inexplicit knowledge that people share. By institutions, I don’t mean buildings like the Supreme Court building or something. I mean the manner of thinking: in the case of the Supreme Court, the manner of thinking that’s shared by hundreds of millions of Americans, that makes them not just behave in a certain way but expect society, the government, the legal system, the state — they expect certain things of those things. It’s those expectations that make up 90 percent of the institution of the Supreme Court.
Libertarians think that’s unimportant and basically want to throw it away, by and large. No doubt there are libertarians who agree with me on this."
I'm interested in the notion of error correction and institutional memory. Do either of those ideas as espoused by Deutsch pose a challenge to most modern libertarian objectives?