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Today's preview: salient + bias in German. bias: Der/das Bias is fine in academia. In everyday German best say: Filter. And then explain the specific bias: "Wir filtern nach der Meinung, die wir schon haben: Eine Info, die dazu passt, glauben wir gern und schnell. Bei widersprechenden Nachrichten sind wir misstrauisch: "Muss ich das glauben?"". ("fehlerbehaftete Voreinstellung" wäre zu lang. "Vorurteil"/"diskriminierende Sprache" sind oft möglich bei "bias" in non-rationalist contexts ("biased language"/"biased against pitbulls"). - "salient"* - wörtlich "springend", im Sinne von "ins Auge springend". Meist gut mit "relevant" übersetzbar. /("wichtig" geht auch, bei relevant kann man auf Nachfrage erklären: "in diesem Zusammenhang wichtig"). Du hast drei Bewerber: Hans, Heinrich und Helmut. Du konzentrierst dich auf ihre Abschlüsse/Erfahrungen u.ä.. Da kommt eine neue gute Bewerbung; von Fatima! Plötzlich wird (auch) relevant/interessant/"salient", dass die ersten 3 Männer sind (und urdeutsche Namen tragen). Dass ihr Name nicht mit H beginnt, bleibt irrelevant. - That's my 2-pence. If I ever get to 10, I'll post. And will post a link here. ;) * bonus fun fact: "salient" would be a possible translation of the Hebrew "tsela" in Genesis, usu. translated as (Adam's) rip (to create Eve). But a rip is not "sticking out". And men have no rips missing. Penis-bone fits much better. Some mammals have one. We do not (anymore). Hence Viagra. https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-interpretation/the-adam-and-eve-story-eve-came-from-where/

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Scott says he will link to me if I give grants to people "who will make the world a worse place".

So what's a good way to make the world a worse place? Maybe stabbing a random guy on the street makes it a little worse, maybe not. But say we have a lot of money and want to maximize our badness in the word: what should we do?

I'm going to rule out terrorism because that's been done to death and this isn't interesting unless we come up with something original.

I think it's a hard problem. Making the world worse is probably as hard as making the world better, because institutions have immense inertia.

Since good institutions are what make the modern world so good, maybe the best way to make the world a worse place is to destroy our best institutions. How do we do that? What are our most important institutions? How do we subvert them?

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Still posting so still manic I suppose. There's this notion in these quarters that conservatives understand liberals but liberals don't understand conservatives. The idea comes from the notion that colleges and the media are liberal, so everyone understands that perspective.

Of course liberals can be exposed to conservative perspectives from growing up with them, from working in a conservative industry, or from reading conservative perspectives.

Whereas I buy that in the general population liberals understand conservatives worse than vice versa, from reading Scott and other related blogs over the past decade, I think the opposite ignorance exists within this community. Here, liberals understand conservatives better than conservatives understand liberals. Would be no big deal were it not for so many conservative members of the community assuming the opposite.

For instance, I was a regular SSC reader from 2015. I discovered SSC, I think, through Marginal Revolution. But at any rate I've read blogs such as MR, The Money Illusion, Overcoming Bias, Roissy in DC, Steve Sailer, Mencius Moldbug, Two Blowhards... All of which are/were conservative leaning.

Yet I make one liberal remark and I'm accused of living in a liberal echo-chamber. I deeply suspect that in general the conservatives who read this site live in more of a conservative echo-chamber than the liberals who post here.

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Scott, what motivates people to post in Open Threads is when you highlight the best comments. For instance, for next week, you could point out my posts below as highlights. It would set the bar low, sure, but motivate others.

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I think I might be experiencing a manic episode because I keep posting and, as far as I can tell, nobody else is. Am I imagining this? Nobody is responding to my posts, so they must be irrational.

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I'm going to break the rules and post about politics. Biden's speech today was all over the map. Who does he think he is?

Can't wait for Trump in 2024! People who hate vaccines rule!!!

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I keep posting, but I am full of whisky, I mean ideas.

Anyway, nobody else is posting. This is a ghost town.

Seems like a fine time to start to flesh out my philosophical arguments about Materialism and The Soul. I'll start with the Givens. You can disagree with them of course, But if you want to disagree with my logic, you must accept the Givens I present.

Given: Physics is real. There's no full theory and all that, but let's accept the conventional wisdom regarding the Laws of Physics.

Given: Metaphysics does not exist. All that exists is rooted in physics.

End of the section of Givens.

What is a human? A species of animal defined as human by the humans.

Do all humans experience subjective reality? We don't know for sure, but by the Transitive Property, I say Yes. I experience something, so I assume other humans do also. .

What is the Me experiencing my existence? I suspect it is the matter inside me. I am made of matter, only matter.

If the Me experiencing existence does so because of the matter in me, does the Me change as the matter within my physical body changes? Maybe, maybe not. Hold that thought.

It seems to me that either the Me changes with each passing moment, as the matter within me changes with each passing moment, OR the Me experiencing subjective reality never changes.

I'm more inclined to believe that the Me experiencing subjective reality never changes, even though the composition of matter within me does. I suspect the composition of matter within me doesn't matter. I'm still Me. Because matter is matter. The individual protons can change in my body but it is still Me.

But if the experience of being Me is composed of matter, and most of the matter in my body can change several times throughout my lifetime, with the subjective experience of being Me unchanging, then I can't claim my existence is due to a specific composition of matter, but due to the matter itself.

This is key to my point. Matter itself must be the fundamental essence of experiential existence, but the specific matter must not matter. If I swap a few protons with you, that may mean we just had a good time together, but I am no more or less me and you are no more or less you.

But why am I no less me or more you if we've just swapped some protons? Here I invoke Occam's Razor: It's because our subjective beings were no different in the first place. I was already you and you were already me.

I think matter is like a tissue, the tissue of existence. Whether we like it or not, we are all one, because we are all this same tissue.

I welcome all rebuttals to this theory.

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I keep posting, but I am full of ideas.

Like many here, I'm fascinated by prediction markets---and disappointed they are so hard to get working in the USA. Here's a thought: sports betting has just open up in a huge, legal way in the USA. Maybe a good strategy for prediction markets would be to first, enter the wide-open legal sports betting world. Differentiate yourself by being more like a prediction market than a straightforward betting market. In other words, make people make odds like they do on the Good Judgement project and ignore the traditional sports betting stuff about point spreads and shit.

The point is to create a legal prediction market in the US, and sports just happens to be the low hanging fruit for that.

From there branch out. Be like Uber, don't ask for permission. Don't go straight into say, political betting, which is already outlawed. But go into things nobody thought of, just to spread your arms and gain default jurisdiction. For instance, since sports betting is legal, look for sports peripherals. Like maybe try a contract that predicts what the GDP of a city or state might be based on the records of there sports teams. So make it a nominal sports bet, but expand your domain. You could make the whole fucking economy nominal bets about sports outcomes with enough creativity.

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I want to steal a topic from the alternative forum: Elite Overproduction. This can mean many things to many people. Too many wannabe PHDs, high-status writers, etc.., too many super-smart people working in fields that don't add much to society. (In the old days we used to say "lawyers", but that frame is old and broke.)

One aspect is say, physicists who go to work in finance, because money. Is our society worse off because too many PHD physicists get rich working on high-frequency trading algorithms as opposed to figuring out more constructive ways to move atoms?

The economist Scott Sumner argued a few years back that the high pay of those who allocate capital goes to show that those who allocate capital are doing the most important jobs in the economy. I have trouble buying that but i also have trouble understanding the economy, so maybe?

My own belief, open to updates, is probably there are too many really smart people working in finance compared to physics or chemical engineering, to be optimal for society. I tend to think there are diminishing returns to optimizing the next hedge fund strategy, even though capital allocation is clearly a very important thing.

Elite Overproduction can mean many other things. Anyone else want to throw some ideas at this?

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I think all of us old SSC readers wish the open threads here were more like those there. But the bad functionality here, particularly for mobile, hurts it much. And the community has splintered, mostly, in fact, due to the poor functionality of the comments section here, but there's a political element to the splintering which has created a feedback loop to the splintering.

I think pushing Substack for better a working comments section would help tremendously in the long run. Just get it back to old WordPress quality. Why is that so hard for Substack?

Also, the heat of political discussions tends to be the death of a comments sections, but so far we seem to have the opposite here. Perhaps people are too afraid of a heated discussion? Maybe limiting politics to every other thread isn't good here?

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If you want me to talk more, bring back Likes in the comment section. No ability to sort comments by how interesting they are makes it seem like a thousand-comment textwall, and the inability to tip my hat to people who contribute usefully is immensely frustrating.

Also, if Substack were to give us a page where we could see responses to our comments, like exists for Reddit or Disqus, that'd really help too.

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So this kind of scam/blackmailing email has been going around for a while now, but this latest version is improved, much better spelling, grammar and layout. Well done latest blackmailer!

This crap regularly comes in on an old work email that isn't used for anything except receiving emails sent to the old address (which some people still use in spite of getting our new details). And if you want to know why Bitcoin et al. are going to have a tough time convincing ordinary people that they are a replacement currency instead of a dodgy pyramid type scheme, then maybe STOP ADVISING THAT THE ADVANTAGES ARE UNTRACEABILITY, SO THAT CRIMINALS STOP USING THEM?????

"I am sorry to inform you but your device was hacked.

That's what happened. I have used a Zero Click vulnerability with a special code to hack your device through a website.

A complicated software that requires precise skills that I posess.

This exploit works in a chain with a specially crafted unique code and such type of an attack goes undetected.

You only had to visit a website to be infected, and unfortunately for you it's that simple for me.

You were not targeted, but just became one of the many unlucky people who got hacked through that webpage.

All of this happened in August. So I’ve had enough time to collect the information.

I think you already know what is going to happen next.

For a couple of month my software was quietly collecting information about your habits, websites you visit, websearches, texts you send.

There is more to it, but I have listed just a few reasons for you to understand how serious this is.

To be clear, my software controlled your camera and microphone as well.

It was just about right timing to get you privacy violated. I have made a few pornhub worthy videos with you as a lead actor.

I’ve been waiting enough and have decided that it’s time to put an end to this.

Here is my offer. Let’s name this a “consulting fee” I need to get, so I can delete the media content I have been collecting.

Your privacy stays untouched, if I get the payment.

Otherwise, I will leak the most damaging content to your contacts and post it to a public website for perverts to view.

You and I understand how damaging this will be to you, it's not that much money to keep your privacy.

I don’t care about you personally, that's why you can be sure that all files I have and software on your device will be deleted immediately after I receive the transfer.

I only care about getting paid.

My modest consulting fee is 1650 US Dollars to be transferred in Bitcoin. Exchange rate at the time of the transfer.

You need to send that amount to this wallet: 1DpA1wTZqGqP9pEcjfZ9bsGEHzbjcsTKq1

The fee is non negotiable, to be transferred within 2 business days.

Obviously do not try to ask for help from the law enforcement unless you want your privacy to be violated.

I will monitor your every move until I get paid. If you keep your end of the agreement, you wont hear from me ever again.

Take care and have a good day."

I like the cheery sign off on this one - "nothing personal, just business" 😀

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It seems to me that much has been written about human psychology which has never been catalogued. The greatest psychologists tend to be novelists, playwrights, directors and screenwriters. The best of those understand the subtleties of complex psychological interactions.

Yet we have no science that seems to have learned much from what the best in the field of psychology -- the artists mentioned above -- have to offer. Why?

The only sub-field of psychology that seems to have learned anything from literature and movies are the Pick-Up Artists. I suppose that makes some sense due to the huge demand to get laid: people are really motivated to figure that out.

So do academics in the field of Psychology simply ignore what there is to learn from literature and movies or what?

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Is there any way to report spambot comments?

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Any good suggestions for rationalist discussion discords? The one linked to by this substack is very irrational and run by a pompous loser.

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You could try posting a Friday announcementless OT to try to separate out the effect of each variable.

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Omeprazole can help with reflux. Over the counter 10 or 20 mg. Sounds like you are at a set point where your metabolism “wants “ to be. It’s ok to be somewhat overweight if you’re healthy, imho.

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I wonder how many comments of each level there are on these posts. I personally commented way more on the last open thread than I usually do (I mean I typically comment in spurts but like I think I have 26 on there or something like that) but they're all replies to two comments about controversial political issues (Chappelle, and Ed Reform).

I don't doubt that the Sunday posting made a difference but I also wonder if there's some kind of controversy cycle (from your numbers it looks like the politics-allowed posts get more comments).

It might be interesting to count how many top-level comments there are, how many replies to top-level comments, etc. to get a sense of like, how many distinct engaging conversations are going on and how much people engage with each topic.

Then again that's also the kind of poison that created facebook so on second thought maybe don't do that at all.

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Does anyone know of any papers on the psychological or neurological correlates of experiencing art? I was thinking about how the structural composition of paintings evoke different emotions or reactions, and similar to how some papers discuss the role of a single neuron in a neural network (ML context), I was thinking about measuring a minor color change, moving of some component, other alteration, etc... in art via slight perturbations in neurological (e.g., fMRI) or psychological (e.g., self-reported reports) measures. It would be cool to have GANs generate art to tickle out different emotions explicitly, but a dataset of neurological cascades for different art pieces would need to be created. Perhaps there is a more efficient workaround, but I simply do not know enough about the subject.

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I'm a traditional horary astrologer; I need to practice my art, and the only way to do that is through using horary to answer questions and provide situational insight. If you would like to give astrological divination a try, please email me at FlexOnMaterialists@protonmail.com. I am exceptionally discreet, but pseudonyms are perfectly acceptable for those with a desire to maintain rationalist street cred.

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There is no way on earth I can read that many comments. I would really appreciate having some sort of sorting by best or curation. When I opened that thread I just closed it right away due to it being too overwhelming. I get that conversations here are important and open, but there has to be a way to separate the wheat from the chaff.

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Is Gwern ok? I notice that none of their newsletters have come out since August, meaning we've missed two months now.

I can see they're still active on Reddit though so I assume they're fine?

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> Maybe open threads with important announcements attached feel less open and hold people back from commenting?

The power of the prior of relevance.

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Super random question, but a year or two ago I remember reading a Scott Sumner blog post where spoke about a card game he'd been playing with friends & family- where they're all pretending to be different characters, and the point of the game is to discover everyone's real identity (i.e. one person is the 'killer', or one person is being deceptive about who they are). He noted that smart engineer types were not particularly good at it, but that many native Chinese were excellent (I believe his wife is Chinese). It's in that vein of social bluffing games, like Blood on the Clocktower.

I've searched his blog every whichaway, but I can't find the name of the game. Does this sound like a social bluffing game that people are familiar with.....? In the absence of that, any good bluffing games that people enjoy or recommend?

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I'm looking for advice on losing weight. I went down from ~280lb to hovering around the 225lb region. I did this by eating only 2 meals per day, targeting 1200 calories per day, and then also having a cheat day on Saturdays where I go truly wild and eat absolutely anything I want.

However, I've stalled here for the past two years. It's good that I've seen that this weight is sustainable - I migrated from eating explicit diet foods and counting calories all the time to eating fairly normal foods during the week, and just making sure I don't eat too much. And I still get to eat whatever I want on Saturdays, which is nice, and helps me to keep going, mentally.

However, I'd like to start losing pounds again. I've tried lots of small changes to tip the scale towards losing, and the changes don't seem to be helping. I've tried counting calories for my meals again, and I see that I still am really hitting roughly 1200 calories/day, generally. I've tried integrating exercise into my life by starting to use an exercise bike 5 days per week, hitting 150 to 160 bpm heart rate for 25 minutes each time. I've also tried (at separate times from biking) doing weight lifting. However, nothing here seems to actually get me to start losing weight again, and I'm getting really really frustrated. I believe I may need to do something drastic.

I think I may cut down to 1 meal per day (probably around 600 to 800 calories per day), but still keep my Saturday cheat day. I do NOT want to sustain a one meal per day diet long-term. However, maybe this is the kickstart I need to actually start losing again. Is this a terrible idea? I'm very very disciplined, so I know I can keep myself to one meal per day if I try. And I'd much rather give up lunch each day as opposed to giving up my Saturday cheat day.

But will doing this screw with my metabolism? Will I be able to lose weight on it, get down to like 190lb, and then go back to what I'm currently doing and maintain that weight? Or will I go right back to 225lb if I stop doing one meal per day? Or will I even gain weight, because my metabolism didn't like being messed with. Could some weird thing happen where I end up retaining more calories, due to my metabolism shutting down or something? I generally believe in CICO, but I'm also very scared to mess with where I am now, which is the most sustainably healthy place I've ever been in my life. I don't want to lose that on a fool's errand to get down to 190lb, and then end up losing it all and going back to 280lb.

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A question for any fellow non-native English speakers here:

Most things I read and interact with online are in English. But my native language is not English (it's German) and I'm also not living in an English-speaking country. So when I find myself talking about certain topics with friends (e.g. economics, anything on ACX, etc), I often struggle to come up with words and good expressions. The first thing that pops into my mind is often in English and I then have to sort of translate it into German on the fly. This takes time and effort, making such conversations not very fluent.

Anybody have a similar experience? How do you deal with it?

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You should post open threads on sunday as so few websites do updates releases on sunday. on Sunday we're all looking for something to do/read and can't find anything. Where as Friday is full of 'annoucements people were trying to hide' and we read alot of those. And we work! :)

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Seeking game recommendations, what are good games to play while listening to podcasts?

I enjoy podcasts a lot but I feel antsy if I'm doing nothing but listening to them. They're ideal for projects that require say physical work and visual attention, but no auditory and limited cognitive demands i.e., cleaning the apartment. This is distinct from say exercising on my stationary bike, where there are essentially no visual, auditory OR cognitive demands and in that case I'll watch a video on Youtube or an episode of Clone Wars or something.

So I've found single player strategy games generally occupy a sweet spot for me, usually the important information is visual and any key audio queues like an attack warning I'll hear over the podcast. Also there's generally not a lot of story to pay attention to. Single player is just nice because it's easy to save and walk away when ever the episode I'm listening to is done. I'd be open to other genres too so long as they can fit those requirements. Some examples in no particular order:

Dungeon of the Endless

Battletech

Stellaris

They are Billions

Endless Space 2

Endless Legend

Slay the Spire

Fate of the World

Civilization

XCOM 2

The Riftbreaker

Darkest Dungeon

FTL

Master of Orion

Master of Magic

Heroes of Might and Magic

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Anyone else have limited inherent ability to do intellectual or white collar office work for long periods of time? Obviously there are lots of uninteresting cliches about 'hard work!' out there, especially in American society- but there seems to be very little discussion of a natural range of ability for extended cognitive work. It's unremarkable to note that differing amounts of work capacity in the physical world (cardio/athleticism), and intelligence/IQ is a bit of a more risque topic but still widely discussed. So- why not note that some people can just sit down, focus, and are more productive over long stretches of intellectual work than others?

I seem to have fairly limited capacity for it, and my work capacity has not increased over years of doing fairly similar work- unlike the workout example, I haven't become 'more conditioned', I guess for lack of a better term. If I push myself past my limits, I just find my concentration & output is even more reduced the next day, suggesting some type of cognitive limit. How's everyone else's intellectual work capacity/ability to concentrate for long stretches? Any psychological research on this topic?

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Anyone have advice for using stimulants when you're at risk of addiction/compulsive redosing? I am diagnosed ADHD and Ritalin helped me lots for several years before I spiraled into addiction and quit for a while. Now I don't get nearly as much done as I did with it but when I take it I'm prone to compulsive redosing and general unproductivity. I'd like to use it again to get that productivity again, any advice or is this just impossible?

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A while back a survey came out asking whether people thought the 2020 presidential election had been stolen. Results varied by party affiliation, but the shocker on my end was that something in excess of 30% of Democrats thought it had been stolen. In attempting to construct a theory of mind for this cohort, I come up with a few ideas:

1) Perhaps they consume conservative news/commentary sources to some extent and find them convincing on this point.

2) Perhaps they consume conspiratorial left-wing sources, and these sources toy with the idea that the election was stolen (alienated berniecrats?)

3) Perhaps they find the results of 2020 just don't pass the sniff test, either personally or in their social milieu.

To those here who are in the cohort in question (Democrat likely voter, think the 2020 presidential election was stolen): are any of these theories correct for you? If not, what accounts for your belief?

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1. Is there a "philosophical" question you think people in your field (or other demographic signifier) would deviate dramatically from the norm on? I wrote a little bit about how economics defect more on cooperation games here: https://ravik.substack.com/p/does-learning-economics-make-you , which was visible in the 2020 SSC results. I have a secret hope that train conductors act differently on the trolley problem.

2. If your partner was angry with you, would you rather take one hard slap to the face or 2 hours of silent treatment? (relevant thread: https://twitter.com/sentientist/status/1442352181655445506, but only click after deciding)

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It's kind of derpy, but yeah, I didn't realize the meetup posts were also the open threads until you'd posted several of them.

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On average people share 50% of their DNA with their siblings and parents, 25% with their grandparents and aunts/uncles, and 12.5% with their cousins. There is, however, a distribution around those averages. Anybody knows what those distributions look like??

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Is dyslexia an actual thing? As in: is it fundamentally distinct from low intelligence? Small sample size, but all self-described dyslexics I've met have not been the brightest of the bunch.

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I'm seeking self-help "brain hacks" to deal with intrusive memories. I find myself frequently remembering incidents from the past that I'd sooner forget. Mostly, these memories involve embarrassing (though basically inconsequential) things I did. But added to the mix are memories of difficult times in my life (like when I was arrested and fired from my job), as well as news stories that involve animal abuse. My brain has a huge library of these things and pulls down random volumes throughout the day. Anybody here have experience in combatting this kind of thing?

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https://denovo.substack.com/p/the-third-year-slump

(It's all I had the energy to write recently.)

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Why are there are no discussions of what an ideal election system should look like?

As a computer professional who has written tens of thousands of lines of code and designed several successful complex systems, I believe that all the software in voting systems should be open source in C running under Linux.

Paper ballots should be used so a permanent record is created. Voters should be able to see their ballot scanned and review the result of the scan immediately.

Scans of mailed ballots could be provided by using public/private key encrypted access over the internet.

The cost of scanners has plummeted and quality has soared. Voting machines could incorporate scanners in each booth which would be fed the paper ballot, display the result, print a confirmation ticket, and save the ballot in a secure container once the voter approved the scan.

Voting system suppliers should compete on things like reliability, cost, support and training provided, level of repair parts and devices and ability to provide quick maintenance service. Their systems should all use the same open source code.

Processors running the systems shouldn’t have the hardware to support any type of communication except direct physical connection, no Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or other similar hardware should be allowed. Open source memory image tests also should be provided to poll watchers who could run the test on machines at will. Audit trails of the types long used in banking systems could easily provide almost unbreakable security of results.

Go into a booth or sit at your kitchen table and mark a paper ballot. Watch it being scanned and check the results or go online and use the private key provided with your ballot to see how it was recorded, with the software providing online access also open source.

This article provides good information on the weaknesses of the current systems. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/11/02/computer-experts-sound-warnings-safety-americas-voting-machines/6087174002/

Direct Recording Electronic voting systems, or DREs, should be replaced by scanners at all polling places, which would scan ballots immediately and let the voter see the results.

Total transparency is the only solution to the sort of behavior we saw in the 2020 election. Voters should be able to see their ballot processed, see the votes counted, and know that armies of geeks are looking at everything in the systems being used.

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founding

going back to SSC style comments would help get me talking

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I've definitely looked at announcement threads a while after they were posted and noticed "oh, hey, that was technically an open thread I could have posted in too"; I think headlining open threads as such probably makes a big difference.

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I normally only have time on Sunday and Open Threads tend to "die" after a day or so.

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I wrote about the notion of "spiritual but not religious":

1.

The term “spiritual but not religious” may be a new one, a category of the PEW report, but the substance of it is old.

When Luther criticized the Church authorities and advocated consulting one’s own conscience, he was initiating a process that would culminate in “spiritual but not religious.” For Spirit is that which we all have access to, while “religious” is code for something external, imposed from without.

The distinction between an external shell and an internal freedom is older even than Luther. We find this concept in Stoicism, in the work of Epictetus, who counseled that we focus on that which is in our control and suspend judgment around that which is not in our control. Religion, in this taxonomy, is that which lies outside my will; spirituality is that which I can do. I can’t make it rain, but I can measure the calories I burn on my Peloton.

2.

Paul, the intellectual architect of Christianity, distinguished—in his polemic against rabbinic law—between the dead letter of the law and its living spirit. You could argue that Christianity itself was a movement of the spiritual, but not religious, at least in relationship to Judaism. To be spiritual but not religious is to be a follower of Paul, no matter one’s religious identity.

When Paul says that through faith there will be “neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female” (Galatians 3:8), he introduces the modern notion of the liberal individual subject, stripped of association, uprooted from tribe. Ironically, those who today assert Christianity as an axis of resistance against liberalism fail to appreciate the ways in which Christianity itself made liberalism possible.

Yet as history has shown, and as Dostoevsky dramatized well in his parable of the “Grand Inquisitor,” the posture of pure dissidence cannot be sustained. Eventually the spiritual, but not religious will want to rule, will want to transmit values to their children, will want to stop the “spiritual and religious” from corrupting them, and so they will have to adopt a certain infrastructure that makes them indistinguishable from all that they criticize. “Spiritual but not religious”—as a matter of substance—is destined to become a Church. The tribe of those who have no tribe—those who reject tribalism—is remarkably homogenous. Cosmopolitans are at home in TSA pre-check no less than folksy localists are at home at the farmer’s market. And with the ascendance of Zoom and remote work, cosmopolitans can now enjoy both worlds, being “of them, but not in them.”

All are “welcome” in the Church as long as one accepts the view that at bottom we are all the same through faith in Jesus. Modern liberalism took out the Jesus part and replaced it with a more amorphous God, but kept the first part. The world is divided between those who don’t see difference and those that do.

3.

The alternative to the Church of the “Spiritual but not religious” is a posture of continuous critique, permanent counter-culture. We find this mode in the figures of dissident mystics, who stand apart from the mainstream, in bohemian artists who sacrifice a life of comfort for their art, in vagabond intellectuals, like Walter Benjamin, in the Timothy Leary acolytes who think that a life of tripping is preferable to a life of 9-5. But the tally of misfit souls would hardly move the sociologist’s needle.

Today, “spiritual but not religious” simply refers to anyone who feels alienated from a single tradition or community. The confluence of globalization, individualism, and tech guarantee that most people, most of the time, but especially elites, will feel alienated from their communities and heritages of origin. The surprise is not that there are so many “spiritual but not religious” but that there are still so many who are “spiritual and religious.” “Spiritual but not religious” is more or less code for “individualist in search of peak experience.”

Both the experience junky and the experience hobbyist are “spiritual, but not religious.” They differ in degree, not kind.

4.

Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim presents the Hasidic masters as “spiritual, but not religious.” Today, it is a classic amongst in liberal seminaries, but is unknown and unread by actual Hasidim.

5.

The reigning assumptions of the “spiritual but not religious” are:

individual experience is fundamental and social life secondary.

the spiritual content of all religions is the same.

spiritual experience can be found without the scaffolding of tradition.

While Paul’s version of spiritual but not religious involved the evisceration of group identity and the enshrinement of a new group united around faith in Christ, the Buddhist version is “form is emptiness.” Underlying all cultural forms is a shared nothingness. Less abstractly, the core experience of the regular meditator is, paradoxically, “ego-lessness.”

Ego-lessness—the realization that all matters of identity are just stories—fits well with liberalism, which is one reason why pop Buddhism is popular in the West. An ideology of “open borders” that is anti-nationalist and sees the notion of protectionism as antique and irrational also accords well with the insight that, really, we are all One.

Spiritual but not religious means: boundaried by the belief that boundaries between self and other are illusory and ultimately bad. As Patrick Deneen argues in Why Liberalism Failed? The left and the right are both classically liberal. The left is socially liberal (my body, my choice) while the right is economically liberal (free markets). Immigration is a good example of how left and right are more alike than not, because it’s an issue on which they’ve traded places. The old left was anti-immigration, seeing it as a way to bring down domestic wages. The new left is pro-immigration because it’s xenophobic to think there’s some national or cultural essence worth protecting (at least when it comes to the majority culture; minority cultures are, meanwhile, inherently worthy). The more, the merrier (as long as the more don’t live in my neighborhood).

6.

Individualism, in practice, is alive and well. And most invocations of collectivity are a form of role-playing, a costume assumed by the bored subject tired of itself. But, rhetorically and culturally tribalism is making a comeback. It’s now considered naive (and prejudiced) to relate to someone simply as an individual, and not as a member of a group. I suspect that this turn or re-turn to identity politics will have major, disruptive consequences for those who claim the mantle of “spiritual, but not religious.” Where once it was trendy to evoke Lutheran dissent against the powers that be, now the Lutheran posture is seen by many—on the left and the right—as a convenient ideology of the powerful elite. Left liberals, it is said, invoke conscience to undermine “solidarity,” while right liberals, it is said, invoke it to undermine “realpolitik.”

In the future, the Pew Report may come to report on those who are “Religious, but not spiritual.”

Yet in the realm of both religion and politics, the sundering of religious from spiritual, the claim that one is primary, the one sided belief that experience is a-social or that the social is all that matters, is confused.

A liberalism that ignores the group is destined to fail, but an anti-liberalism that ignores the individual is likewise doomed. To solve this problem, we must be religious, and therefore spiritual; spiritual, and therefore religious.

https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/spiritual-but-not-religious

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My twin baby cousins suddenly began smacking each other, but they have never been exposed to any violence.

I know it is a sample size of two, but are we innately violent?

My theory is yes, because all the brutish stuff is from the ancient part of our brains. The pre-frontal cortex responsible for why we don't beat each other up immediately when triggered is much newer and less developed. That makes it is easy for us to fall into our primitive ways.

You can "lose" your cool (and return to a more primitive nature of attacking someone), but you never will suddenly becoming peaceful and reasonable.

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Is there a way to set the clock back so that "new reply" can be recovered? Threads get reset when the tab is refreshed.

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A fun and important concept in physics and engineering (especially electrical engineering) is impedance matching. I'll give a physical example first, since an electrical one probably wouldn't be as intuitive.

Slide a hockey puck along the ice so that it hits another stationary hockey puck dead on. The puck you're sliding is of standard size, but the one you hit can be nonstandard: either smaller or larger than the one you're sliding. If your goal is to transfer as much energy as possible into the puck you're targeting, then you should match the size of the target puck to be the same as the projectile puck. If you make the target puck much larger, then the projectile puck will just bounce off of it, without the target puck moving much. If you make the target puck much smaller, then it will be moving quickly (nearly twice the speed that you initially launched the projectile puck with) but the small mass means that it won't carry much energy. If you make it exactly the same size, though, then all the energy will be transferred, leaving the projectile puck stationary on the ice.

A similar thing happens in an electrical circuit. Real batteries aren't perfect. They have a small amount of internal resistance in them, that eats up energy whenever current is flowing. Let's say you're designing a flashlight and you want it to be as bright as possible. That means you want to get the maximum power out of the battery possible. It's possible to create light bulbs with various resistances by changing the length and thickness of the filament. Creating a very high resistance light bulb means very little current will flow, and so the light won't be very bright. Creating a low resistance light bulb means a lot of current will flow, but it will flow very easily without heating up the filament very much. Most of the resistance in the circuit will be due to the battery, and so most of the energy will be used to heat the battery up (not desirable!). The choice with highest power output is to select the resistance of the bulb to be the same as the internal resistance of the battery. (In that case, half the power output is going to the light bulb, and half is still being wasted in heating up the battery. The least "wasteful" option is to have a very high resistance bulb. Then, almost no energy will be wasted. But the cost is that the power is low, so it takes a long time for all that energy to dribble out, making for a dim but long lasting flashlight.)

This is also related to why sound doesn't transfer between air and water very well. (Why one can't hear whales singing while sitting on the beach.) Sound trying to go from air into water just bounces off the surface mostly. The water is too heavy and hard to compress. Sound trying to go from water into air also mostly bounces. Even with a very high energy underwater sound wave, there isn't that much compression. The individual molecules only oscillate over a very short distance. So when the wave reaches the surface, they aren't pushing on the air molecules with the kind of fast large motions that would be required to make an equally high-energy sound wave in air.

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Not sure if you're looking for more comments about Hungary, but a piece of interesting trivia: their current second-largest party, Jobbik, started off as a neo-Nazi party (though they have been trying very hard to moderate since 2015), with a paramilitary wing during the 2000s and consistent protests at Jewish events. However, their leader since 2020, Peter Jakab, is a guy with substantial Jewish heritage and (by Hungarian standards) an identifiably Jewish last name. (Jakab has been an activist for the party since their violent-paramilitary days, in 2007, which is a hell of an example of cognitive dissonance -- though under his control the party has expelled most of its truly far-right members and he even tacitly endorsed left-wing pro-Europe candidate Klara Dobrev in the multi-party opposition-to-Orban leadership primary in 2021, which is a *hell* of a pivot. Dobrev is the wife of very unpopular former socialist PM Ferenc Gyurcsany, who you covered, and she lost the primary to right-wing candidate Peter Marki-Zay, independent mayor of the small town of...[deep breath]...Hodmezovasarhely. Marki-Zay is not associated with any specific anti-Orbanist party, whether socialist, liberal, fascist, satirical -- Hungary having had some scarily strong results for satirical parties in the past -- or anything else. Probably for the best considering how loathed Gyurcsany and most of the specific anti-Orbanist parties remain, by all accounts.)

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Would be interesting to have a system with a more complicated form of "likes".

I think one of the problems with likes is that they mix too many things: "this is witty", "I agree with this wholeheartedly", "this is thought-provoking", you name it. So I think they could be made more meaningful by separating different aspects of what you like about them. And having different rules for them.

So for example, we want to promote correct comments over incorrect, what should we do? I don't think "this is correct" vote is that useful: the most correct comments are just trivial. "This is not true" might work. Except better make it more than just a vote: you have to provide an explicit refutation. Which will be marked by the comment system as such in bright colors. And can be refuted in turn if it is based on incorrect information or doesn't actually refute the parent comment.

And since a lot of us are Bayesians, correct/incorrect is too narrow, let's allow the comments' authors mark them with a number 1%-100% reflecting their certainty. Why not 50%-100%? Because it's not "I estimate the likelihood of this as n%" but rather "I'm n% certain", that is, "I'd bet n points if I got 100 for it being true". I'm not sure there should be actual points: somebody would have to resolve truthfulness of a meaningful fraction of comments and the most interesting ones are probably not going to be resolvable (and then it's just combining a comment section with a prediction market which is not such a stupid idea now that I think of it). But there's got to be a way to crowdsource estimates of likelihood, or at least "best estimates according to this cluster of commenters". Analyzing the clusters resulting from certainties and refutations would be quite interesting, too.

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Does anyone have experience with the differences between long release melatonin and short release? Accidentally ordered long release (6hrs) of 750mcg and I'm wondering if it's worth finishing the bottle or not. I'm noticing I'm a little groggy in the morning and fall asleep with ease but not really any more sleepy than usual.

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I was pleasantly surprised that "find (classical) music by melody" works in practise (for popular pieces at least).

I had some Schubert piano music in my head for days and could not identify it, which made me quite antsy.

http://bestclassicaltunes.com/DictionaryPiano.aspx gave the answer almost immediately (even though I do not play the piano and had to trial-and-error the melody...)

It is Impromptu Op 142 No 3, https://youtu.be/xpXQNuce7jE , by the way...

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ask us questions in a direct way.

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Default substack avatars should be replaced by the result of feeding the user's username into Neuralblender

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@scott if its really about having lots of people in interesting discussions then I would recommend making this as frictionless and enjoyable as possible. I find myself discussing the most often in the open discussion areas of special interest forums driven by XenoForo software. Forums driven by this software are lightning fast, have a good user interface both on PCs and Smartphones, one can easily cite, link, post images, see ones older posts, get real time notification, discuss privately, ignore user (aka trolls), search for all kinds of things, use Google to search all kinds of things etc. The Substack page in contrast is slow on each single interaction, reloads always when I come back to the browser tab on my smartphone and often the position I was before is lost, deep threads get unreadable on Smartphones etc. It's a lot of friction and incentives to not take part in discussions because of technical and comfort issues allone.

I assume Substack software was created for authors to publish paid articles and get some feedback now and then. Open discussions among a huge number of participants about anything was and is not the objective.

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>> Maybe open threads with important announcements attached feel less open and hold people back from commenting? Weird that such a small thing can have such a big effect - tell me what else I should do to get you talking!

Subject lines/headings don't always register as saliently as the text of the post. If all the numbered points in the article are about meetups, it looks like a post about the meetups. (There was a point where I had to consciously notice 'oh these are actually the open threads too'.)

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If there's 2 things the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis predicts, it's that there's gonna be an arms race between intelligence (bullshitting ability) and self-deception (ability to lie without lying).

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Suppose you know for a fact you're not in a simulation. Then, you build a simulator that simulates a precise copy of this Universe down to the elementary particles. Bar the obvious impossibility and all the laws of physics it would break, would it make sense to assign a 50% likelihood to the hypothesis that you are now in a simulation? Now, say you make a million of these simulations, does it make sense to say that you are not almost certain to be in a simulation?

Then, if you know for a fact that you're going to start a simulation like that one in a month, and that you'll use it to simulate the current month, does it make sense to currently assign a 50% probability that you're in a simulation?

Then, let's say you start modifying the simulation under you (as in, you modify the computer program that runs the Universe simulation on a computer). In the million sims scenario, would you be able to give yourself superpowers through the simulation by modifying slightly the underlying simulations that are on your computer by giving your simulated copy a superpower (for example, you'd modify the adjacent gravity of your copy (on the computer) so that it can fly, or something like that, would you then start flying immediately)?

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Jung was right. So is Jordan Peterson. He's not crazy and neither am I.

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What's going on with "likes"? I can't "like" comments on the post itself, but I can do it via the email notifications that I get for replies to my comments. And I can't see a "like" score displayed anywhere on comments.

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Who has watched The Sandbaggers? I just finished watching it, and I think it's an excellent British Cold War drama from the 80s. Though the last season was weak, I do think that S1 and S2 have a great deal to offer. The series would have wider appeal today if not for (a) terrible video quality and (b) only streaming on BritBox and Tube in the US.

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> Weird that such a small thing can have such a big effect - tell me what else I should do to get you talking!

Prompts for the open thread might be an interesting thing to try if that's not too much trouble-- and assume it wouldn't be. Link some claim, study, or news item of interest, say "Discuss", done.

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I'd talk more if there were more ruthless moderation! Anything that you (Scott) deem to not be a clear positive contribution to the discourse, kill it.

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I am nearly 100% certain the bible is completely true.

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