I'm interested in the total number of votes cast for each party in the US midterms, for both the Senate and the House. Breakdowns by state and district are readily available, but I'm not interested enough to compile the totals myself.
Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks!
Note that this is unlikely, maybe 5-10% chance tops, but because we live in the stupidest timeline there is a case to be made that Dems win the House and Rs win the Senate.
Gentlemen! All this discussion about politics, and yet none of you saw fit to tell me about Thomas Jefferson's mammoth cheese? A cheese that was given a room of its own in the White House, and guests were conducted there to view it? Partisan cheese that had no Federalist cow involved in its manufacture?
"The Cheshire Mammoth Cheese was a gift from the town of Cheshire, Massachusetts to President Thomas Jefferson in 1802. The 1,235-pound (560 kg) cheese was created by combining the milk from every cow in the town, and made in a makeshift cheese press to handle the cheese's size. The cheese bore the Jeffersonian motto "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."
...Given the political landscape of the time, there was a fear that the more Republican Jefferson, considered an "infidel of the French Revolutionary school," would harm the religious interests of the citizenry, and that "the altars of New England would be demolished, and all their religious institutions would be swept away by an inrushing and irresistible flood of French infidelity."
One pastor in Cheshire, Elder John Leland, opposed this line of thought. A beleaguered minority in Calvinist New England, the Baptists were perhaps the strongest advocates in the early republic of the separation of church and state. Leland had met Jefferson during his time in Virginia and the two grew to have a friendly relationship. Leland remembered this as he served in Cheshire, and campaigned strongly for Jefferson.
Leland, believing that his efforts helped Jefferson win the Presidency, encouraged his townspeople to make a unique gesture to Jefferson. He urged each member of his congregation "who owned a cow to bring every quart of milk given on a given day, or all the curd it would make, to a great cider mill..." Leland also insisted that "no Federal cow" (a cow owned by a Federalist farmer) be allowed to offer any milk, "lest it should leaven the whole lump with a distasteful savour."
NOTE: I say 'correct or incorrect' for percentage predictions, as most folks made 1-2 predictions, so there's no useful calibration to do. This required reducing them to a binary, e.g. 60% chance of X, if X didn't happen is recorded as incorrect.
Okay, so we’re still early, but let’s take a quick look at the midterm predictions from last thread and earlier:
Starting with my own predictions:
“I'd predict 60% chance that the polls have not been fixed and are still undercounting Republican voters,”
This looks to have been wrong. We’ll know more later, but this looks basically in line with the polling, so far.
“However, the Republican senate candidates appear sort of disastrously bad, so I'd also say there's a 60% chance the Democrats keep the Senate.”
Uncertain, but looks right so far.
Argentus:
“Something like 80% chance the Repubs win the House.”
Uncertain, but appears almost certainly correct.
“I think something like 50% chance Repubs win the Senate, 20% Dems win it, and 30% they tie.”
Uncertain, but looks like we’re falling in the last two boxes.
Yug Gnibrob:
“I predict a surprise victory for Elvis Presley in at least three races.”
Everything hasn’t been called yet, so still possible. Also, amusing.
Carl Pham:
“I'm expecting an epic Democratic wipeout.”
Incorrect.
Note, Deisach responded to this, but I couldn’t pull a concrete prediction out of it, so much as a description of the options.
Education Realist:
Begins with a reference to conventional wisdom which appears likely to be wrong, but I don’t think that was their prediction? Feel free to jump in if I misunderstood.
“I think there's a 40% chance the Senate stays tied ,which was all the GOP could hope for six months ago, but would now be the downside.”
Uncertain, but looks like it may be tied.
“There's an enormous likelihood--not a 60% chance but closer to 90%--that the polls are understating GOP support.”
Uncertain, but looks incorrect? Just like for me, it looks like polls did significantly better this time.
Axioms:
“On the upside for them Fetterman had a stroke but on the downside the Trump endorsed candidate is so widely hated he is still gonna lose.”
Correct. Fetterman won.
“I'd say 53-54 Senate seats for Dems.”
Incorrect.
“The House is 60-40 and I expect the majority for either side to be like 10 tops.”
Unclear wording, but I think this was saying 60-40 in favor of Democrat victory, based on the above predictions. If so, uncertain, but appears likely to be incorrect, current projection is R-224, D-211, but this is obviously in flux.
Paul Botts:
Agreed with my predictions, then added “I'd say the GOP has around a 2 in 3 chance of gaining a House majority but most likely a narrow one.”
Appears correct, though not certain yet and depends a bit on definition of narrow. It’s projected to be broader than the current D one, but not by much.
“Polymarket, Manifold, and PredictIt now have shiny interfaces for predicting the upcoming US midterm elections. In terms of the Republicans taking the Senate, Polymarket is at 65%, Manifold at 58%, PredictIt at 73%, and 538 at 49%.”
Uncertain, but it appears this is not likely to happen.
To tell you the absolute truth, this video about why it makes sense to cook a turkey in pieces got a lot more response than why there wasn't violence at the polls.. Possibly of interest to rationalists because it's an example of goal factoring-- is that Norman Rockwell image of bringing a whole turkey to the table and carving it worth it compared to having a turkey cook faster and the ability to cook dark meat and light meat separately?
People were worried about violence at the polls. It didn't happen. Any theories?
Was the possibility of violence actually a matter of excessive concern about some people who were talking big? This might have an implication that Republicans are less violent than Democrats expect.
As a rough estimate, there are some 75 million Republicans in the US. If as little as one in a million of them had chosen violence yesterday, it would have been a very bad day.
Was the punishment of January 6 rioters enough to get potentially violent people to think hard about whether they wanted to wreck their lives?
I don't believe there could have been adequate protection against violence at polling places to have prevented a determined attempt.
I've posted this to Facebook, and haven't gotten very interesting replies, though one person mentioned significant police at their polling place, and another claimed that violence at the polls has been predicted for years (possibly decades) but never happens.
I'm hoping for some discussion about what went wrong with the prediction, and by that, I mean something more sophisticated that the left generally gets things wrong.
So previously I predicted that the polls would lean suddenly rightward leading up the election, and that there would be a general right-wing victory.
So I got the first part right, but I'd say my prediction overall was wrong. And even if I do end up getting the second part right, at this point, it will be by accident rather than good planning, because looking at the little data that is coming in - it looks like young people actually voted.
I, uh, didn't expect that. And I'm pretty sure neither did the pollsters. Because I'm reasonably certain what will come out in short order is exactly my mistake: A misallocation of likely voters as we approached the election.
I think it comes down to that abortion was enough to bridge some of the enthusiasm gap, but we'll see.
That's all, really. Got a thing wrong, here's why I think I got it wrong, in case any of you find that helpful.
Legal question: A friend of mine recently took the LSAT, but on the day scores were released he received, instead of a score, a notice saying that the LSAT companied believed he had cheated, & were investigating the situation, and it might be up to 4 months til he learned the outcome. If they conclude he cheated he will not be allowed to take the LSAT again. Friend has learned from an online forum for LSAT-takers that LSAT never shares info about why they suspect cheating, and how they arrived at ultimate conclusion that person was guilty or not guilty.
So my question: Can this possibly be legal? My friend did not cheat, and if testing company decides he did and locks him out of taking LSAT again his life & life plans will be greatly damaged. The only forms of cheating that are possible could not be proven through viewings of the video of his taking the exam -- at most a viewer might see something that would make them suspect cheating. It seems to me it should at least be possible to insist that my friend be allowed to retake the exam under conditions where whatever form of cheating they suspect could not possibly be carried out -- let's say in some setting where his pockets or whatever are checked beforehand & someone sits in the room watching him the whole time he's taking the test. Those of you who understand the legal issues here: Do you agree it would be possible legally to force the test company to allow a re-take of this kind?
A couple additional details: My friend took several old versions of the LSAT in prep for taking the real thing, and got perfect scores on some and near-perfect on the rest, so it is likely that he achieved the same on the actual test. It seems likely that the testing company would be particularly suspicious of someone who scored a perfect 180, and we suspect that's why he is now under investigation. That's understandable, but this sure is shabby treatment of someone who worked hard to prepare, then managed to do better than 99.9% of the other test-takers.
FYI Scott, your Moloch article links to http://raikoth.net/libertarian.html however the domain has been squatted, so the link took me to a “you have won a Samsung phone” page. I am guessing you know, and that maintaining old links is a burden, but just in case you didn’t! Cheers
So today is election day. Some people are gonna look smart and some will look very foolish. Hard to say who is who right now. Some very weird stuff going on this election. Win or lose I'm ready to be done, though. Election day is gonna suck for me regardless cause I have some weird jaw pain that is not going away. Well unless I chug Tylenol. Florida is look pretty rough in the EDay vote but old Republicans vote early in Miami so it doesn't say a ton yet.
Any recommendations for interesting an entertaining stories/books/videos/movies where the protagonist has a strong sense of duty? Deontological ethics are pretty far from the mind of the average teenager, I find...
Throwaway account to comment on my ban, it's easy to guess which one of those banned was my main.
The reason I do this is *not* to go full troll and flagrantly disrespect your, Scott's, dominion. I have a lot of respect for you, which is precisely why I write this feedback. The issues of moderation and bannning seems to be "in the air" and on your mind recently with your recent posts and the twitter buyout playing out, so I sought to offer you the (as far as I know) unique perspective of someone you banned. No part of this should ever be construed as me bargaining or asking for an account unban.
1- The most puzzling thing about this for me is why now? 2 months is a really long time for me, is it not for everybody ?
This is relevant because fast enforcement of rules is good.
1-a- From the point of view of the banned, it feels unfair (an entirely different thing from actually being unfair) to come after me after I have cooled off. If you have banned me in the 5-10 days interval after posting that rant, I would still be pissed, but hey, I had it coming. While not exactly a pleasant analogy, imagine this a fist fight. I throw a punch and you come at me 6 hours later with a bunch of your friends and give me a piece of your mind, harsh but fair. But I throw a punch and you come at me 2 months later ? Hmmmmm.
1-b- If you don't give a flying heck about the banned, (some of) the rest of your community is probably latching on bannings as a useful signal. It's a bit like how programmers learn a new programming language : write what they think to be a valid program, throw it at a program responsible for saying what's a valid program, and recieve yelling in return about why this is not - in fact - a valid program. Rinse and repeat till no yelling. Back to the object level : the programmers here are the commenteriats. The programs are the comments. And you're the oracle responsible for saying which programs are valid and which are nonsense. A 2-month-long feedback cycle is degrading this useful signal by a whole amount of a lot. Is this intentional so people spend more time thinking about what to write instead of just hitting 'post' and seeing what happens ?
2- The particular comment you banned contains, right after downthread, a semi-apology to the person who reported me, which he semi-accepted by replying back in kind. I don't want a cookie for this, but it feels like it should count for something. Apologies are hard, they are costly, they contain tacit admissions of a lot of bad things about the one apologizing. To put that in the most transactional and entitled way possible : What did my softened tone later in that thread buy me ? Is the answer nothing ? *Should* the answer be nothing ? Gradients are lovely, they allow you to be mostly wrong but still make progress. 0/1 kindness may be hard for me towards a particular class of people, it would be cool if I can be mean then retract and make amends later.
3- This is simply a matter of perception, but I can't shake the feeling that you're biased in favor of you-know-who. This is probably wrong, but wrong perceptions still can and indeed does affect conversations. There is a very easy solution for this : pick the most anti-you-know-who person that have ever anti-you-know-who-ed in your close circle, and make them responsible for the final green light on a random 50% of the people you intend to ban.
4- There is something awefully school-principal-like and preachy about posting the names of the banned. What purpose does it serve ? The message "A lot of people were banned, tread carefully" can equally be sent by stating the number of bans, not the actual names. If the content of the comments serve as a useful signal (as in 1-b-), then maybe you can just copy paste it into a pastebin or a github repo without the name attached. I'm not "ashamed" of my comment, I just object to the forced-group-consensus aspect of highlighting the badness of my comment as if it was a fact or an uncontroversial example to be heeded.
To temper this very tame criticism, I reacted positively to you banning the comment that directly insulted an actual person, and not the comment that just said a bunch of very naughty words that a bunch of you-know-whos said shouldn't be said. It might be a minuscule thing, it might have been entirely a noise artifact that I'm reading weird things into, but it really proves for me that you take moderation seriously as a tool to make the prisoner's dilemma of internet conversations bend more towards cooperation, rather than merely a synonym for "a button I can use to efficiently shutdown people I don't want to speak". Moderation Is Different From Censorship indeed.
I like your moderation, Scott, and I like you in general, and I learn(t) a lot of things from reading you think about conflict-resolution, free speech, governance and whatnot. 1..4 are just "UX" issues that I think it would benefit you greatly and the community to think more about.
Here's the SQLite blessing :
> May you do good and not evil.
> May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
> May you share freely, never taking more than you give.
Have a great (*Checks California time*) afternoon.
But all of that went away with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Whatever replaces the Helsinki Accords, formally or de facto, Europe is in a new world now.
Here's an additional reason to make some effort to trim back the number of post: This page, which currently has 930 posts, is virtually impossible to use on mobile. Takes more than 60 secs to load. Glitches in weird ways. Would not let me put up a brief post -- just kept telling me, in red type, that "something went wrong." Mmm, thanks, I'd figured that out actually.
Wrote the above on the computer. Approx. 1 minute later page froze for 30 secs or so. Got a notice that "This webpage is using significant energy. Closing it may improve the responsiveness of your Mac." There's also a notable lag when I type into the comment box -- text takes a few seconds to appear. These huge pages seem to be too much for Substack's system.
Does anyone have any good advice on buying cars around the $8k-$10k price point?
I know the used car market is kind of crazy right now, and I'm thankful I won't need to buy a car for 4-6 months, but I've been driving 15 year old Honda Civics for the past 10 years until they literally die on the side of the road. These typically cost $3-$4k. I've saved up ~$10k for a new car and it's hard to see anything worth the effort. In general, for an extra $5-$7k I feel like the options are to buy 10 year old boring Japanese sedan instead of a 15 year old boring Japanese sedan which...doesn't seem right for almost tripling the amount of money I'm willing to spend. I'm seeing something around the $15-$20k mark that look like a significant step up, and I'm capable of buying that, but that's a lot of money to spend on single item I use for mostly practical reasons. Is this just part of being the only weirdo who only pays cash and never takes auto loans?
Am I missing something? Are there makes and models that are fun or...just feel like a step up from a beater Honda around $10k?
Some of the comments about easy jhana make me suspect that some things described as "jhana" are just people pausing to think for the first time in their life.
Ethics question: how evil would it be to develop a payload for a mechanically suitable off-the-shelf remote-control multirotor drone that would enable a remote user to pierce a car or truck tire and render it irreparably leaky?
For numbers, let's say:
* the drone is viably controllable up to a quarter-mile from an off-the-shelf controller station (read: phone or lap, maybe with a radio dongle)
* the drone is not autonomous outside basic flight stability and safety features to other humans, so it has to be guided to a tire and the knife triggered by the user
* the knife can be triggered 4 times per flight
* the drone's battery and knife can be replenished within a minute by the user
* the knife is captive, so it can't hurt anything the drone isn't immediately adjacent to, and magically can't be modified to do otherwise by end users.
* the drone and ground station are readily replaceable for <$10K, so accessible for a small organization or an org with donors, but not a typical individual.
This is prompted by my trying to inhabit the viewpoint of modern dirtbag left activists, such as those who protest by gluing themselves to roads and suchlike.
Factors I can think of offhand:
* This enables grassroots enforcement of no-car, no-truck zones for the anarchistically-inclined
* This makes destruction of property safer for the perpetrator
* This enables wider-scale destruction of property viable for a single user
* The payload designer isn't hard to replace, since the payload is easy to design, but the payload only needs to be designed once and then plans distributed
* Obviously, this makes hit-and-run violence easier and safer, but that rate is already low and dropping, but maybe someone out there is only held back from a spree by having to be present for the attacks in person? If so, why aren't they a sniper on a spree already?
* Once the payload is built, how much harder is making the entire thing autonomous? To the degree of "here's a car-shaped thing, slice the tires"? "Here's a geofenced area, slice the tires of all car-shaped things in it"? "Here's a geofenced area, slice the tires of all cars without a badge"?
I’d like to signal boost the Brad DeLong-Ezra Klein interview. DeLong is sooo right on 99% of what he says that it is sort of scarry to see that much of this is news to Klein.
I've spent a lot of time reading and trying to reproduce different experiences, so I've tried to put together a list of heuristics for evaluating reports. I think our default attitude should be skepticism, but that shouldn't keep us from experimenting.
"In other words, the experts used eminence over evidence to make a recommendation. That is dangerous, and we have too much of it in medicine.
The practicing doctors—with their cumulative wisdom—got this one right. DCP proved that their choice of HCTZ was the correct one.
But I hope you know what my next sentence will be.
We should also not trust the collective wisdom of practicing doctors. I’ve discussed many of the colossal errors we’ve made in accepting therapies that ultimately proved ineffective or harmful."
The way forward, so beautifully shown in the DCP trial, is proper randomized trials."
Complicated deletion methods with 33% threshholds have the major effect of avoiding transparency. They let you delete anything you want for any reason you want, nobody can understand exactly why their comments were deleted, nobody can meaningfully dispute it, and whether their comments were deleted can depend on circumstances outside their control (for instance, it means that it is now bad for someone if other people post good comments).
If you want to be able to arbitrarily delete comments, it's your blog, so why not just arbitrarily delete comments? (Note that I'm not saying it's necessarily *good* to do so, just that arbitrary+honest is better than arbitrary+dishonest.)
The same goes for "50% bans". All you're doing is pretending that your arbitrary decisiuon is based on numbers. If your policy is to arbitrarily ban people, at least admit it.
I never have, though I considered going there a year ago, but dropped the idea because flights were hotels were so expensive.
I just checked again today, and prices are much lower: $400 round trip flights from the DC area where I live, and as low as $80/night for a decent hotel. This is for a February trip.
What happened? Was Aruba abnormally expensive a year ago, or is it abnormally cheap now?
Ooh, plowable snow in the forecast! I expect I’m going to have the same conversation with Mrs Gunflint where she nags me to buy her a new shovel. Every year it’s the same damn thing.
Steven's awareness recursion method reminds me of the start of Tolle's book The Power of Now:
<<“I cannot live with myself any longer.” This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. "Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the 'I' and the 'self' that 'I' cannot live with.“ ”Maybe,“ I thought, ”only one of them is real." I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words “resist nothing,” as if spoken inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection of what happened after that.>>
I've seen people argue that the "necessary" in true, kind, necessary isn't necessary, but I've got a meaning for it.
Necessary can be interpreted to mean not redundant. If the commenter is saying the same thing a lot of times (an ill-defined standard), the new comment isn't contributing to the discussion.
How well does the colloquial usage of things being 'meant to be' (e.g. "my partner and I were just meant to be") square with the deterministic view of the universe? For some reason they feel like two different things, but I'm having a hard time figuring out why. Is it just that the former usually presents as a non-scientific folk belief, while the latter is espoused by very smart people who've spent years thinking about it?
I notice that "computers" tend to be associated with "math"...but many of the most common pitfalls for the tech-illiterate stem from, well, illiteracy rather than innumeracy. If you can't spell well, search won't work well*; if you're sloppy at composing consistent strings, that just compounds the problem. I suppose it's true that in many regards, the architecture of "how computers think" is math-based, and so that's a more useful lens through which to conceptualize them...the sort of way that I get frustrated by so-called natural language model search algorithms, because I'm used to phrasing queries in bit-comprehensibe ways, regex, etc. (C.f. search apps searching for what it assumes you *really* meant to search for, rather than the actual term as entered.)
But I wonder if it'd be more efficaceous for raising the tech savviness waterline to focus on wordcelling rather than shaperotating. At least, for the median user who doesn't want to think about how computers work, they just want them __to work__. (Sometimes I wonder if this is the real secret behind Apple's historical success, realizing sooner than others who the actual median user was/could be.)
*a particular bother for me working in grocery - it's sometimes embarrassing seeing a no-hits search left open, and boggling at how coworkers or customers think <mildly ethnic food> is spelled...but they can identify the package on sight, no problem.
"I'll delete all comments below maybe what the 33rd percentile comment in a non-Challenge-Mode thread would be."
Do you know about Deming's Red Bead Experiment? (Not actually invented by Deming but used by him to teach how to understand variation and think statistically. See The New Economics (1994)
Here is a alternative version to make a similar point. Suppose you had the subscribers to ACX flip 100 coins and report the amount of heads. And then you banned those with below average heads count. Do you really think that you will have created a better head flipping club?
In writing this comment, it occurs to me that I should refresh my recollection of the history of "the salon" and consider the complications with having a money making operation (your paid subscriptions) tied to the endeavor of ACX.
Almost all modern TV series I can think of do parallel plot threads, i.e. Two Lines, No Waiting or more https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TwoLinesNoWaiting. Is there a modern, popular TV series where we just follow one single protagonist the entire series?
Anyone know a great model of flip phone? I'd like to de-smartphone for attention and time management reasons, but ideally retain decent photo and emoji texting abilities, maybe navigation too.
It's surprisingly hard to find a decent dumb phone.
My friend is developing a new predictions market platform that's more point and shoot than the usual. His first product is basically a March Madness bracket for the Senate elections on Tuesday. He's looking for early users and I figure this might be a good group. Feel free to join my league or better yet, make your own! It's still in beta so it's a little buggy but it should work.
For those who are interested in prediction markets this year, the PredictIt market for Nevada was an absolutely brain melting 80/20 for Adam Laxalt. Until Jon Ralston posted his Nevada predictions roughly 30 minutes ago after which point there was a swing of 25% to 67/33. This swing is ongoing. And anyone who actually followed the ballot updates for Nevada saw this coming a mile away. But when you want something to be a specific way you interpret the ambiguous data in your favor. Motivated reasoning.
Does anyone know if there are guidelines for what is meant by low quality posts/can provide a good summary of what “high quality” posts have? ls the metric strictly insightful thoughts here, or is there some level of clarity/grammar, logic, ethos, or demonstration of knowledge that is being accounted for? Do expressions of sheer goodwill or enthusiasm for a topic make the cut?
I recently started started re-reading Gödel-Escher-Bach after about 3 years. I never finished it though, I only read approx. 3/4 of the book. The reason being that, to my experience, the book has an immense amount of content to the point that I really start to get lost. I mean you get to a point in which you wonder what the book is even about, but in a beautiful way. Has anyone here had a similar experience? Is there another way to approach this book?
I would very much love to be able to enter a jhana state, preferably without spending months and years of my life on it. I suspect that this should be possible, given that, as an amateur hypnotist, I was able to get more than one willing and receptive subject into a very similar state of absolute bliss/continuous full body orgasm (not sure if there is a difference for AFABs) within a very short time. Sadly, I do not seem to have the ability of being easily hypnotized, at least not from what I have tried, so that route is not promising for me. I wonder if there are other shortcuts that can be explored.
As this is probably the last open thread before the midterms in the US, anyone have good (or bad, we'll know pretty soon) predictions?
I do not have any major insight. I guess I'd predict 60% chance that the polls have not been fixed and are still undercounting Republican voters, which suggests a disaster of Democrats.
However, the Republican senate candidates appear sort of disastrously bad, so I'd also say there's a 60% chance the Democrats keep the Senate.
A few questions I have to the regular commenters here, especially the "EA types":
1 - How come that Betting Markets (at least PredictIt) are favoring the GOP to take both the Senate and the House quite heavily, while polls and early voting data so far paint a much better picture for the Democrats? Which one should the "layperson" trust more? Or is it, as I think, that PredictIt overstates the GOP's chances because of self-selection of the bettors (I.e. Thiel-Style Libertarian/Alt-Righters?)
2 - Would people here consider Robin Hanson to be alt-right? Because recently he seems to be posting quite a few opinion pieces that are very sympathetic to the alt-right...is he on the "libertarian-to-alt-right pipeline like Herr Thiel?
I am not an American, but watching the upcoming midterm elections from the sidelines feels like a buildup to a calamity, were this a TV show. With the most sane Republican being Liz Cheney, and most of the rest being 2020 election denialists and proponents of a nationwide abortion ban, the Dems' progressives (AOC, Warren, Sanders etc.) sliding ever further into commie think ("Billionaires bad!") and anti-tech, and the center either non-existent or extremely uninspiring on ether side, the odds of a post-election conflict worse than Jan 6 seem unnervingly high. And yet, I don't see much in terms of alarm bells going off, so maybe I am missing something here.
Re Intelligence II: I am of a logical bent so this question drawn from R.J. Sternberg, a very big name in intelligence studies, appeals to me:
"You are at a party of truth-tellers and liars. The truth-tellers always tell the truth, and the liars always lie. You meet someone new. He tells you that he just heard a conversation in which a girl said she was a liar. Is the person you met a liar or a truth-teller?
Well logically the answer should come swiftly, but there's a problem with the question and the higher your Intelligence the more likely you will answer "incorrectly"
Back in the 90s and early 2000s, many of the sorts of people who would nowadays be Internet Rationalists (indeed, many of the exact same people) were instead Transhumanists, or even Extropians. They would talk optimistically about how technologies like AI, uploading, cryonics, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and so forth would lead to a wonderful singularity, and they would boo-hiss against luddites like Bill Joy who wanted to shut down nanotechnology research for fear of gray goo. I lurked on those sorts of mailing lists back in the day, and I imagine some other people here did too.
What happened to all of that? Many of the same people are still kicking around, but the optimism is all gone. Most of the technologies that used to be discussed on those lists are now dismissed by the same sorts of people as pipe dreams, except for AI which is now more feared than celebrated. The Singularity is no longer celebrated as some kind of Rapture For Nerds in which we all get to live forever, but is feared as a world-ending kaboom where everything becomes paperclips. I just checked and extropy.org is still up (but advertising a conference in 2007) and https://www.aleph.se/Trans/ is still up but doesn't seem to have changed either.
What happened to all of that? I miss the techno-utopianism of those days, even if a lot of it was a bit crazy.
Has anyone here successfully studied themselves as a data point of ONE, to lose weight or improve on some health measure, by trying different things, keeping intelligent notes, and seeing what works for you?
I imagine Scott could ask Substack to implement such an option and also recommend to other people to do the same. One person asking probably won't do much, but after several people asking it might actually get onto the roadmap.
I have recently watched this 30 minute video with John Oliver where, according to the YouTube description, he "explains what critical race theory is, what it isn’t, and why we can expect to hear more about it in the coming months". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EICp1vGlh_U
Now maybe I wasn't paying enough attention, but I do not remember any part where he explained what CRT actually *is*. It seemed to me like he just spent all that time making fun of people who oppose the idea. I am being unfair here? If you think so, could you please give me the timestamp of the actual explanation in that video?
I have previously watched his explanation of the dialysis industry, which in my opinion was well done. Not sure how fair it was, but at least it felt like someone was *explaining* nontrivial things to me, and making a few jokes along the way. So I clicked to another recommended video, expecting a comparable quality... and was disappointed.
I just had some exemplary customer service from HP, and there are a couple of policies I recommend in general. One is that they asked me at the beginning what I'd already tried. This is great. I'd already done a number of the usual things.
They gave me a service ticket, so that if the chat ended (it did), we didn't have to start from scratch. (I'm looking at you, LabCorps.)
These are simple, objective policies. The more complex part is hiring smart people and giving them enough time to do a good job.
The specific issue is a paper feed problem in an Envy 6000 printer, and I can post details if anyone cares. HP didn't solve the problem, but they're sending me a replacement printer.
There are many movies depicting the evils of Nazi regime; for example "Schindler's List". Are the similar movies depicting the evils of Communist regime? If you know them, please post names.
To explain my criteria:
I want movies containing stories, not mere documentaries. Movies based on real characters or events are okay, of course.
I want the movie to show the suffering of people living in the regime. Can be the average people, or can be people who were especially persecuted e.g. because of their faith. (Not outsiders fighting against the regime, e.g. Rambo.) It must be the regime that initiates violence against the protagonist.
Looking through the bans, the PEG one seems unnecessary. It highlighted that one man's deeply rooted belief is another man's absurdity, and that some such beliefs are labelled religion, while others are labelled "science" or "reality." It was not particularly polite, but describing reality without sharing someone's dogmas often seems impolite. The reality of a trans existence becomes "magic," just as a god becomes a "sky daddy."
The Bernard Gress ban also seems excessive, although less so. Sure it is grating, but I think in general it is worth it to lower the average quality of comments while raising the variance in their content. So although the comment didn't elaborate, it did provide an alternative perspective and was not overly offensive.
Obviously, any comment that would result in a user ban wouldn't be a great comment, I just don't personally think those two warranted bans.
Conversely, the Descriptor and Impassionata ones seemed more overtly hostile, and seemingly ban-worthy.
The Machine Interface one seems difficult to understand. He was accused of "Attacking other commenters, falsely accusing them of ideas they don't believe." But he cited exact quotes from the user that said precisely what he accused him of. Letting other users know what sort of stuff a user has written so they can choose to engage with them or not seems helpful and productive - certainly not banworthy.
I find myself often thinking about situations/topics where reasonable and smart people seem to hold two contradictory opinions at the same time. I'll give two examples of the kind of topics I have in mind:
1) The limit/existence of human agency. I think most people who don't ascribe to the notion of a soul think that our actions are for the most part pre-determined (putting aside any quantum shenanigans). Here I have in mind the kind of people who are influenced by things like The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel, and who believe that our actions are some function of our society, culture, upbringing, genetics, etc. and are not determined by our personal "will". At the same time, very few of these individuals will apply this logic to situations that are far uglier. In those cases, the language used implies that certain individuals involved could have acted otherwise if they just wanted to enough.
2) The objectivity/subjectivity of art. For many people the language they use when describing movies/paintings/books/games they like implies that there is some objective way to grade these things. They'll say stuff like "x is a masterpiece" or "y is a very good movie". Yet, if you push them enough, or if they don't enjoy something that is generally well-received by critics, they jump to a subjective view of art. They'll then say stuff like "there's no such thing as 'good' art, it's a matter of taste and taste is relative".
I think a common thread across these situations is that our reasoning really clashes with our intuitions. If we think about the nature of the universe, it seems very likely that our actions are determined but it definitely doesn't feel that way. Similarly, when I watch a really good movie I feel that it's objectively good, but I have a hard time making a coherent theory of aesthetics to justify my feelings. If anyone has any thoughts on scenarios like this, or any links to share, they would be well appreciated.
> In a Challenge Mode Open Thread, I‘ll delete all comments below maybe what the 33rd percentile comment in a non-Challenge-Mode thread would be.
Fair enough. Only ... this means I won't ever see what fell below your threshold (until it happens to me), and I won't be able to adjust my own calibration accordingly. This is also true more broadly: folks won't see what counts as not accepted.
I don't have a good solution though. In general just deleting those comments sounds nicer than the alternatives.
I miss the hidden open threads. Much fewer number to read, and I could ask more intimate/ personal questions... which I don't feel as comfortable doing on the open threads. More comments is more noise.
Oh, I'd also approve of a rule that says each person can only start one new thread, though they can comment on other threads as much as they wanted.
What are the current options for a barely responsible wannabe pharmacist who's trying to lose weight? Something not as lethal as DNP but not as ineffective as moderate exercise.
After being aggravated by too many bad press releases* about epigenetic inheritance, I've decided to write a post series explaining how epigenetics really works. The first post, which covers the basics of epigenetic marks, is here: https://denovo.substack.com/p/what-is-epigenetics
Later posts will cover the epigenetics of the mammalian germline, and why transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in mammals is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
Re Intelligence: I always scored high on standardized testing, always in the top 2 percentile, both in childhood, college and army. So in Stanford Binet, Weshler Bellevue, SATs, NMSQT, AFQT (armed forces qualifications test) I did really well, but the deck was always stacked in my favor: culturally, not being test shy (my father was part of mid-century IPAT and we faculty children took LOTS of standardized tests), tests giving alot of weight to verbal ability (I was an early and lifelong reader), etc. So it wasn't too surprising I did well.
But my supposed "intelligence" was a peculiar kind: a general rapidity of response and quick learning in some areas, total bafflement in others. It was very quick to move laterally, not so good at in depth analyticity. So high test IQ perhaps but not translating all that well to real world abilities. I am left with a measure of skepticism of IQ tests as predictors of real world success
Kind of an open-ended question, but- does anyone respect 'exercise science' as being even halfway to a real scientific discipline at all? I'd be particularly interested in hearing from people coming from the actual hard sciences.
Originally I was going to ask a more specific exercise science question- how credible is the evidence that doing random exercises 'explosively' increases one's speed or explosiveness *at a totally different athletic maneuver*. Examples would include the idea that performing Olympic weightlifting exercises, like say a power clean, would then translate to increased speed and/or explosiveness in a completely unrelated movement- say, an American football tackle, high jump, or baseball or golf swing. The supposed idea is that doing one activity fast (power cleans) makes you faster at something unrelated (a golf swing).
Personally, this sounds like not just absolute pseudoscience, but is veering into sympathetic magic. Doing one thing fast makes you faster at something else- performing the rain dance makes it rain. But then I realized that this is basically a tenet of modern exercise science and has been for a couple of decades, which lead to the question 'is exercise 'science' a real science or can we completely ignore stuff that sounds like sympathetic magic'.
I mean, as Scott has noted previously, there's lots of studies 'proving' that homeopathy works too, but we can safely ignore them. Does anyone respect exercise science?
Edit to include: Pseudoscientific frauds within the exercise science industry, just in the last 20 years, include cupping, KT tape, compression pants, applied kinesiology, magnet therapy, cryotherapy, and dry needling. All were promoted by some exercise 'scientist' or another- all are fake. You can see why this makes one skeptical of the field in general, no?
I'm currently offering services as a research assistant for $20/hr! Any literature review you want performed or general questions you have I will do my best to answer. CV and work samples available upon request!
Repeating my comment from the jhana thread as it didn't get any replies:
Like several others, I experienced *something* from trying the "are you aware?" shortcut (having almost never meditated before), and it seems to be reproducible.
I don't know whether it's a jhana or not (or maybe some sort of partial jhana or step on the way). I would describe it as pleasurable, but not supremely blissful, and not better than sex. It's like a fizzy, excited, expansive feeling in my chest and throat - a little bit like being wired on caffeine. It's definitely more of a physical sensation than an emotional state.
I'd be interested to hear from people who have experienced jhana about whether or not this is similar to what they experience.
If there really wasn't one, then I suppose this crush and panic was a spontaneous phenomenon caused by general crowding, sort of like phantom traffic jams.
Healthy mental states from physical suffering. I was musing on it the other night, commuting home by bike in an early taste of winter, thinking about how, in a strange way, I am looking forward to the depths of winter. There's a strong NW wind that blows in off Siberia and China (I live in Korea) as part of a weather pattern that drops the temperature way below freezing, and I have a 25 km (15 miles) ride home into the teeth of it at times. I characterize it as being good for the soul--good for the metaphysical self I guess--and it's something David Goggins talks about often. Anyone else value the mental state that comes of suffering physically?
Speaking as a recently warned poster, the moderation policy here is not based around what posters want or are OK with, but what Scott wants his own comment section to be. Fair enough.
Would like an outside perspective on this idea: I weight the upper bounds of what is possible for a super intelligence to achieve based on the Fermi Paradox. Looking for hole pokes, other than
Some examples below as to what conclusions /questions this leads me to.
If paper clip maximizers were possible and inevitable on an intergalactic scale wouldn’t I be able to see a large portion of the sky as paper clips? What could the paper clips of the things that I do see and why isn’t the universe homogenous?
This in general leads me to strongly fall into the camp of weak orthogonality. I think maybe you can build something able to simultaneously 1. Want 2. Achieve 3. Self Propagating enough to paper clip maximize your solar system but probably not you galaxy or your universe. My guess is that it would evolve itself out of the maximalist position fairly quickly on cosmic time scales.
One interesting phenomenon right now with the midterms is that betting markets all seem to rate the Republicans much more highly than 538 does. (eg giving them about 70-80% chance of taking senate, vs 538 saying its a toss up).
Based on past performance I feel like there is a pretty high bar to saying that you are smarter than 538. So is this all dumb money? Or is there some good reason to think so? ("polls get it wrong" is insufficient since 538 already models the relative accuracy of pollsters and considers other factors)
Cribbing from Austin, I'd like to make a gentle plea for fellow feeling and maintaining good naturedness in this election week. There are only a few real bad guys just people with competing visions of the good. Let's reestablish community in this country!
Let's take as an axiom that some people are more intelligent than others, with IQ acting as one proxy for that intelligence.
Here are two possible meanings of "more intelligent" I can think of:
Option A) Being more intelligent means that you just absorb stuff faster. These are the kids who are always bored in school, don't need as much time to pick up new ideas, etc. They are more likely to get more education credentials because as time goes on the pace of learning to earn a credential gets faster and faster, and they can keep up. There isn't a ceiling to how much someone can learn, it just might take a long time.
Option B) Being more intelligent means you have a higher ceiling for what you can learn. Everyone can learn addition and subtraction, most people can learn basic algebra, some people can learn calculus, a few people can learn engineering, and only a tiny minority can learn the standard model of particle physics. People learn more or less at the same speed, but some people have a much higher ceiling for what they can learn.
Now I think it's almost certainly a mix of the two. But I'm curious if there is any evidence for Option A vs Option B, and in the absence of evidence, do people think it's 50/50? 70/30 toward one side or the other? Is there another option I'm not thinking of? Etc.
Caveat: not sure if this passes the threshold for a high-quality contribution (apologies if not, in which case I'm happy for this comment to be promptly deleted).
I've been working on a series of posts/essays concerning the question of whether large language models (LLMs) understand language, and how we'd even go about trying to adjudicate that question. I wanted to share a summary here because of the back-and-forth between Scott and Gary Marcus, which I think is quite relevant. My intended contribution to the debate is to try to clarify some of the different views and ultimately to connect this to our understanding of how humans understand language (I'm a psycholinguist by training).
Broadly, I think much of the debate can be boiled down to two opposing camps:
1) The “duck test” view holds that if a system (like a large language model) behaves as if it understands language, then it probably understands language.
2) The “axiomatic rejection” view holds that behavior alone is insufficient––that true language understanding requires some foundational property or mechanism, such as grounding, compositionality, or a situation model.
In this post (https://seantrott.substack.com/p/how-could-we-know-if-large-language), I come down more on the "duck tester" side. For one, I think that for a question to fall under the domain of scientific inquiry it should be something we can empirically test, which sort of makes me a duck tester by definition––it's just a question of getting the "right" tests. Further, the axiomatic rejection camp often makes somewhat under-specified claims, and it's amenable to a "moving the goalposts" problem.
All that being said, I think there are some merits to the axiomatic rejection view (which is sort of akin to an anti-functionalist account), and so in the remaining posts I'm planning to explore some of the axiomatic criteria people have referenced (e.g., Marcus references compositionality) as being necessary conditions for "True Understanding".
I'm curious to hear more about what people in this community think about the debate.
Come work with us to make forecasting more fun and engaging! We have the dual benefits of a remote culture, and being deeply embedded in the EA/LW/ACX world. We're mission driven and our pay is competitive.
Can anyone here steelman the view that consciousness doesn't exist or that it is an illusion? It seemed immediately evident to me that there was a hard problem, and I currently would even be much more open to idealism or solipsism (even though both seem implausible to me) than to believing consciousness is illusory. However, it seems that many philosophers believe it might be an illusion, so I feel like I must be missing something.
For the last three nights, I've suffered from sleep maintenance insomnia.
It's reasonably easy and quick for me to fall asleep at first, but at any point from 1 to 4 hours after falling asleep I wake up and it takes me a *long* time (anywhere from 3.5 to 7 hours, very roughly guesstimated) to fall asleep again. Even when I do fall asleep again, my sleep is light and fitful, with many repeated awakenings. The next day, I feel horrifically exhausted and basically can't do anything productive.
I've struggled with insomnia before, but only for a day or two at most.
I've already started doing all the standard sleep-hygiene things (no caffeine late in the day, cool and quiet bedroom, turning off the lights and putting away electronic devices early, etc.). Maybe, in your experience, they take more than a few nights to start working?
I do think a significant part of the problem is a current medical issue that causes mild stomach pain. But it's mild enough that during the daytime I can easily ignore it, and in the past I could easily ignore it at night as well, sometimes with the aid of an Advil before bed. These last few days, though, it's been driving me crazy when I'm trying to sleep, even taking Advil every four hours overnight.
> An especially common offense this time around was “low-content high-content comments”
Did you mean low-content high-conflict?
I'd love to see more experimentation with aggressive moderation (where stuff that's not strictly bad, just dull or low-quality, also gets deleted), it's a very underappreciated tool. In a high-volume comment section, free time becomes a participation filter; as free time tends to be inversely correlated with skill and experience, that's not great. Clearing out the low-value comments makes more space for high-value oned, in a way. (Of course it's very time consuming for the moderator.)
Old-timer forums used karma systems for that, it's sad that that's not very popular these days.
1. Substack could benefit from giving moderators the ability to highlight good comments, so I can read those first, like setting a threshold of +3 on Slashdot. I don't have time to read most of the comments otherwise. But I don't want a comment voting system to degenerate into reddit where people are just pandering to the ignorant masses to collect karma.
2-4. A lot of shitty comments are from newbies who don't know any better. It might help to link to something like the rules at r/themotte at the bottom of every open thread. There are also some shitty comments from people who do know better, but temporarily forgot or are being lazy or something. They might also benefit from the reminder.
8. shoutout to Oliver at Redwood Research who was my buddy at CFAR I in Prague last month.
Does anyone know where I can find datasets on weather forecasts and outcomes? For example, a dataset on forecast rain probability each day and then the corresponding outcome of whether or not it actually rained?
I'm working on a project to report forecast performance metrics for as many possible datasets as I can, including the ones usually discussed on ACX like election predictions (538, PredictIt, etc), as well as other kinds of forecasts like sports betting and weather. So far finding a good weather dataset with outcomes has actually been kinda hard.
I'd like to encourage people not to use the word "meritocracy", and not to fall into the ways of thinking it implies.
Scott uses the word to mean "selecting applicants for competed-for, desirable jobs based solely on how well they'll do them". And I think that's a good thing, and find his arguments for it compelling, but I think that referring to that as "merit" is both misguided and offensive.
It's absolutely true that, all else being equal, if you work harder you'll do better than if you work less hard. But it's also true that, with the same level of effort, someone with rich, educated, supportive parents and genes conducive to academic study will acquire far more ability, and do far, /far/ better, than someone less lucky but equally hard-working.
And while I think it's defensible to use a word like "merit", with its strong connotations of virtue and moral worth, not just of ability, to refer to "hard work", it clearly shouldn't be used to refer to those forms of luck.
If you want a genuine "merit"ocracy, you should be doing.. not the opposite of, quite, but something orthogonal to, the thing we call "meritocracy" - doing your best to give out jobs based not on achievement but on effort. That would unquestionably be fairer, but the cost in terms of everything worse would be far too high.
Hiring lazy people with upbringings and genes that let them turn effort into accomplishment efficiently in preference to harder-working but less able people is clearly the right thing to do - it's unfair, but a) it benefits a lot of people a lot, and b) "hire the person who will do the job best" is a useful Schelling point that avoids squabbles about how the handicapping system should work. But pretending that it's fair, or that you're hiring based on "merit", is unnecessarily adding insult to injury.
"Abilitocracy" is obviously an ugly word, and no-one will understand what you mean if you use it. But try "hiring based solely on ability"? Or, if you must use "meritocracy", please add a caveat pointing out that you recognise and explicitly reject the connotations and subtext of what you're saying.
I find myself having the same argument with smart people over [1] and over [2]: is it reasonable to consider that things without brains might feel?
It think it's quite reasonable to hypothesize (but not assume!) that e.g. plants can feel pain. Other people seem to think that, without some kind of sophisticated information processing, pain makes no sense.
Its interesting that banning people on Substack must be much more powerful than banning them from the old blog, since your account here may be tied to other subscriptions. At SSC being banned meant losing name recognition (probably desirable for many people banned there) but probably just making a new account. If you have many paid subscriptions on Substack, if you're banned here but still want to comment it means either maintaining two accounts or switching all your subscriptions from the old to the new. Thanks, network effects.
I casually have to do a lot of operations to string data, on 1M+ rows datasets, and am constrained to Python (mostly by skill, but also by the entire tool stack that the rest of my team uses). How do I make my workflow not suck? Because right now it's an almost daily occurence that I do "pd.read_csv('file.csv')", go for a cup of coffee, and come back to a dead kernel because Pandas tried to load it all into RAM and never managed to. And if lo-and-behold it managed to ingest the file and create a dataframe, anything I do to it like basic loc's or pivots/reshaping runs the same risk and also takes mindboggling amounts of runtime.
I heard a lot about Arrow/PyArrow, but IDK if it's workable already. I also tried Modin, but my laptop got hot enough that I couldn't comfortably keep my hands on the keyboard, and froze dead after a few operations, to the point I had to do a hard reboot.
Reposting from the mid-week open thread where I received some great ideas, but I'd also like to see what the Sunday crowd says.
I've been introspecting into my ADHD for years now and have a decent model for it. Basically, the "task switcher" part of my brain is very low level and largely subconscious. It switches focus between things so quickly and subtly that I often don't notice; being in a car with me as I mumble through my train of thought is surreal.
Using Kaj Sotala's Multiagent Models of Mind sequence, I envision my task switcher as accepting or rejecting bids from various subagents to change what I'm doing, using expected value. But, ADHD means the expected values are all screwed up! "Good" stuff is much lower value than it should be, stuff that's great today turns blah tomorrow (I get bored of stuff easily), and even if I'm bored to tears of whatever I'm doing now, very little is compelling enough to make the switch.
Let's say I want to do the dishes, for instance. I send a bid to the task switcher, which looks at the expected value table, where washing dishes or having clean dishes isn't very rewarding in expectation. It rejects the bid. I perceive this as my brain just not doing the thing, even as I get frustrated and miserable. Why is the expected reward so low? I could write about dopamine, but I hear that's getting discredited in the ADHD community, so I'm kinda at a loss.
You may rightly ask about medication, and I'd love to try it, but I have a cardiac issue. Mild tachycardia which is normally fine, if a bit bothersome, but I'd imagine that stimulants would make it worse, or lead to complications down the road as my heart spends decades beating too fast. Plus, I guess I have wild blood pressure spikes when I'm stressed out. I once got a 179 diastolic in the dentist's chair before they even did anything. I tried atomoxetine and guanfacine; the former gave me worse tachycardia, and the latter didn't really do anything.
My question to you: what can be done to modify the reward table? What can be done to make the brain believe that a task is actually rewarding? If the answer is "you can't", please tell me so I can at least get rid of this doubt.
“ delete all comments below maybe what the 33rd percentile comment in a non-Challenge-Mode thread would be.”
This is going to be a bit hard to judge well. I wasn’t sure you even were reading all the comments.
It’s also going to delete follow on comments, which might aggravate more people than the ones with the disappearing posts. Might be worth a try for a week or two though.
re: The Demise of OkC. Everyone I’ve ever talked to that used that site in its heyday is similarly upset about how awful it is now. I’m probably not the only one looking for a suitable replacement. The “date me?” docs or google forms people in this broader community seem to like writing are the current spiritual successors as far as I can tell -- the documents to write long-form content about yourself, and the forms to gather information about others (okay, maybe Aella was mostly using that for her nifty stats projects since she had an existing and... *enthusiastic* audience to sample from, but I’m taken to believe she got at least a few worthwhile dates out of them?). The magic of OkC was putting these together and bundling in the network effect, which is where the current, decentralized “maybe a popular rat-adjacent blogger can signal boost me” leaves a lot to be desired. This all makes me think that there’s an addressable market out there, even if not through a typical “swipey-swipey” dating app in the post-Tinder world. I’d like a good ‘ol website to do that on.
Those are my thoughts anyway. I hope somebody takes on the problem again someday soon (sadly, my tech skills are not the right kind for this).
Britain is possibly the world’s most famous monarchy. Maybe less well known is the decade it spent as a republic after executing Charles I. Executing the king had never been the plan and for the next decade Britain struggled to try to find a way to make it all work. A revolution in a deeply conservative country. Anna Keay was a great guest on the podcast. Subscribers to this blog may particularly enjoy the story of the scientist William Petty (google him - amazing guy). And Anna has a beautiful English accent of the kind so loved by Americans! Can’t recommend Anna or her book The Restless Republic highly enough.
I really like new substack app (especially on iPad). It’s great for keeping track of read and unread posts. My biggest pain point is that there’s no “download for offline” feature. I love reading my substacks when flying for example. The app at least keeps the text but loses any images or embedded tweets. This can have varying importance depending on the content. Sometimes I can load the full post whilst on Wi-Fi and then the images stay loaded when offline, my success with this has been spotty. If anyone can escalate to the substack team it would be greatly appreciated, it seems like a small fix!
What do you think the effects are of the large number of different strains of Christianity?
Given the huge number of doctrinal issues that various churches might disagree on, i suspect that most people's understanding of, and beliefs about "what christians believe" is calibrated to whichever strain of Christianity most was predominant where they were.
What kind of second order effects does this have?
When Neal DeGrasse tyson says, "even the pope believes in evolution, can you even get more christian than the pope?", for example, i found myself surprised/not surprised. The rough impression i have is that the simpler an idea, the more likely it is to go viral, for example. So what i would expect is that most people have no idea how much complexity goes into the thinking of someone like Aquinas, or the continuity between classical thinkers like Socrates. From what I understand, catholicism has tried to walk this really fine line between 'the hereafter is what really matters', but 'this life matters as well.' It makes me think catholicism is an anti-meme which is more easily outcompeted by simpler belief systems.
I do note that very few top level posts are of horrible quality, even if they garner no replies. More often when (we) members of the commentariat post crap comments, they are nearly always in response, and frequently as part of a downward escalating spiral.
I would like to note that David Freman does a repeatly decent job of disagreeing strongly but politely.
Just voicing a bunch of support for this Challenge Mode experiment (and doing so here, since a vague "yay X" comment might not make the bar on Wednesday!). I'm a fan of easy-to-access wide open content spaces, but there are already plenty of those, and the environment of "someone with good taste ruthlessly culls every subpar comment" is much harder to find and so correspondingly more valuable to have around on the margin IMO. Much like Groucho Marx didn't actually say, I can't wait for this club to be good enough that I don't qualify as a member.
I'm not opposed to the idea of challenge mode but I think if you're going to do it you should pick examples, both long and short, of opening comments and replies you consider good and would like to see more of. Otherwise you're just asking commenters to guess what you think is valuable.
More broadly, I think your previous blog had a fairly high quality comment section though not without issues. However, your commenters got mixed in with the Substack median which caused a reversion to the internet mean.
Hi everyone, I'm collecting examples of stupid byzantine rules from the workplace for my book on Discretion (I want to argue that we need to build more of it into rules, not less). Examples like this I've gotten from real life: a librarian whose rule it was to collect library and driver's license numbers for late returns, which were then thrown into the trash because they were collecting too much information to do anything with. A rule against ordering from Starbucks as a supplier for coffee for work events, with the exception for Starbucks coffee that was supplied by a two approved suppliers. Any you have from your life I'd appreciate permission to use for the book. Thanks for those who submitted in previous open thread.
In Challenge Mode, how often are the 33rd&below comments going to be deleted? Is it within 5 minutes of posting, every hour on the hour, once at the 18-hour mark, etc? Knowing this will help me informally make odds that a comment I just read won’t be there later today/tomorrow/etc. Or will the timing be at Scott’s discretion?
Anyone here have experience with POTS (tachycardia)? The wife who is a super low anxiety person recently came down with it out of the blue. No new stresses, actually pretty low stress time in an overall low stress life. Beta blockers have been helping, but as with most “syndromes” kind of frustrating for an otherwise super healthy person to come down with weird illness at 38 and for there not to be a clear physical cause. At first they thought it was for sure heart valve issues, but that has been ruled out.
Luckily her case seems pretty mild, but any advice is appreciated. Seems kind of related to the past discussions around historic fainting sickness among women and such, but I don’t think that type of social contagion is what is going on here.
I'm interested in the total number of votes cast for each party in the US midterms, for both the Senate and the House. Breakdowns by state and district are readily available, but I'm not interested enough to compile the totals myself.
Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks!
To everyone here who was long on Crypto, especially via FTX, my condolences.
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/09/binance-walks-away-from-ftx-deal-wsj/
Note that this is unlikely, maybe 5-10% chance tops, but because we live in the stupidest timeline there is a case to be made that Dems win the House and Rs win the Senate.
Gentlemen! All this discussion about politics, and yet none of you saw fit to tell me about Thomas Jefferson's mammoth cheese? A cheese that was given a room of its own in the White House, and guests were conducted there to view it? Partisan cheese that had no Federalist cow involved in its manufacture?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrKafmzGNJc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheshire_Mammoth_Cheese
"The Cheshire Mammoth Cheese was a gift from the town of Cheshire, Massachusetts to President Thomas Jefferson in 1802. The 1,235-pound (560 kg) cheese was created by combining the milk from every cow in the town, and made in a makeshift cheese press to handle the cheese's size. The cheese bore the Jeffersonian motto "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."
...Given the political landscape of the time, there was a fear that the more Republican Jefferson, considered an "infidel of the French Revolutionary school," would harm the religious interests of the citizenry, and that "the altars of New England would be demolished, and all their religious institutions would be swept away by an inrushing and irresistible flood of French infidelity."
One pastor in Cheshire, Elder John Leland, opposed this line of thought. A beleaguered minority in Calvinist New England, the Baptists were perhaps the strongest advocates in the early republic of the separation of church and state. Leland had met Jefferson during his time in Virginia and the two grew to have a friendly relationship. Leland remembered this as he served in Cheshire, and campaigned strongly for Jefferson.
Leland, believing that his efforts helped Jefferson win the Presidency, encouraged his townspeople to make a unique gesture to Jefferson. He urged each member of his congregation "who owned a cow to bring every quart of milk given on a given day, or all the curd it would make, to a great cider mill..." Leland also insisted that "no Federal cow" (a cow owned by a Federalist farmer) be allowed to offer any milk, "lest it should leaven the whole lump with a distasteful savour."
Tooting my own horn a little bit, wrote about how SBF is a tribalism litmus test for EA https://sergey.substack.com/p/sbf-is-a-tribalism-litmus-test-for
NOTE: I say 'correct or incorrect' for percentage predictions, as most folks made 1-2 predictions, so there's no useful calibration to do. This required reducing them to a binary, e.g. 60% chance of X, if X didn't happen is recorded as incorrect.
Okay, so we’re still early, but let’s take a quick look at the midterm predictions from last thread and earlier:
Starting with my own predictions:
“I'd predict 60% chance that the polls have not been fixed and are still undercounting Republican voters,”
This looks to have been wrong. We’ll know more later, but this looks basically in line with the polling, so far.
“However, the Republican senate candidates appear sort of disastrously bad, so I'd also say there's a 60% chance the Democrats keep the Senate.”
Uncertain, but looks right so far.
Argentus:
“Something like 80% chance the Repubs win the House.”
Uncertain, but appears almost certainly correct.
“I think something like 50% chance Repubs win the Senate, 20% Dems win it, and 30% they tie.”
Uncertain, but looks like we’re falling in the last two boxes.
Yug Gnibrob:
“I predict a surprise victory for Elvis Presley in at least three races.”
Everything hasn’t been called yet, so still possible. Also, amusing.
Carl Pham:
“I'm expecting an epic Democratic wipeout.”
Incorrect.
Note, Deisach responded to this, but I couldn’t pull a concrete prediction out of it, so much as a description of the options.
Education Realist:
Begins with a reference to conventional wisdom which appears likely to be wrong, but I don’t think that was their prediction? Feel free to jump in if I misunderstood.
“I think there's a 40% chance the Senate stays tied ,which was all the GOP could hope for six months ago, but would now be the downside.”
Uncertain, but looks like it may be tied.
“There's an enormous likelihood--not a 60% chance but closer to 90%--that the polls are understating GOP support.”
Uncertain, but looks incorrect? Just like for me, it looks like polls did significantly better this time.
Axioms:
“On the upside for them Fetterman had a stroke but on the downside the Trump endorsed candidate is so widely hated he is still gonna lose.”
Correct. Fetterman won.
“I'd say 53-54 Senate seats for Dems.”
Incorrect.
“The House is 60-40 and I expect the majority for either side to be like 10 tops.”
Unclear wording, but I think this was saying 60-40 in favor of Democrat victory, based on the above predictions. If so, uncertain, but appears likely to be incorrect, current projection is R-224, D-211, but this is obviously in flux.
Paul Botts:
Agreed with my predictions, then added “I'd say the GOP has around a 2 in 3 chance of gaining a House majority but most likely a narrow one.”
Appears correct, though not certain yet and depends a bit on definition of narrow. It’s projected to be broader than the current D one, but not by much.
Other predictions.
Matt Yglesias final (https://www.slowboring.com/p/pre-registering-some-takes-on-the):
“10 percent chance that Democrats gain one or more Senate seats
20 percent chance that there is net zero change of seats.
30 percent chance that Republicans gain net one seat.
20 percent chance that Republicans gain net two seats.
20 percent chance that Republicans gain net three or more seats.”
Too early to tell, but it appears we’re likely to be in the top two boxes.
AstralCodexTen prediction markets (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-248):
“Polymarket, Manifold, and PredictIt now have shiny interfaces for predicting the upcoming US midterm elections. In terms of the Republicans taking the Senate, Polymarket is at 65%, Manifold at 58%, PredictIt at 73%, and 538 at 49%.”
Uncertain, but it appears this is not likely to happen.
Vox and AstralCodexTen and Matt Yglesias, earlier (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22824620/predicting-midterms-covid-roe-wade-oscars-2022 https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/predictions-for-2022-contest https://www.slowboring.com/p/predictions-are-hard) :
Democrats will lose their majorities in the House and Senate.
Vox: 95%
Scott: 90%
Matt: 90%
Uncertain, but it appears this is not likely to happen.
Democrats lose at least two Senate seats
Matt/Scott: 80%
Appears almost certainly wrong.
Democrats lose fewer than six Senate seats
Matt/Scott: 80%
Correct.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh7oPAZH4yY&fbclid=IwAR0GR-MsQV2Q0fFVLpfiPxJ9hr5YyRKOvHcmrLLhCViGQ4SsqIiPVoooMLk
To tell you the absolute truth, this video about why it makes sense to cook a turkey in pieces got a lot more response than why there wasn't violence at the polls.. Possibly of interest to rationalists because it's an example of goal factoring-- is that Norman Rockwell image of bringing a whole turkey to the table and carving it worth it compared to having a turkey cook faster and the ability to cook dark meat and light meat separately?
People were worried about violence at the polls. It didn't happen. Any theories?
Was the possibility of violence actually a matter of excessive concern about some people who were talking big? This might have an implication that Republicans are less violent than Democrats expect.
As a rough estimate, there are some 75 million Republicans in the US. If as little as one in a million of them had chosen violence yesterday, it would have been a very bad day.
Was the punishment of January 6 rioters enough to get potentially violent people to think hard about whether they wanted to wreck their lives?
I don't believe there could have been adequate protection against violence at polling places to have prevented a determined attempt.
I've posted this to Facebook, and haven't gotten very interesting replies, though one person mentioned significant police at their polling place, and another claimed that violence at the polls has been predicted for years (possibly decades) but never happens.
I'm hoping for some discussion about what went wrong with the prediction, and by that, I mean something more sophisticated that the left generally gets things wrong.
So previously I predicted that the polls would lean suddenly rightward leading up the election, and that there would be a general right-wing victory.
So I got the first part right, but I'd say my prediction overall was wrong. And even if I do end up getting the second part right, at this point, it will be by accident rather than good planning, because looking at the little data that is coming in - it looks like young people actually voted.
I, uh, didn't expect that. And I'm pretty sure neither did the pollsters. Because I'm reasonably certain what will come out in short order is exactly my mistake: A misallocation of likely voters as we approached the election.
I think it comes down to that abortion was enough to bridge some of the enthusiasm gap, but we'll see.
That's all, really. Got a thing wrong, here's why I think I got it wrong, in case any of you find that helpful.
Legal question: A friend of mine recently took the LSAT, but on the day scores were released he received, instead of a score, a notice saying that the LSAT companied believed he had cheated, & were investigating the situation, and it might be up to 4 months til he learned the outcome. If they conclude he cheated he will not be allowed to take the LSAT again. Friend has learned from an online forum for LSAT-takers that LSAT never shares info about why they suspect cheating, and how they arrived at ultimate conclusion that person was guilty or not guilty.
So my question: Can this possibly be legal? My friend did not cheat, and if testing company decides he did and locks him out of taking LSAT again his life & life plans will be greatly damaged. The only forms of cheating that are possible could not be proven through viewings of the video of his taking the exam -- at most a viewer might see something that would make them suspect cheating. It seems to me it should at least be possible to insist that my friend be allowed to retake the exam under conditions where whatever form of cheating they suspect could not possibly be carried out -- let's say in some setting where his pockets or whatever are checked beforehand & someone sits in the room watching him the whole time he's taking the test. Those of you who understand the legal issues here: Do you agree it would be possible legally to force the test company to allow a re-take of this kind?
A couple additional details: My friend took several old versions of the LSAT in prep for taking the real thing, and got perfect scores on some and near-perfect on the rest, so it is likely that he achieved the same on the actual test. It seems likely that the testing company would be particularly suspicious of someone who scored a perfect 180, and we suspect that's why he is now under investigation. That's understandable, but this sure is shabby treatment of someone who worked hard to prepare, then managed to do better than 99.9% of the other test-takers.
FYI Scott, your Moloch article links to http://raikoth.net/libertarian.html however the domain has been squatted, so the link took me to a “you have won a Samsung phone” page. I am guessing you know, and that maintaining old links is a burden, but just in case you didn’t! Cheers
Any predictions for what's likely to happen in Kherson?
My assumption is that the Russians are Up to Something, but what?
So today is election day. Some people are gonna look smart and some will look very foolish. Hard to say who is who right now. Some very weird stuff going on this election. Win or lose I'm ready to be done, though. Election day is gonna suck for me regardless cause I have some weird jaw pain that is not going away. Well unless I chug Tylenol. Florida is look pretty rough in the EDay vote but old Republicans vote early in Miami so it doesn't say a ton yet.
Any recommendations for interesting an entertaining stories/books/videos/movies where the protagonist has a strong sense of duty? Deontological ethics are pretty far from the mind of the average teenager, I find...
Throwaway account to comment on my ban, it's easy to guess which one of those banned was my main.
The reason I do this is *not* to go full troll and flagrantly disrespect your, Scott's, dominion. I have a lot of respect for you, which is precisely why I write this feedback. The issues of moderation and bannning seems to be "in the air" and on your mind recently with your recent posts and the twitter buyout playing out, so I sought to offer you the (as far as I know) unique perspective of someone you banned. No part of this should ever be construed as me bargaining or asking for an account unban.
1- The most puzzling thing about this for me is why now? 2 months is a really long time for me, is it not for everybody ?
This is relevant because fast enforcement of rules is good.
1-a- From the point of view of the banned, it feels unfair (an entirely different thing from actually being unfair) to come after me after I have cooled off. If you have banned me in the 5-10 days interval after posting that rant, I would still be pissed, but hey, I had it coming. While not exactly a pleasant analogy, imagine this a fist fight. I throw a punch and you come at me 6 hours later with a bunch of your friends and give me a piece of your mind, harsh but fair. But I throw a punch and you come at me 2 months later ? Hmmmmm.
1-b- If you don't give a flying heck about the banned, (some of) the rest of your community is probably latching on bannings as a useful signal. It's a bit like how programmers learn a new programming language : write what they think to be a valid program, throw it at a program responsible for saying what's a valid program, and recieve yelling in return about why this is not - in fact - a valid program. Rinse and repeat till no yelling. Back to the object level : the programmers here are the commenteriats. The programs are the comments. And you're the oracle responsible for saying which programs are valid and which are nonsense. A 2-month-long feedback cycle is degrading this useful signal by a whole amount of a lot. Is this intentional so people spend more time thinking about what to write instead of just hitting 'post' and seeing what happens ?
2- The particular comment you banned contains, right after downthread, a semi-apology to the person who reported me, which he semi-accepted by replying back in kind. I don't want a cookie for this, but it feels like it should count for something. Apologies are hard, they are costly, they contain tacit admissions of a lot of bad things about the one apologizing. To put that in the most transactional and entitled way possible : What did my softened tone later in that thread buy me ? Is the answer nothing ? *Should* the answer be nothing ? Gradients are lovely, they allow you to be mostly wrong but still make progress. 0/1 kindness may be hard for me towards a particular class of people, it would be cool if I can be mean then retract and make amends later.
3- This is simply a matter of perception, but I can't shake the feeling that you're biased in favor of you-know-who. This is probably wrong, but wrong perceptions still can and indeed does affect conversations. There is a very easy solution for this : pick the most anti-you-know-who person that have ever anti-you-know-who-ed in your close circle, and make them responsible for the final green light on a random 50% of the people you intend to ban.
4- There is something awefully school-principal-like and preachy about posting the names of the banned. What purpose does it serve ? The message "A lot of people were banned, tread carefully" can equally be sent by stating the number of bans, not the actual names. If the content of the comments serve as a useful signal (as in 1-b-), then maybe you can just copy paste it into a pastebin or a github repo without the name attached. I'm not "ashamed" of my comment, I just object to the forced-group-consensus aspect of highlighting the badness of my comment as if it was a fact or an uncontroversial example to be heeded.
To temper this very tame criticism, I reacted positively to you banning the comment that directly insulted an actual person, and not the comment that just said a bunch of very naughty words that a bunch of you-know-whos said shouldn't be said. It might be a minuscule thing, it might have been entirely a noise artifact that I'm reading weird things into, but it really proves for me that you take moderation seriously as a tool to make the prisoner's dilemma of internet conversations bend more towards cooperation, rather than merely a synonym for "a button I can use to efficiently shutdown people I don't want to speak". Moderation Is Different From Censorship indeed.
I like your moderation, Scott, and I like you in general, and I learn(t) a lot of things from reading you think about conflict-resolution, free speech, governance and whatnot. 1..4 are just "UX" issues that I think it would benefit you greatly and the community to think more about.
Here's the SQLite blessing :
> May you do good and not evil.
> May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
> May you share freely, never taking more than you give.
Have a great (*Checks California time*) afternoon.
Here's an interesting video about the 1975 Helsinki Accords, and their status as an earnestly agreed-upon framework for peace in Europe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdKmOGMrzuM
But all of that went away with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Whatever replaces the Helsinki Accords, formally or de facto, Europe is in a new world now.
Here's an additional reason to make some effort to trim back the number of post: This page, which currently has 930 posts, is virtually impossible to use on mobile. Takes more than 60 secs to load. Glitches in weird ways. Would not let me put up a brief post -- just kept telling me, in red type, that "something went wrong." Mmm, thanks, I'd figured that out actually.
Wrote the above on the computer. Approx. 1 minute later page froze for 30 secs or so. Got a notice that "This webpage is using significant energy. Closing it may improve the responsiveness of your Mac." There's also a notable lag when I type into the comment box -- text takes a few seconds to appear. These huge pages seem to be too much for Substack's system.
Does anyone have any good advice on buying cars around the $8k-$10k price point?
I know the used car market is kind of crazy right now, and I'm thankful I won't need to buy a car for 4-6 months, but I've been driving 15 year old Honda Civics for the past 10 years until they literally die on the side of the road. These typically cost $3-$4k. I've saved up ~$10k for a new car and it's hard to see anything worth the effort. In general, for an extra $5-$7k I feel like the options are to buy 10 year old boring Japanese sedan instead of a 15 year old boring Japanese sedan which...doesn't seem right for almost tripling the amount of money I'm willing to spend. I'm seeing something around the $15-$20k mark that look like a significant step up, and I'm capable of buying that, but that's a lot of money to spend on single item I use for mostly practical reasons. Is this just part of being the only weirdo who only pays cash and never takes auto loans?
Am I missing something? Are there makes and models that are fun or...just feel like a step up from a beater Honda around $10k?
Some of the comments about easy jhana make me suspect that some things described as "jhana" are just people pausing to think for the first time in their life.
Ethics question: how evil would it be to develop a payload for a mechanically suitable off-the-shelf remote-control multirotor drone that would enable a remote user to pierce a car or truck tire and render it irreparably leaky?
For numbers, let's say:
* the drone is viably controllable up to a quarter-mile from an off-the-shelf controller station (read: phone or lap, maybe with a radio dongle)
* the drone is not autonomous outside basic flight stability and safety features to other humans, so it has to be guided to a tire and the knife triggered by the user
* the knife can be triggered 4 times per flight
* the drone's battery and knife can be replenished within a minute by the user
* the knife is captive, so it can't hurt anything the drone isn't immediately adjacent to, and magically can't be modified to do otherwise by end users.
* the drone and ground station are readily replaceable for <$10K, so accessible for a small organization or an org with donors, but not a typical individual.
This is prompted by my trying to inhabit the viewpoint of modern dirtbag left activists, such as those who protest by gluing themselves to roads and suchlike.
Factors I can think of offhand:
* This enables grassroots enforcement of no-car, no-truck zones for the anarchistically-inclined
* This makes destruction of property safer for the perpetrator
* This enables wider-scale destruction of property viable for a single user
* The payload designer isn't hard to replace, since the payload is easy to design, but the payload only needs to be designed once and then plans distributed
* Obviously, this makes hit-and-run violence easier and safer, but that rate is already low and dropping, but maybe someone out there is only held back from a spree by having to be present for the attacks in person? If so, why aren't they a sniper on a spree already?
* Once the payload is built, how much harder is making the entire thing autonomous? To the degree of "here's a car-shaped thing, slice the tires"? "Here's a geofenced area, slice the tires of all car-shaped things in it"? "Here's a geofenced area, slice the tires of all cars without a badge"?
I’d like to signal boost the Brad DeLong-Ezra Klein interview. DeLong is sooo right on 99% of what he says that it is sort of scarry to see that much of this is news to Klein.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bradford-delong.html
Re: Jhāna skepticism
I just wrote up some of my thoughts here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/can-we-trust-self-reported-mystical
I've spent a lot of time reading and trying to reproduce different experiences, so I've tried to put together a list of heuristics for evaluating reports. I think our default attitude should be skepticism, but that shouldn't keep us from experimenting.
I bemoan the fact that people here will ask person medical questions, instead of talking to experts.
However, generalized questions of medicine and healthcare are important.
As a cross-pollination:
https://sensiblemed.substack.com/p/experts-vs-practicing-doctors?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
"In other words, the experts used eminence over evidence to make a recommendation. That is dangerous, and we have too much of it in medicine.
The practicing doctors—with their cumulative wisdom—got this one right. DCP proved that their choice of HCTZ was the correct one.
But I hope you know what my next sentence will be.
We should also not trust the collective wisdom of practicing doctors. I’ve discussed many of the colossal errors we’ve made in accepting therapies that ultimately proved ineffective or harmful."
The way forward, so beautifully shown in the DCP trial, is proper randomized trials."
Complicated deletion methods with 33% threshholds have the major effect of avoiding transparency. They let you delete anything you want for any reason you want, nobody can understand exactly why their comments were deleted, nobody can meaningfully dispute it, and whether their comments were deleted can depend on circumstances outside their control (for instance, it means that it is now bad for someone if other people post good comments).
If you want to be able to arbitrarily delete comments, it's your blog, so why not just arbitrarily delete comments? (Note that I'm not saying it's necessarily *good* to do so, just that arbitrary+honest is better than arbitrary+dishonest.)
The same goes for "50% bans". All you're doing is pretending that your arbitrary decisiuon is based on numbers. If your policy is to arbitrarily ban people, at least admit it.
Aruba: Who has been there recently?
I never have, though I considered going there a year ago, but dropped the idea because flights were hotels were so expensive.
I just checked again today, and prices are much lower: $400 round trip flights from the DC area where I live, and as low as $80/night for a decent hotel. This is for a February trip.
What happened? Was Aruba abnormally expensive a year ago, or is it abnormally cheap now?
Ooh, plowable snow in the forecast! I expect I’m going to have the same conversation with Mrs Gunflint where she nags me to buy her a new shovel. Every year it’s the same damn thing.
Does anyone have the link to Deiseach's Rings of Power season finale review?
Steven's awareness recursion method reminds me of the start of Tolle's book The Power of Now:
<<“I cannot live with myself any longer.” This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. "Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the 'I' and the 'self' that 'I' cannot live with.“ ”Maybe,“ I thought, ”only one of them is real." I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words “resist nothing,” as if spoken inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection of what happened after that.>>
Re moderation:
https://gamerant.com/mythic-quest-ravens-banquet-episode-3-review/
I've seen people argue that the "necessary" in true, kind, necessary isn't necessary, but I've got a meaning for it.
Necessary can be interpreted to mean not redundant. If the commenter is saying the same thing a lot of times (an ill-defined standard), the new comment isn't contributing to the discussion.
How well does the colloquial usage of things being 'meant to be' (e.g. "my partner and I were just meant to be") square with the deterministic view of the universe? For some reason they feel like two different things, but I'm having a hard time figuring out why. Is it just that the former usually presents as a non-scientific folk belief, while the latter is espoused by very smart people who've spent years thinking about it?
I notice that "computers" tend to be associated with "math"...but many of the most common pitfalls for the tech-illiterate stem from, well, illiteracy rather than innumeracy. If you can't spell well, search won't work well*; if you're sloppy at composing consistent strings, that just compounds the problem. I suppose it's true that in many regards, the architecture of "how computers think" is math-based, and so that's a more useful lens through which to conceptualize them...the sort of way that I get frustrated by so-called natural language model search algorithms, because I'm used to phrasing queries in bit-comprehensibe ways, regex, etc. (C.f. search apps searching for what it assumes you *really* meant to search for, rather than the actual term as entered.)
But I wonder if it'd be more efficaceous for raising the tech savviness waterline to focus on wordcelling rather than shaperotating. At least, for the median user who doesn't want to think about how computers work, they just want them __to work__. (Sometimes I wonder if this is the real secret behind Apple's historical success, realizing sooner than others who the actual median user was/could be.)
*a particular bother for me working in grocery - it's sometimes embarrassing seeing a no-hits search left open, and boggling at how coworkers or customers think <mildly ethnic food> is spelled...but they can identify the package on sight, no problem.
"I'll delete all comments below maybe what the 33rd percentile comment in a non-Challenge-Mode thread would be."
Do you know about Deming's Red Bead Experiment? (Not actually invented by Deming but used by him to teach how to understand variation and think statistically. See The New Economics (1994)
Here is a alternative version to make a similar point. Suppose you had the subscribers to ACX flip 100 coins and report the amount of heads. And then you banned those with below average heads count. Do you really think that you will have created a better head flipping club?
In writing this comment, it occurs to me that I should refresh my recollection of the history of "the salon" and consider the complications with having a money making operation (your paid subscriptions) tied to the endeavor of ACX.
Does anyone know /
have recommendations for private prediction markets software? Looking for something I can trial with internal teams at the office.
Almost all modern TV series I can think of do parallel plot threads, i.e. Two Lines, No Waiting or more https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TwoLinesNoWaiting. Is there a modern, popular TV series where we just follow one single protagonist the entire series?
Anyone know a great model of flip phone? I'd like to de-smartphone for attention and time management reasons, but ideally retain decent photo and emoji texting abilities, maybe navigation too.
It's surprisingly hard to find a decent dumb phone.
I find it strange no one asked it before (or at least I missed it if someone did) but isn't jhana basiclly just extreme mastubration?
My friend is developing a new predictions market platform that's more point and shoot than the usual. His first product is basically a March Madness bracket for the Senate elections on Tuesday. He's looking for early users and I figure this might be a good group. Feel free to join my league or better yet, make your own! It's still in beta so it's a little buggy but it should work.
https://clickandpredict.com/my-leagues/9aa0044f-1aa3-45bd-93b1-e4e69887e1ec
Is it possible to be fine for years and then suddenly have ADHD?
I really don't remember having problems as a kid into high school but now find it absolutely impossible to focus as a college sophomore.
For those who are interested in prediction markets this year, the PredictIt market for Nevada was an absolutely brain melting 80/20 for Adam Laxalt. Until Jon Ralston posted his Nevada predictions roughly 30 minutes ago after which point there was a swing of 25% to 67/33. This swing is ongoing. And anyone who actually followed the ballot updates for Nevada saw this coming a mile away. But when you want something to be a specific way you interpret the ambiguous data in your favor. Motivated reasoning.
Does anyone know if there are guidelines for what is meant by low quality posts/can provide a good summary of what “high quality” posts have? ls the metric strictly insightful thoughts here, or is there some level of clarity/grammar, logic, ethos, or demonstration of knowledge that is being accounted for? Do expressions of sheer goodwill or enthusiasm for a topic make the cut?
I recently started started re-reading Gödel-Escher-Bach after about 3 years. I never finished it though, I only read approx. 3/4 of the book. The reason being that, to my experience, the book has an immense amount of content to the point that I really start to get lost. I mean you get to a point in which you wonder what the book is even about, but in a beautiful way. Has anyone here had a similar experience? Is there another way to approach this book?
I would very much love to be able to enter a jhana state, preferably without spending months and years of my life on it. I suspect that this should be possible, given that, as an amateur hypnotist, I was able to get more than one willing and receptive subject into a very similar state of absolute bliss/continuous full body orgasm (not sure if there is a difference for AFABs) within a very short time. Sadly, I do not seem to have the ability of being easily hypnotized, at least not from what I have tried, so that route is not promising for me. I wonder if there are other shortcuts that can be explored.
As this is probably the last open thread before the midterms in the US, anyone have good (or bad, we'll know pretty soon) predictions?
I do not have any major insight. I guess I'd predict 60% chance that the polls have not been fixed and are still undercounting Republican voters, which suggests a disaster of Democrats.
However, the Republican senate candidates appear sort of disastrously bad, so I'd also say there's a 60% chance the Democrats keep the Senate.
A few questions I have to the regular commenters here, especially the "EA types":
1 - How come that Betting Markets (at least PredictIt) are favoring the GOP to take both the Senate and the House quite heavily, while polls and early voting data so far paint a much better picture for the Democrats? Which one should the "layperson" trust more? Or is it, as I think, that PredictIt overstates the GOP's chances because of self-selection of the bettors (I.e. Thiel-Style Libertarian/Alt-Righters?)
2 - Would people here consider Robin Hanson to be alt-right? Because recently he seems to be posting quite a few opinion pieces that are very sympathetic to the alt-right...is he on the "libertarian-to-alt-right pipeline like Herr Thiel?
> I‘ll delete all comments below maybe what the 33rd percentile comment in a non-Challenge-Mode thread would be.
Wouldn't it be less labor-intensive just to enable sorting comments by likes? I would love this mode.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/11/03/the-witching-hour/
Given the day, is it ok to link to this excellent old story from SSC?
I am not an American, but watching the upcoming midterm elections from the sidelines feels like a buildup to a calamity, were this a TV show. With the most sane Republican being Liz Cheney, and most of the rest being 2020 election denialists and proponents of a nationwide abortion ban, the Dems' progressives (AOC, Warren, Sanders etc.) sliding ever further into commie think ("Billionaires bad!") and anti-tech, and the center either non-existent or extremely uninspiring on ether side, the odds of a post-election conflict worse than Jan 6 seem unnervingly high. And yet, I don't see much in terms of alarm bells going off, so maybe I am missing something here.
Re Intelligence II: I am of a logical bent so this question drawn from R.J. Sternberg, a very big name in intelligence studies, appeals to me:
"You are at a party of truth-tellers and liars. The truth-tellers always tell the truth, and the liars always lie. You meet someone new. He tells you that he just heard a conversation in which a girl said she was a liar. Is the person you met a liar or a truth-teller?
Well logically the answer should come swiftly, but there's a problem with the question and the higher your Intelligence the more likely you will answer "incorrectly"
Whatever happened to transhumanism?
Back in the 90s and early 2000s, many of the sorts of people who would nowadays be Internet Rationalists (indeed, many of the exact same people) were instead Transhumanists, or even Extropians. They would talk optimistically about how technologies like AI, uploading, cryonics, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and so forth would lead to a wonderful singularity, and they would boo-hiss against luddites like Bill Joy who wanted to shut down nanotechnology research for fear of gray goo. I lurked on those sorts of mailing lists back in the day, and I imagine some other people here did too.
What happened to all of that? Many of the same people are still kicking around, but the optimism is all gone. Most of the technologies that used to be discussed on those lists are now dismissed by the same sorts of people as pipe dreams, except for AI which is now more feared than celebrated. The Singularity is no longer celebrated as some kind of Rapture For Nerds in which we all get to live forever, but is feared as a world-ending kaboom where everything becomes paperclips. I just checked and extropy.org is still up (but advertising a conference in 2007) and https://www.aleph.se/Trans/ is still up but doesn't seem to have changed either.
What happened to all of that? I miss the techno-utopianism of those days, even if a lot of it was a bit crazy.
Has anyone here successfully studied themselves as a data point of ONE, to lose weight or improve on some health measure, by trying different things, keeping intelligent notes, and seeing what works for you?
If so, how did you do it?
I'm looking for guidance. Thanks.
> I’m limited to Substack’s features
I imagine Scott could ask Substack to implement such an option and also recommend to other people to do the same. One person asking probably won't do much, but after several people asking it might actually get onto the roadmap.
I have recently watched this 30 minute video with John Oliver where, according to the YouTube description, he "explains what critical race theory is, what it isn’t, and why we can expect to hear more about it in the coming months". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EICp1vGlh_U
Now maybe I wasn't paying enough attention, but I do not remember any part where he explained what CRT actually *is*. It seemed to me like he just spent all that time making fun of people who oppose the idea. I am being unfair here? If you think so, could you please give me the timestamp of the actual explanation in that video?
I have previously watched his explanation of the dialysis industry, which in my opinion was well done. Not sure how fair it was, but at least it felt like someone was *explaining* nontrivial things to me, and making a few jokes along the way. So I clicked to another recommended video, expecting a comparable quality... and was disappointed.
I just had some exemplary customer service from HP, and there are a couple of policies I recommend in general. One is that they asked me at the beginning what I'd already tried. This is great. I'd already done a number of the usual things.
They gave me a service ticket, so that if the chat ended (it did), we didn't have to start from scratch. (I'm looking at you, LabCorps.)
These are simple, objective policies. The more complex part is hiring smart people and giving them enough time to do a good job.
The specific issue is a paper feed problem in an Envy 6000 printer, and I can post details if anyone cares. HP didn't solve the problem, but they're sending me a replacement printer.
There are many movies depicting the evils of Nazi regime; for example "Schindler's List". Are the similar movies depicting the evils of Communist regime? If you know them, please post names.
To explain my criteria:
I want movies containing stories, not mere documentaries. Movies based on real characters or events are okay, of course.
I want the movie to show the suffering of people living in the regime. Can be the average people, or can be people who were especially persecuted e.g. because of their faith. (Not outsiders fighting against the regime, e.g. Rambo.) It must be the regime that initiates violence against the protagonist.
Looking through the bans, the PEG one seems unnecessary. It highlighted that one man's deeply rooted belief is another man's absurdity, and that some such beliefs are labelled religion, while others are labelled "science" or "reality." It was not particularly polite, but describing reality without sharing someone's dogmas often seems impolite. The reality of a trans existence becomes "magic," just as a god becomes a "sky daddy."
The Bernard Gress ban also seems excessive, although less so. Sure it is grating, but I think in general it is worth it to lower the average quality of comments while raising the variance in their content. So although the comment didn't elaborate, it did provide an alternative perspective and was not overly offensive.
Obviously, any comment that would result in a user ban wouldn't be a great comment, I just don't personally think those two warranted bans.
Conversely, the Descriptor and Impassionata ones seemed more overtly hostile, and seemingly ban-worthy.
The Machine Interface one seems difficult to understand. He was accused of "Attacking other commenters, falsely accusing them of ideas they don't believe." But he cited exact quotes from the user that said precisely what he accused him of. Letting other users know what sort of stuff a user has written so they can choose to engage with them or not seems helpful and productive - certainly not banworthy.
I find myself often thinking about situations/topics where reasonable and smart people seem to hold two contradictory opinions at the same time. I'll give two examples of the kind of topics I have in mind:
1) The limit/existence of human agency. I think most people who don't ascribe to the notion of a soul think that our actions are for the most part pre-determined (putting aside any quantum shenanigans). Here I have in mind the kind of people who are influenced by things like The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel, and who believe that our actions are some function of our society, culture, upbringing, genetics, etc. and are not determined by our personal "will". At the same time, very few of these individuals will apply this logic to situations that are far uglier. In those cases, the language used implies that certain individuals involved could have acted otherwise if they just wanted to enough.
2) The objectivity/subjectivity of art. For many people the language they use when describing movies/paintings/books/games they like implies that there is some objective way to grade these things. They'll say stuff like "x is a masterpiece" or "y is a very good movie". Yet, if you push them enough, or if they don't enjoy something that is generally well-received by critics, they jump to a subjective view of art. They'll then say stuff like "there's no such thing as 'good' art, it's a matter of taste and taste is relative".
I think a common thread across these situations is that our reasoning really clashes with our intuitions. If we think about the nature of the universe, it seems very likely that our actions are determined but it definitely doesn't feel that way. Similarly, when I watch a really good movie I feel that it's objectively good, but I have a hard time making a coherent theory of aesthetics to justify my feelings. If anyone has any thoughts on scenarios like this, or any links to share, they would be well appreciated.
Does anyone else feel like it’s later than it is?
In the US, excluding Arizona.
> In a Challenge Mode Open Thread, I‘ll delete all comments below maybe what the 33rd percentile comment in a non-Challenge-Mode thread would be.
Fair enough. Only ... this means I won't ever see what fell below your threshold (until it happens to me), and I won't be able to adjust my own calibration accordingly. This is also true more broadly: folks won't see what counts as not accepted.
I don't have a good solution though. In general just deleting those comments sounds nicer than the alternatives.
I miss the hidden open threads. Much fewer number to read, and I could ask more intimate/ personal questions... which I don't feel as comfortable doing on the open threads. More comments is more noise.
Oh, I'd also approve of a rule that says each person can only start one new thread, though they can comment on other threads as much as they wanted.
Are there any ACX community in Lyon, France?
What are the current options for a barely responsible wannabe pharmacist who's trying to lose weight? Something not as lethal as DNP but not as ineffective as moderate exercise.
After being aggravated by too many bad press releases* about epigenetic inheritance, I've decided to write a post series explaining how epigenetics really works. The first post, which covers the basics of epigenetic marks, is here: https://denovo.substack.com/p/what-is-epigenetics
Later posts will cover the epigenetics of the mammalian germline, and why transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in mammals is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
*Like this one, which tries to apply a result about C. elegans sperm to humans, when they're extremely different biologically: https://news.ucsc.edu/2022/09/epigenetic-inheritance.html
Re Intelligence: I always scored high on standardized testing, always in the top 2 percentile, both in childhood, college and army. So in Stanford Binet, Weshler Bellevue, SATs, NMSQT, AFQT (armed forces qualifications test) I did really well, but the deck was always stacked in my favor: culturally, not being test shy (my father was part of mid-century IPAT and we faculty children took LOTS of standardized tests), tests giving alot of weight to verbal ability (I was an early and lifelong reader), etc. So it wasn't too surprising I did well.
But my supposed "intelligence" was a peculiar kind: a general rapidity of response and quick learning in some areas, total bafflement in others. It was very quick to move laterally, not so good at in depth analyticity. So high test IQ perhaps but not translating all that well to real world abilities. I am left with a measure of skepticism of IQ tests as predictors of real world success
Kind of an open-ended question, but- does anyone respect 'exercise science' as being even halfway to a real scientific discipline at all? I'd be particularly interested in hearing from people coming from the actual hard sciences.
Originally I was going to ask a more specific exercise science question- how credible is the evidence that doing random exercises 'explosively' increases one's speed or explosiveness *at a totally different athletic maneuver*. Examples would include the idea that performing Olympic weightlifting exercises, like say a power clean, would then translate to increased speed and/or explosiveness in a completely unrelated movement- say, an American football tackle, high jump, or baseball or golf swing. The supposed idea is that doing one activity fast (power cleans) makes you faster at something unrelated (a golf swing).
Personally, this sounds like not just absolute pseudoscience, but is veering into sympathetic magic. Doing one thing fast makes you faster at something else- performing the rain dance makes it rain. But then I realized that this is basically a tenet of modern exercise science and has been for a couple of decades, which lead to the question 'is exercise 'science' a real science or can we completely ignore stuff that sounds like sympathetic magic'.
I mean, as Scott has noted previously, there's lots of studies 'proving' that homeopathy works too, but we can safely ignore them. Does anyone respect exercise science?
Edit to include: Pseudoscientific frauds within the exercise science industry, just in the last 20 years, include cupping, KT tape, compression pants, applied kinesiology, magnet therapy, cryotherapy, and dry needling. All were promoted by some exercise 'scientist' or another- all are fake. You can see why this makes one skeptical of the field in general, no?
I'm currently offering services as a research assistant for $20/hr! Any literature review you want performed or general questions you have I will do my best to answer. CV and work samples available upon request!
Repeating my comment from the jhana thread as it didn't get any replies:
Like several others, I experienced *something* from trying the "are you aware?" shortcut (having almost never meditated before), and it seems to be reproducible.
I don't know whether it's a jhana or not (or maybe some sort of partial jhana or step on the way). I would describe it as pleasurable, but not supremely blissful, and not better than sex. It's like a fizzy, excited, expansive feeling in my chest and throat - a little bit like being wired on caffeine. It's definitely more of a physical sensation than an emotional state.
I'd be interested to hear from people who have experienced jhana about whether or not this is similar to what they experience.
The news reports I have seen of the 150 or so crowd surge deaths in Korea suggest authorities haven't yet identified any trigger for the panic.
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/01/1133039658/south-koreas-prime-minister-and-police-admit-failures-leading-to-halloween-trage
If there really wasn't one, then I suppose this crush and panic was a spontaneous phenomenon caused by general crowding, sort of like phantom traffic jams.
https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/what-are-phantom-traffic-jams.html
Any other theories?
Healthy mental states from physical suffering. I was musing on it the other night, commuting home by bike in an early taste of winter, thinking about how, in a strange way, I am looking forward to the depths of winter. There's a strong NW wind that blows in off Siberia and China (I live in Korea) as part of a weather pattern that drops the temperature way below freezing, and I have a 25 km (15 miles) ride home into the teeth of it at times. I characterize it as being good for the soul--good for the metaphysical self I guess--and it's something David Goggins talks about often. Anyone else value the mental state that comes of suffering physically?
Speaking as a recently warned poster, the moderation policy here is not based around what posters want or are OK with, but what Scott wants his own comment section to be. Fair enough.
I'm new to substacks as such, where can I view rules for this blog?
Would like an outside perspective on this idea: I weight the upper bounds of what is possible for a super intelligence to achieve based on the Fermi Paradox. Looking for hole pokes, other than
Some examples below as to what conclusions /questions this leads me to.
If paper clip maximizers were possible and inevitable on an intergalactic scale wouldn’t I be able to see a large portion of the sky as paper clips? What could the paper clips of the things that I do see and why isn’t the universe homogenous?
This in general leads me to strongly fall into the camp of weak orthogonality. I think maybe you can build something able to simultaneously 1. Want 2. Achieve 3. Self Propagating enough to paper clip maximize your solar system but probably not you galaxy or your universe. My guess is that it would evolve itself out of the maximalist position fairly quickly on cosmic time scales.
"Lazarus(I assume he'll return)"
I see what you did there.
One interesting phenomenon right now with the midterms is that betting markets all seem to rate the Republicans much more highly than 538 does. (eg giving them about 70-80% chance of taking senate, vs 538 saying its a toss up).
Based on past performance I feel like there is a pretty high bar to saying that you are smarter than 538. So is this all dumb money? Or is there some good reason to think so? ("polls get it wrong" is insufficient since 538 already models the relative accuracy of pollsters and considers other factors)
https://interessant3.substack.com/
I write a newsletter where I post three things I find interesting, once a week.
I've decided to supplement NAD+ but am confused about Nicotinamide riboside and Liposomal NAD+.
Which is more effective and which is cheaper for its effect?
Does anyone have more insight into that?
Liposomal NAD+ comes in 750 mg pills (500 mg + 250 mg Trimethylglycine) for ~30 cents per pill.
Nicotinamide riboside comes in 300 mg pills for $1+ per pill.
(prices from amazon)
Sources I consulted for NAD+:
Reprogramming to recover youthful epigenetic information and restore vision: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2975-4
But Why - We Can Reverse Aging: https://youtu.be/cY25i_bkUys
Book Review - Lifespan: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-lifespan)
Comment form the review: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-lifespan/comment/3835048
Cribbing from Austin, I'd like to make a gentle plea for fellow feeling and maintaining good naturedness in this election week. There are only a few real bad guys just people with competing visions of the good. Let's reestablish community in this country!
Let's take as an axiom that some people are more intelligent than others, with IQ acting as one proxy for that intelligence.
Here are two possible meanings of "more intelligent" I can think of:
Option A) Being more intelligent means that you just absorb stuff faster. These are the kids who are always bored in school, don't need as much time to pick up new ideas, etc. They are more likely to get more education credentials because as time goes on the pace of learning to earn a credential gets faster and faster, and they can keep up. There isn't a ceiling to how much someone can learn, it just might take a long time.
Option B) Being more intelligent means you have a higher ceiling for what you can learn. Everyone can learn addition and subtraction, most people can learn basic algebra, some people can learn calculus, a few people can learn engineering, and only a tiny minority can learn the standard model of particle physics. People learn more or less at the same speed, but some people have a much higher ceiling for what they can learn.
Now I think it's almost certainly a mix of the two. But I'm curious if there is any evidence for Option A vs Option B, and in the absence of evidence, do people think it's 50/50? 70/30 toward one side or the other? Is there another option I'm not thinking of? Etc.
Caveat: not sure if this passes the threshold for a high-quality contribution (apologies if not, in which case I'm happy for this comment to be promptly deleted).
I've been working on a series of posts/essays concerning the question of whether large language models (LLMs) understand language, and how we'd even go about trying to adjudicate that question. I wanted to share a summary here because of the back-and-forth between Scott and Gary Marcus, which I think is quite relevant. My intended contribution to the debate is to try to clarify some of the different views and ultimately to connect this to our understanding of how humans understand language (I'm a psycholinguist by training).
Broadly, I think much of the debate can be boiled down to two opposing camps:
1) The “duck test” view holds that if a system (like a large language model) behaves as if it understands language, then it probably understands language.
2) The “axiomatic rejection” view holds that behavior alone is insufficient––that true language understanding requires some foundational property or mechanism, such as grounding, compositionality, or a situation model.
In this post (https://seantrott.substack.com/p/how-could-we-know-if-large-language), I come down more on the "duck tester" side. For one, I think that for a question to fall under the domain of scientific inquiry it should be something we can empirically test, which sort of makes me a duck tester by definition––it's just a question of getting the "right" tests. Further, the axiomatic rejection camp often makes somewhat under-specified claims, and it's amenable to a "moving the goalposts" problem.
All that being said, I think there are some merits to the axiomatic rejection view (which is sort of akin to an anti-functionalist account), and so in the remaining posts I'm planning to explore some of the axiomatic criteria people have referenced (e.g., Marcus references compositionality) as being necessary conditions for "True Understanding".
I'm curious to hear more about what people in this community think about the debate.
https://www.metaculus.com/ has also ramped up hiring! See all of our open roles at https://apply.workable.com/metaculus/. This week we added new Frontend Engineer and Full-Stack Engineer openings.
Come work with us to make forecasting more fun and engaging! We have the dual benefits of a remote culture, and being deeply embedded in the EA/LW/ACX world. We're mission driven and our pay is competitive.
A short video essay from historian Jon Meachum. (about 3 minutes) You tell me, TDS or earnest sober warming.
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/lincolns-example-and-our-task-to-protect-democracy/#x
Can anyone here steelman the view that consciousness doesn't exist or that it is an illusion? It seemed immediately evident to me that there was a hard problem, and I currently would even be much more open to idealism or solipsism (even though both seem implausible to me) than to believing consciousness is illusory. However, it seems that many philosophers believe it might be an illusion, so I feel like I must be missing something.
Looking for practical advice:
For the last three nights, I've suffered from sleep maintenance insomnia.
It's reasonably easy and quick for me to fall asleep at first, but at any point from 1 to 4 hours after falling asleep I wake up and it takes me a *long* time (anywhere from 3.5 to 7 hours, very roughly guesstimated) to fall asleep again. Even when I do fall asleep again, my sleep is light and fitful, with many repeated awakenings. The next day, I feel horrifically exhausted and basically can't do anything productive.
I've struggled with insomnia before, but only for a day or two at most.
I've already started doing all the standard sleep-hygiene things (no caffeine late in the day, cool and quiet bedroom, turning off the lights and putting away electronic devices early, etc.). Maybe, in your experience, they take more than a few nights to start working?
I do think a significant part of the problem is a current medical issue that causes mild stomach pain. But it's mild enough that during the daytime I can easily ignore it, and in the past I could easily ignore it at night as well, sometimes with the aid of an Advil before bed. These last few days, though, it's been driving me crazy when I'm trying to sleep, even taking Advil every four hours overnight.
> An especially common offense this time around was “low-content high-content comments”
Did you mean low-content high-conflict?
I'd love to see more experimentation with aggressive moderation (where stuff that's not strictly bad, just dull or low-quality, also gets deleted), it's a very underappreciated tool. In a high-volume comment section, free time becomes a participation filter; as free time tends to be inversely correlated with skill and experience, that's not great. Clearing out the low-value comments makes more space for high-value oned, in a way. (Of course it's very time consuming for the moderator.)
Old-timer forums used karma systems for that, it's sad that that's not very popular these days.
1. Substack could benefit from giving moderators the ability to highlight good comments, so I can read those first, like setting a threshold of +3 on Slashdot. I don't have time to read most of the comments otherwise. But I don't want a comment voting system to degenerate into reddit where people are just pandering to the ignorant masses to collect karma.
2-4. A lot of shitty comments are from newbies who don't know any better. It might help to link to something like the rules at r/themotte at the bottom of every open thread. There are also some shitty comments from people who do know better, but temporarily forgot or are being lazy or something. They might also benefit from the reminder.
8. shoutout to Oliver at Redwood Research who was my buddy at CFAR I in Prague last month.
Does anyone know where I can find datasets on weather forecasts and outcomes? For example, a dataset on forecast rain probability each day and then the corresponding outcome of whether or not it actually rained?
I'm working on a project to report forecast performance metrics for as many possible datasets as I can, including the ones usually discussed on ACX like election predictions (538, PredictIt, etc), as well as other kinds of forecasts like sports betting and weather. So far finding a good weather dataset with outcomes has actually been kinda hard.
I'd like to encourage people not to use the word "meritocracy", and not to fall into the ways of thinking it implies.
Scott uses the word to mean "selecting applicants for competed-for, desirable jobs based solely on how well they'll do them". And I think that's a good thing, and find his arguments for it compelling, but I think that referring to that as "merit" is both misguided and offensive.
It's absolutely true that, all else being equal, if you work harder you'll do better than if you work less hard. But it's also true that, with the same level of effort, someone with rich, educated, supportive parents and genes conducive to academic study will acquire far more ability, and do far, /far/ better, than someone less lucky but equally hard-working.
And while I think it's defensible to use a word like "merit", with its strong connotations of virtue and moral worth, not just of ability, to refer to "hard work", it clearly shouldn't be used to refer to those forms of luck.
If you want a genuine "merit"ocracy, you should be doing.. not the opposite of, quite, but something orthogonal to, the thing we call "meritocracy" - doing your best to give out jobs based not on achievement but on effort. That would unquestionably be fairer, but the cost in terms of everything worse would be far too high.
Hiring lazy people with upbringings and genes that let them turn effort into accomplishment efficiently in preference to harder-working but less able people is clearly the right thing to do - it's unfair, but a) it benefits a lot of people a lot, and b) "hire the person who will do the job best" is a useful Schelling point that avoids squabbles about how the handicapping system should work. But pretending that it's fair, or that you're hiring based on "merit", is unnecessarily adding insult to injury.
"Abilitocracy" is obviously an ugly word, and no-one will understand what you mean if you use it. But try "hiring based solely on ability"? Or, if you must use "meritocracy", please add a caveat pointing out that you recognise and explicitly reject the connotations and subtext of what you're saying.
I find myself having the same argument with smart people over [1] and over [2]: is it reasonable to consider that things without brains might feel?
It think it's quite reasonable to hypothesize (but not assume!) that e.g. plants can feel pain. Other people seem to think that, without some kind of sophisticated information processing, pain makes no sense.
What do y'all think?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ymxpgf/barbara_mcclintock_on_scientific_mysticism_and/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/xxegzn/comment/irc92na/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Its interesting that banning people on Substack must be much more powerful than banning them from the old blog, since your account here may be tied to other subscriptions. At SSC being banned meant losing name recognition (probably desirable for many people banned there) but probably just making a new account. If you have many paid subscriptions on Substack, if you're banned here but still want to comment it means either maintaining two accounts or switching all your subscriptions from the old to the new. Thanks, network effects.
I casually have to do a lot of operations to string data, on 1M+ rows datasets, and am constrained to Python (mostly by skill, but also by the entire tool stack that the rest of my team uses). How do I make my workflow not suck? Because right now it's an almost daily occurence that I do "pd.read_csv('file.csv')", go for a cup of coffee, and come back to a dead kernel because Pandas tried to load it all into RAM and never managed to. And if lo-and-behold it managed to ingest the file and create a dataframe, anything I do to it like basic loc's or pivots/reshaping runs the same risk and also takes mindboggling amounts of runtime.
I heard a lot about Arrow/PyArrow, but IDK if it's workable already. I also tried Modin, but my laptop got hot enough that I couldn't comfortably keep my hands on the keyboard, and froze dead after a few operations, to the point I had to do a hard reboot.
Reposting from the mid-week open thread where I received some great ideas, but I'd also like to see what the Sunday crowd says.
I've been introspecting into my ADHD for years now and have a decent model for it. Basically, the "task switcher" part of my brain is very low level and largely subconscious. It switches focus between things so quickly and subtly that I often don't notice; being in a car with me as I mumble through my train of thought is surreal.
Using Kaj Sotala's Multiagent Models of Mind sequence, I envision my task switcher as accepting or rejecting bids from various subagents to change what I'm doing, using expected value. But, ADHD means the expected values are all screwed up! "Good" stuff is much lower value than it should be, stuff that's great today turns blah tomorrow (I get bored of stuff easily), and even if I'm bored to tears of whatever I'm doing now, very little is compelling enough to make the switch.
Let's say I want to do the dishes, for instance. I send a bid to the task switcher, which looks at the expected value table, where washing dishes or having clean dishes isn't very rewarding in expectation. It rejects the bid. I perceive this as my brain just not doing the thing, even as I get frustrated and miserable. Why is the expected reward so low? I could write about dopamine, but I hear that's getting discredited in the ADHD community, so I'm kinda at a loss.
You may rightly ask about medication, and I'd love to try it, but I have a cardiac issue. Mild tachycardia which is normally fine, if a bit bothersome, but I'd imagine that stimulants would make it worse, or lead to complications down the road as my heart spends decades beating too fast. Plus, I guess I have wild blood pressure spikes when I'm stressed out. I once got a 179 diastolic in the dentist's chair before they even did anything. I tried atomoxetine and guanfacine; the former gave me worse tachycardia, and the latter didn't really do anything.
My question to you: what can be done to modify the reward table? What can be done to make the brain believe that a task is actually rewarding? If the answer is "you can't", please tell me so I can at least get rid of this doubt.
“ delete all comments below maybe what the 33rd percentile comment in a non-Challenge-Mode thread would be.”
This is going to be a bit hard to judge well. I wasn’t sure you even were reading all the comments.
It’s also going to delete follow on comments, which might aggravate more people than the ones with the disappearing posts. Might be worth a try for a week or two though.
re: The Demise of OkC. Everyone I’ve ever talked to that used that site in its heyday is similarly upset about how awful it is now. I’m probably not the only one looking for a suitable replacement. The “date me?” docs or google forms people in this broader community seem to like writing are the current spiritual successors as far as I can tell -- the documents to write long-form content about yourself, and the forms to gather information about others (okay, maybe Aella was mostly using that for her nifty stats projects since she had an existing and... *enthusiastic* audience to sample from, but I’m taken to believe she got at least a few worthwhile dates out of them?). The magic of OkC was putting these together and bundling in the network effect, which is where the current, decentralized “maybe a popular rat-adjacent blogger can signal boost me” leaves a lot to be desired. This all makes me think that there’s an addressable market out there, even if not through a typical “swipey-swipey” dating app in the post-Tinder world. I’d like a good ‘ol website to do that on.
Those are my thoughts anyway. I hope somebody takes on the problem again someday soon (sadly, my tech skills are not the right kind for this).
Britain is possibly the world’s most famous monarchy. Maybe less well known is the decade it spent as a republic after executing Charles I. Executing the king had never been the plan and for the next decade Britain struggled to try to find a way to make it all work. A revolution in a deeply conservative country. Anna Keay was a great guest on the podcast. Subscribers to this blog may particularly enjoy the story of the scientist William Petty (google him - amazing guy). And Anna has a beautiful English accent of the kind so loved by Americans! Can’t recommend Anna or her book The Restless Republic highly enough.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/subject-to-change/id1436447503?i=1000585248320
I really like new substack app (especially on iPad). It’s great for keeping track of read and unread posts. My biggest pain point is that there’s no “download for offline” feature. I love reading my substacks when flying for example. The app at least keeps the text but loses any images or embedded tweets. This can have varying importance depending on the content. Sometimes I can load the full post whilst on Wi-Fi and then the images stay loaded when offline, my success with this has been spotty. If anyone can escalate to the substack team it would be greatly appreciated, it seems like a small fix!
What do you think the effects are of the large number of different strains of Christianity?
Given the huge number of doctrinal issues that various churches might disagree on, i suspect that most people's understanding of, and beliefs about "what christians believe" is calibrated to whichever strain of Christianity most was predominant where they were.
What kind of second order effects does this have?
When Neal DeGrasse tyson says, "even the pope believes in evolution, can you even get more christian than the pope?", for example, i found myself surprised/not surprised. The rough impression i have is that the simpler an idea, the more likely it is to go viral, for example. So what i would expect is that most people have no idea how much complexity goes into the thinking of someone like Aquinas, or the continuity between classical thinkers like Socrates. From what I understand, catholicism has tried to walk this really fine line between 'the hereafter is what really matters', but 'this life matters as well.' It makes me think catholicism is an anti-meme which is more easily outcompeted by simpler belief systems.
I support the idea of a challenge open thread.
I do note that very few top level posts are of horrible quality, even if they garner no replies. More often when (we) members of the commentariat post crap comments, they are nearly always in response, and frequently as part of a downward escalating spiral.
I would like to note that David Freman does a repeatly decent job of disagreeing strongly but politely.
Just voicing a bunch of support for this Challenge Mode experiment (and doing so here, since a vague "yay X" comment might not make the bar on Wednesday!). I'm a fan of easy-to-access wide open content spaces, but there are already plenty of those, and the environment of "someone with good taste ruthlessly culls every subpar comment" is much harder to find and so correspondingly more valuable to have around on the margin IMO. Much like Groucho Marx didn't actually say, I can't wait for this club to be good enough that I don't qualify as a member.
I'm not opposed to the idea of challenge mode but I think if you're going to do it you should pick examples, both long and short, of opening comments and replies you consider good and would like to see more of. Otherwise you're just asking commenters to guess what you think is valuable.
More broadly, I think your previous blog had a fairly high quality comment section though not without issues. However, your commenters got mixed in with the Substack median which caused a reversion to the internet mean.
What are the best antonyms for Always, Coming, From, Take, Me, and Down?
Hi everyone, I'm collecting examples of stupid byzantine rules from the workplace for my book on Discretion (I want to argue that we need to build more of it into rules, not less). Examples like this I've gotten from real life: a librarian whose rule it was to collect library and driver's license numbers for late returns, which were then thrown into the trash because they were collecting too much information to do anything with. A rule against ordering from Starbucks as a supplier for coffee for work events, with the exception for Starbucks coffee that was supplied by a two approved suppliers. Any you have from your life I'd appreciate permission to use for the book. Thanks for those who submitted in previous open thread.
In Challenge Mode, how often are the 33rd&below comments going to be deleted? Is it within 5 minutes of posting, every hour on the hour, once at the 18-hour mark, etc? Knowing this will help me informally make odds that a comment I just read won’t be there later today/tomorrow/etc. Or will the timing be at Scott’s discretion?
Anyone here have experience with POTS (tachycardia)? The wife who is a super low anxiety person recently came down with it out of the blue. No new stresses, actually pretty low stress time in an overall low stress life. Beta blockers have been helping, but as with most “syndromes” kind of frustrating for an otherwise super healthy person to come down with weird illness at 38 and for there not to be a clear physical cause. At first they thought it was for sure heart valve issues, but that has been ruled out.
Luckily her case seems pretty mild, but any advice is appreciated. Seems kind of related to the past discussions around historic fainting sickness among women and such, but I don’t think that type of social contagion is what is going on here.