> Aren’t a lot of Scott’s examples just motivated reasoning?
If you buy Mercier and Sperber's argument that human reasoning evolved for argumentation [1], then motivated reasoning should be the default expectation, so it wouldn't be surprising that most commonsense examples are motivated reasoning.
I think many smart people disagreed with evolution when it was first introduced on this basis. Things that seem obvious post hoc often seem crazy to start with.
> What we need to understand first, though, is that there is no contemporaneous or documentary evidence for the existence of most ancient figures. That's the nature of our historical sources for the ancient world. So if the question is "Do we have good historical evidence that Jesus existed, the kind of evidence that historians take as conclusive when they're doing ancient history" then the answer is a clear "yes."
The historicity of Jesus does not depend on the Gospels; there's secular history of the early Christian church that is inconsistent with Jesus being make-believe. Out of curiosity, when do you believe that people made up that story, and where?
I think that there is insufficient evidence to warrant a firm opinion either way. I'll agree that there doesn't seem to be much good evidence that he existed, but how much evidence would you expect to find? I was expecting to find court records, but it turns out those would have been destroyed in a fire.
I watched an interview with Carrier a couple days ago on a Youtube channel I follow (Crecganford). I found him moderately persuasive, but not convincing. I think I updated my estimate of the existence of a historical Jesus downwards from something like 95% to 90%. Still much higher than Carrier's own estimate (stated in the interview) of about 30%.
His line of argument that seemed strongest to me was the comparative mythology angle, that our records of second-century Christianity fit several very common patterns around that time of savior cults and reinterpretation of divine/celestial entities as historical people. He also talked a little about an example of a mystery cult around the same time period that had an outer teaching that its central figure was a historical human, but an inner teaching that the central figure was purely celestial and that the outer teaching was allegorical. Collectively, these seem to provide better grounding for a hypothesis of how an ahistorical Jesus could have to be widely believed to be historical so soon after his purported death than the straightforward "Peter and Paul were con artists or lunatics" explanation.
On the other hand, there were several things that Carrier said that make me wary of believing his claims and arguments without strong corroboration. To start out, he seems to have a definite "angry atheist" attitude towards Christianity which I find off-putting and makes me suspect him of being biased towards believing claims that reflect poorly upon it. For another, he made several specific claims that seemed fishy given things I already know about.
One was that he relied heavily on "dog that didn't bark" evidence: that lack of contemporary record of Jesus, especially from secular sources implies that he probably wasn't real because if he was he would have left more concrete traces. This is at odds with my understanding of the extreme patchiness of pre-modern historical records, and Carrier's attempt to preempt this objection by bringing up extensive contemporary evidence of much more notable-at-the-time figures like Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great feels like a swindle. I mean, of course great conquerers and rulers of continent-spanning empires leave more records than leaders of moderately-successful messianic cults in a peripheral client state that only acquired macrohistorical importance in hindsight a century or two later.
Carrier also cited as evidence that the Canonical Gospels were written in Greek rather than Aramaic, comparing this to the only accounts of an American figure being written in Italian. This seems to discount Greek's role as in the Roman world as a cosmopolitan language of trade and scholarship, so it's more analogous to someone in Anglo-Saxon England only being written about in Latin (which happened all the time). This ties in with how Carrier seemed to talk about the Gospels as if they were entirely original compositions by the authors of their canonical texts rather than (as is more commonly theorized) drawing heavily on lost earlier written and oral sources (e.g. Q, M, and Proto-Mark), especially in the case of the Synoptic Gospels that clearly draw on one another if not from lost common source. It wouldn't strike me as terribly surprising if Q and Proto-Mark were written or orally transmitted in Aramaic, then translated to Greek, and only the widely-distributed (and interleaved in improved forms in the cases oof Matthew and John) Greek versions survived to the Council of Constantine.
Carrier also seemed to rely too heavily on active and deliberate Christian suppression of documents to explain away the absence of additional evidence against a historical Jesus. Yes, Christians have suppressed heterodox religious writings on multiple occasions, but nowhere near as comprehensively as Carrier seemed to argue. In particular, the works of the fourth century Emperor Julian the Apostate (particularly "Against the Galileans", an extensive tract criticizing Christianity) seem like prime candidate for suppression but nevertheless substantial fragments of them survive (largely thanks to being quoted extensively by Christian scholars seeking to refute Julian's arguments in context).
The best argument for Jesus' divinity is that there's some no-name loser with no major following during his life, no armies or accomplishments, with almost no direct evidence of his existence is somehow in the historical record for doing little other than being loving and then being tortured to death in some imperial backwater,
I roll to disbelieve. If it weren't something i already knew were true, and were deeply embedded in our culture, i'd say, look you're bullshitting me, that's just a feel-good story.
Far easier to believe this is the child of the simulation's author than that some random loser is the most impactful figure in human history.
This is survivorship bias. We're credulous beings and one fictitious story was bound to bubble to the top of the meme space. It happened to be the Jesus story in the West, the Muhammad story in other places and a few other stories in even more places.
Muhammad had a huge army during his time alive, though. He wrote down words directly, and his followers copied a bunch of his own written words. His historical existence gets a much higher probability than Jesus'.
Muhammad was illiterate. He recited the Quran from memory (his memory of what the Archangel Gabriel told him.) Memorizing the Quran is considered a feat of piety among Muslims to this day. It was only after Muhammed’s death that people realized they’d better write it down.
The same could be said of Gautama Buddha, Lao Tzu, or Confucius, more or less. And we're not even sure all of those even existed. But it's pretty clear that if Jesus is divine, those three aren't.
Ideas, well expressed, can change the world. A no-name loser in life, with the right idea and a first-rate talent for expression, can become the inspirational leader of hundreds of millions of people, a thousand or more years later.. No divine intervention required. We know this from multiple examples.
Buddha was born a prince and had a significant number of followers before he died.
Confucius is a good example; as someone else argued, Jesus was championed by Paul, and Confucius was championed by Mencius, so it looks like what you really need is someone else championing you.
> But it's pretty clear that if Jesus is divine, those three aren't.
Maybe? If Jesus was divine AND a bunch of traditional interpretations of Christianity are correct, sure.
But let's say that every couple hundred years the simulation authors try their hand at fixing the place up; then maybe we periodically get visited by otherworldly persuasive people engineered from outside the simulation.
> Ideas, well expressed, can change the world.
I like that you're saying this; maybe i just need to take that concept more seriously.
He was not a random loser. Jesus (as is described) was a highly charismatic leader of a Jewish cult, that has to deny its obvious seccesionist ambitions in order to avoid extermination like the Zealots in the first Roman-Jewish war.
You will have to start to explain yourself when people give up their cushy job of tax collectors/collaborators with the Roman occupation to become your apostle instead:
Jerusalem may be an imperial backwater from the Roman perspective, but certainly a troublesome one. The authorities wouldn't bother to publicly crucify just anyone.
Whether he's historical or not, the story is not about some loser. If you read the bible, you'll note that Jesus and his apostles are in the process of starting a major movement.
More existence than Thor. And certainly no reason to doubt some random person claiming some religious import and trying to “Reform Judaism” with that name. There were lots of people doing that, nothing that odd about it.
That even a small portion of the events of the gospels happened? Who knows, not well established in the historical record at all.
More well established than Thor is pretty weak sauce though. Is the existence of Jesus more well established than, uh here's a list off the top of my head, Socrates, Alexander the Great, King David, Herod the Great, Plato, Augustus, Paul the Apostle, or... hmm any other historical or legendary figures that you think might be illustrative.
Alexander the Great was well documented by sources in Greece, Syria, Egypt, Persia and elsewhere. There are all too many contemporary accounts and monuments in his name to have been faked. They didn't pull the name for Alexandria out of a hat. The rapid change in the region's political structure is also well documented. An unbeatable army came from the north of Greece and its leader called himself Alexander. He died young and without issue, and his kingdom was divided into three kingdoms that dominated the region for over a century.
Plato and Socrates are also pretty well documented. They were well documented in their own era and later. Unlike Jesus, there is not just documentation from their followers but also from their enemies. Obviously, one could argue that every surviving document from the era has been consistently edited for nefarious purposes, but ....
There is archeological evidence for Herod the Great. He existed and ruled the right place at the right time. He built a harbor and put his name on it. There are mentions of him in other Roman sources. Whether he did what was recounted in the New Testament is less well documented. Evil kings back then were always said to have demanded the death of every first born boy, so this might have just been "woke" posturing.
Augustus existed. The Romans didn't just make him up to slap his name on buildings, monuments and seaports and use in contemporary art work or mention in contemporary documents. His military and political actions were also well documented by allies and enemies.
King David is largely undocumented except for the Old Testament. There is the Tel Dan inscription which was written for some king who defeated the "King of Israel and the king of the house of David", but it was written centuries later, after David's kingdom had been divided. It is clearly not enough to establish his existence. (Supposedly, Jesus was a distant descendant of King David.)
Paul the Apostle is tougher. The only source is the New Testament and he was supposedly one of its authors. I'm sure some biblical scholars have weighed in on this, but I got the impression that Paul was written by a single author or at least in one consistent voice unlike, let's say, the book of Isaiah.
Did Jesus exist? Sure. He was one of many charismatic religious leaders in a turbulent time. How much of the New Testament's account of him is true? That's a much tougher question. (I think Life of Brian addressed this question surprisingly well.)
Thanks for this. One further question. Regarding Socrates I was under the impression that Plato was the only contemporary source attesting his existence. Is it possible that Plato made him up as a rhetorical or narrative device? Is Socrates attested to in documents independent of Plato?
The reason I bring this up is that I've heard that Jesus is about as well attested as Socrates and almost nobody doubts the existence of Socrates. So the implication is that people who deny the mere existence of Jesus may have an ideological axe to grind.
There are actually Socratic dialogues by people (or, well, a person) other than Plato. Xenophon wrote several, as well as various histories, both attempting to continue Thucydides' work, and also chronicle some of what he himself got up to (the Anabasis is definitely worth checking out). It's been a while, but I recall thinking that both Plato and Xenophon portrayed Socrates as having a very similar personality and style of argumentation, but as making wildly different points, in a way that was distinctly biased toward reinforcing the authors' personal views.
(I don't know if there are any Socratic dialogues by anyone other than Plato and Xenophon, but it should be easy to check.)
I know Socrates makes an appearance in Aristophanes Clouds, but this could have just been an inside joke like Nicolas Bourbaki among French mathematicians.
I guess you can say we don't have enough evidence to be sure he existed in the same way some tiktokers believe we don't have enough evidence to believe Rome existed.
Tacitus spoke of the crucified Jew, and not because he was against cruficixition
Perhaps, but he wasn't talking about current events, but stories about things that happened "far off and long ago". (Well, not *that* long ago, but decades at least.) So not good evidence of fact. It's not just hearsay, it's "The way I heard it" kind of stuff.
I found the wikipedia article on the historicity of Jesus pretty compelling, so I'll just suggest you read that (if you haven't already). If you happen to have especially high standards for historical figures or mythological figures (which I use in the sense of foundational stories, not in the sense of false) then ok.
Actually, I found it rather unconvincing. There were a lot of "most people who study the Bible believe he existed" arguments, but that ignores the percentage of the folks who study biblical history that are committed Christians. Even if such people are honest, they will tend not to question extremely weak arguments. The strongest evidence that I find that he existed is that there's no reason to expect to find any evidence that he did. And there is admission in that article (if you attend carefully) that many documents were altered or forged by the early Christians.
So if you want a comparison today, look at the way history you have observed happening is altered by those with strong political beliefs. And don't assume those motivations are recent changes in humanity.
Ok, we agree on what evidence exists, and I don't personally feel especially persuasive at the moment. It's more evidence than exists for nearly any other individual of that time. If you think it's not enough to be certain, we'll have to wait until someone finds his tomb to know for sure.
I think an underrated aspect of the Neom project is that it was developed my western consultants- it's worth making fun of, but predominantly because it shows the lack of imagination with the western mind.
It'd be a mistake to make a non-negligible update about Westerners based on one very unusual project concept made a few Westerners, under unknown design constraints, chosen among an unknown number of others, made to please a man whose aesthetic preferences you don't know.
Hard disagree- "efficient",public transport oriented, sustainable etc etc. These are common tropes that have been doing the rounds for around 3 decades amongst the western intelligentsia. Not remotely imaginative, merely the extreme of the consultants understanding.
I think you misunderstand the point slightly. Being unimaginative is not *the* problem with this project. *The* problem, the reason it's _prima facie_ absurd, is that it's impractical.
The answer to Scott's question, "how do we know that the Saudis can't do construction ten times cheaper than anyone else?", is that there's an international market for large construction, and if they could, they would already be doing that and wiping the floor with everyone else.
(Note: this explanation is not "capitalism". It is "markets", which long predate capitalism and which will exist long after it's gone.)
When it comes to, say, tunnel construction, France can do it ten times cheaper than the US. But construction markets aren't as free as you suggest. French and Chinese firms don't win big US construction contracts, even if they can undercut competitors on price.
Yes, Neom is terribly impractical, but not more so than Brasilia, and it's sure backed by more money. And yet Brasilia is real, in all its silly impracticality. And when you think about it, Dubai is arguably even more impractical, because Dubai went up really fast but without any livability-promoting coordination. We might easily think of better models than the big Neom line artery, but hey, at least it's one livability forethought, compared to Dubai's zero.
I'm glad someone mentioned Le Corbusier's Brasilia. Neom seems to be more like one of Paolo Soleri's arcologies. They were both inspired by Buckminster Fuller's argument that cities are machines for living.
This is a quite puzzling generalization about Dubai; having lived in it for years, I've failed to notice it has a livability of zero. Thoroughly artificial? Yes. Unliveable? God no, very much to the contrary.
US has totally overbloated costs of everything (from medicine and universities to, yes, construction), for reasons that go into several blogposts of length (posts that were largely already written) - the short of it being that US intuitions on how much something should cost, can be ditched and disposed of as soon as you exit the US context.
For instance, the Burj Khalifa cost $1.5B compared to One World Trade Center's $3.9B, in spite of the Burj being a significantly more demanding project (top floor @ 605m, versus One's top floor @ 386m).
Actually trying to build a city from scratch in a way that hasn't been done before is imaginative, even if the principles you choose to use to guide your city design process are the somewhat-stale principles of the secular religion of the Western intelligentsia.
I think a fairer criticism is that it's what a Saudi king who is kind of a westaboo but doesn't actually understand the West wants to make so that (his imagined version of) Westerners will like him.
The recent issue of the Economist has a section on MBS. At the end is a bit on Neom where the author goes out to the site, looks around, and talks to the consultants on the project. They're constantly making new plans, hoping to continue making their fees for as long as possible before being fired. One likens it to riding a bull, you know you can't stay on forever but the point is to see how long you can go.
There's a difference between things that 1. seem absurd but fall in realms where fundamental understanding is pretty poorly developed and there is a broad possibility space for surprises and 2. things that seem absurd and fall into very well understood spaces where surprises don't really happen anymore.
Centrally planned economies and modernist urban planning fall squarely into the category of "ideas that were once groundbreaking but have since been pretty conclusively shown not to work for reasons that were pretty obvious in hindsight", and Neom basically leaps into the arms of several extremely well understood pitfalls with no plan to address them.
Add to this that the project can serve many individuals' personal ends without actually succeeding and you have the ideal recipe for money-incinerating white elephant boondoggle nirvana. This is not "ambitious but doable in principle". This is "obviously terrible idea borne of rich-kid hubris on an unprecedented scale".
Sorry, but I think you are overgeneralizing. I'm not sure what you mean by "modernist urban planning", but "Centrally planned economies" describes every national economy. The degree of control varies, but if they issue currency, they are planning on creating economic effects based on that issue. And the SF area BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) was quite successful. Not perfectly successful, but an immense improvement over not having it present. Enough of an immense improvement to more than justify its cost. So not all things that *I* consider "modernist urban planning" are failures.
I would assume he's using the normal definitions of market vs centrally planned economy. All real countries fall on a spectrum between the two, but ones closer to the market end tend to be far more prosperous than ones closer to the centrally planned one.
The US economy is centrally planned, though I've heard arguments that we are not as prosperous as we think. Just about every major industry is centrally controlled by a handful of cooperating corporate entities. The banking system is centrally controlled by the Federal Reserve. There's plenty of room of innovation if you don't run afoul of one of the big guys and don't need a lot of capital.
I agree that Neom is unlikely to work, but a lot of centrally planned scheme work out just fine. Look at the centrally planned and government funded technology we are using for this discussion.
The U.S. economy is not centrally planned. That's simply incorrect. Even the Fed mostly interacts with the banking system through open market operations.
If you are using a definition of "Centrally planned" which includes both the US and USSR, consider that your definition is overexpansive to the point of meaninglessness. Can you name a single country whose economy isn't "centrally planned" by your lights?
I really can't think of any country where the economy isn't centrally planned. It's all a matter of degree, of how open the system is to allowing outsiders to expand and use formal channels. The US is fairly good about this. If your skin wasn't too dark and you worshiped in the correct manner, the sky was the limit. The USSR had no official tolerance for its massive underground economy, but relied on it much as North Korea does today. Still, we Americans used to joke that Russians had to shop at Grocery Store #815 while we Americans had a lot more choices. Of course, now, most of our food shopping is done at Grocery Store #815 as a handful of chains control the market.
The US has always had a lot of economic central planning. Differences between the central planners in London and in the Colonies were a major driver of the Revolution. After the Revolution the Colonies tried to move planning down to the state level, but that only lasted a few years.
> Maybe, every so often, do a deep dive into fact-checking something, even if you’re absolutely sure it’s true. Maybe if everybody does this, then someone will (by coincidence) catch the false absurdities, and then the social epistemology thing can work.
I do not recommend this. I did this with "Donald Trump is a Racist" and even though I hate the man and 80% of what he stands for, now half my in-group thinks I'm MAGA. For completeness, I went a little further down the rabbit hole than Scott did in his "You're Still Crying Wolf" essay, and started providing videos of black people saying Trump isn't racist.
On the other hand, much of my in-group isn't rationalists, so maybe that is where my error lies.
In any case, be prepared, after you do a deep dive fact checking things that are "obviously true" to your in-group, that you will have some very negative social interactions anytime you bring up what you found, if it doesn't turn out to be actually-true.
It did finally come down to that. It turns out the definition of "racist" was just "someone I don't like, and who the mainstream media is willing to label as such."
For me it was the surprising large number of people that (completely) bought into it. Really made me wonder what other things I "know" because mainstream media says it, and it appeals to me.
I'm saying something different. Trump is on record calling Mexicans rapists, African countries as shithole countries, saying he wanted more immigrants from Norway, calling for and implementing immigration policies that were discriminatory against Muslims, apologizing for white supremacists rallying against jews, and much more. Is that enough to call him "racist". I feel like that's a fair threshold.
You seem to be saying that you found videos of black people saying he's not racist and that's enough to put him in the "not racist" category. I disagree with you, but now we're arguing not about what he did or didn't do, we're not arguing if what he did was acceptable or not, we're just arguing where the threshold of "racist" is.
I'm glad you started there, because that's where I stop. He is on record saying no such thing. You imply he said this about all Mexicans. Surely this was just you mis-speaking. Being charitable, you mean he said most, or maybe "far more than average" Mexicans are this. Again, he said no such thing.
I am familiar with all your talking points. Are you familiar with the alternative viewpoints? Have you bothered to do the research into the massive numbers of people who feel he is less racist than average, perhaps even far less racist than average? Can you summarise their viewpoints?
"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
I never said *all*. He called a generalized version of Mexican immigrants rapists.
How is that supposed to be racist? If I go to Mexico, round up a bunch of convicted rapists, and send them north, is it racist to call them rapists?
Racism is at least notionally supposed to ascribe characteristics to people because of their race. The quote you just mentioned says that Mexican immigrants differ from other Mexicans by consisting largely of undesirables. It doesn't say that Mexican immigrants differ racially from other Mexicans, even though that would be true.
And I, at the risk of sounding like a broken record... am 100% already familiar with your talking points.
So let me belabour my point.
There are many millions of Mexicans, living and working both in Mexico and the United States, who disagree with you. Can you characterise the viewpoint those millions of Mexican nationals and Mexican immigrants who think Trump is not racist? Hint, it sounds a lot like what Michael Watts said, but I encourage you to do your own research.
As the "You Are Still Crying Wolf" article points out, Bill Clinton and John McCain both made the exact same point, though perhaps phrased more carefully.
McCain 2008:
> Border security is essential to national security. In an age of terrorism, drug cartels, and criminal gangs, allowing millions of unidentified persons to enter and remain in this country poses grave risks to the sovereignty of the United States and the security of its people.
When Clinton or McCain implies illegal Mexican immigrants commit terrible crimes, no one bats an eye.
Every once in a while I'll get into an argument with non rationalists and then halfway through remember, to my surprise, that most people take disagreement as a personal insult rather than a point of factual debate.
I think you might be able to side-step this failure mode in the future by presenting what you find as "here's my understanding of how the out-group thinks and why they believe what they do" rather than "here's some evidence against our belief"?
Au contraire, the problem is that "racism" has *too many* meanings, and people simply pick the one that most confirms their beliefs.
Scott's written about this before, and the closest he came to a coherent definition was "a combination of Motive, Belief, and Consequences, weighted in favor of Definition By Motives" where "By Motives" was "An irrational feeling of hatred toward some race that causes someone to want to hurt or discriminate against them."
This is a great point. Too many people think "racis[t,m]" has become meaningless, but it most clearly has not, yet we still go in circles. Thanks for the reframing.
Is Trump sexist? I think someone making an argument for him not being racist would be much more credible if they thought he was sexist. So I'm interested to see if you pass that test.
I can see an argument for him not being racist where someone argues he is just self-interested and crass or something. Framing him as not sexist is much more difficult.
The OP doing "research" and finding that 3 black guys and some latinos don't think trump is racist is not "rationality", it's autism. The OP believes there's some precise meaning of racism and that you have to fulfill certain hard criteria for it. But racism is a useful definition even if it's loosely defined to refer to people that consistently say negative things about certain races independent of their internal motives. It's a social construction and a a little ambiguous, but still useful. Rationality is not about 0s and 1s, it's about navigating imprecision with reason.
Sure but I'm interested in whether he actually really dislikes Trump as stated. Some fancy argument for him not advocating racism is plausible. Sexism is much more cut and dry. So it is a good sniff test.
I find the exact opposite. For examples of Trump's racism, it's easy to point to his desired Muslim ban, his comments about the Khan family, etc. On the other hand, this may be my google-fu failing me, but it's hard to find a single Trump quote that's obviously sexist.
Searching for sexist Trump quotes, most quotes fall into one of these categories:
- Trump bragging about how every woman wants to date him or have sex with him.
- Trump insulting specific individuals who are women.
- Trump acting like a selfish jerk
- Trump saying women are superior to men
Trump gets into feuds with a lot of people and will happily throw insults at people of any race or gender. He's more likely to call women fat or ugly than men, but I think when he's insulting people, he just says whatever he thinks will be most hurtful and he tends to think men will be less hurt by being called "fat" or "ugly" than women. Regardless of his reasoning, it's really hard to convince someone that Trump is sexist with a quotes of him insulting a particular person, because it only shows he thinks badly of that person.
The statements of his which are the closest to sexism, in my opinion, are when he talks about women in general. When he does so, he tends to ascribe qualities he admires to them, although they aren't always qualities the rest of us admire: he thinks women in business are shrewd, cutthroat, strong, aggressive, and manipulative. In context, he seems to say these things with great admiration. It feels vaguely sexist, but I'm not even sure whether it feels more sexist against men or women. For example:
"Women have one of the great acts of all time. The smart ones act very feminine and needy, but inside they are real killers. The person who came up with the expression 'the weaker sex' was either very naive or had to be kidding."
Is that necessarily racist? Sam Harris has made similar arguments against Islam and the radicalization that is all too common. Since you can't distinguish moderate Muslims from radicalized Muslims, if you're being targeted by Muslim radicals, doesn't it naturally follow that you should restrict Muslim immigration to reduce the threat? This seems standard practice in times of war.
Assuming we agree that racism is "racial prejudice", and "prejudice" is holding "unreasonable preconceived judgments", is it not actually reasonable to be prejudiced against Muslims in the above scenario?
You could dispute that the threat from Muslim radicals was far too low to justify such a measure, but now we've switched to a more subjective debate and away from any obvious racist motives.
> But racism is a useful definition even if it's loosely defined to refer to people that consistently say negative things about certain races independent of their internal motives.
Yes, racism is literally "racial prejudice". The example you cited wasn't talking about Mexicans though, but a specific subset of Mexicans. It's like saying calling all New Yorkers assholes is racist against white people. It might be an incorrect opinion that happens to include a racial or ethnic name, but that doesn't make it racist.
To my recollection Trump did not "consistently say negative things about other races", he said negative things about specific subsets. That's not racist as others have pointed out to you.
What you're calling an "absurdity heuristic" just seems like a very specific reframing of Occam's razor. An explanation like "there's a Saudi conspiracy to develop amazing construction technology and hide it from the rest of the world" is complex, whereas an explanation like "really rich people sometimes do stupid things with their money" is simple. It shouldn't be mistaken for a foolproof way to identify truth, but it's a useful shortcut.
I came here to make basically this comment. I don't think it's about the complexity of the belief, though, it's about the complexity of the update to the rest of your beliefs the evidence would imply. In fact both "there's a Saudi conspiracy to develop amazing construction technology and hide it from the rest of the world" and "really rich people sometimes do stupid things with their money" are pretty complicated beliefs (involving complicated social constructs like theory of mind, deception, economics, socially constructed reality), but the latter belief doesn't require much updating to integrate, while the former requires shifting around many pieces of my understanding of reality. (If I had insider information on the existence of many conspiracies, and was one of the rich myself, I might find myself in the reverse position, where the former fits more naturally into my understanding of the world than the latter.)
I think you're theoretically right - "absurd = unnecessarily complicated" seems correct to me.
The value of the "absurdity heuristic" is that it connects with our feelings and intuitions about the simplicity of various competing explanations or predictions. These feelings probably result from an semi-conscious or unconscious synthesis of a large amount of information into an intuitive judgment. For me, the question of "when to stop" is driven by the opportunity cost of further analysis relative to other things I could be doing, not a straightforward desire for better accuracy on the topic at hand.
This post looks like it's an exercise in something like ethics, or a values system. Rationality as a whole promotes a set of values (like any religion), but these values happen to be restricted to certain domains, namely processing and communication of information.
In this case, the 'absurdity' filter can be understood simply as, you have to use your value system to decide which hypothesis are worth exploring and which ones aren't.
If i try to point this out directly - that we are articulating and acting on values _just_ like religions do - people will usually say, no no, this is just about instrumental rationality. If that's so, then why 'obligations' to others? And what's wrong with 'the cowards 'way out?
> But I hate this answer. It seems to be preemptively giving up and hoping other people are less lazy than you are.
Words like 'lazy' and 'coward' have an obvious moral valence to them. Wouldn't a more fair interpretation be something like 'people are different, they will naturally explore different parts of the world, and you only have so much time and attention. You can't _not_ use your value system when determining which hypothesis to explore and test, and which ones aren't worth the expiration'.
Clearly, you are articulating norms and values here. You are trying to explore what is and isn't good, in the realm of reasoning and communication. But do value systems constrain anticipation? If not, then in this community they must live in the Jungian shadow; forever preventing us from fully introspecting what exactly the rationality project is about: defining a religion with truth as its deity.
> Rationality as a whole promotes a set of values (like any religion), but these values happen to be restricted to certain domains, namely processing and communication of information.
This seems to me like a confusion of terminal values, instrumental values, and heuristics... if I may use the LW lingo.
Terminal values = things you want as such (e.g. feeling happy).
Instrumental values = things you want as tools to achieve other things (e.g. money allows you to buy stuff).
Heuristics = convenient shortcuts that work 99% of the time, and fail 1% of the time.
Having (terminal) values does not make you a religion. It just makes you an agent (i.e. someone who has preferences).
Being able to distinguish true statements from false statements is an instrumental value. It can help you achieve what you want. For example, if you are sick and want to be healthy again, it can be useful to distinguish between actual medicine and snake oil.
An example of a heuristic is "if something sounds absurd, it is usually false". It does not work perfectly. But it works most of the time, and it can save you a lot of effort, if you hear thousands of statements and do not have enough resources to investigate all of them separately.
> It seems to be preemptively giving up and hoping other people are less lazy than you are. It’s like answering a child’s question about how to do a math problem with “ask a grown-up”. A coward’s way out!
Scott is using an emotional language to make the text more pleasant to read. But the underlying issue is like this:
We hear a lot of statements, and we want to figure out which ones are true and which ones are false. (Because knowing that might hypothetically be useful for some purpose.) We do not have enough resources to fully investigate everything, so realistically we want to separate the statements into *three* buckets: "this is true", "this is false", and "this is complicated"; the last one meaning we did not spend enough resources on this one to figure it out.
Scott is basically asking, if a statement sounds absurd, whether it's okay to put it in the "false" basket, or rather in the "complicated" basket. The goal is, on one hand, to only put true statements in the "true" basket and only put false statements in the "false" basket; on the other hand, to leave as few as possible in the "complicated" basket because that one is not very useful for us.
He mentions a heuristics that says: If it feels absurd, don't think too much and put it into the "false" basket. If someone else, who seems like he thought about this issue more than you did, puts it in their "true" or "complicated" basket, move it into your "complicated" basket, too.
The problem with this heuristic is that it assumes that someone else will spend more resources on this question ( = "less lazy") than you did... but that is not guaranteed to happen, especially when other people use the same heuristic, or when you are the only person who cares about this question.
This heuristic resembles what people would do if they were afraid (= "coward’s way out") to actually pay attention to seemingly absurd statements. The problem is that this doesn't seem like a reliable way to generate true answers.
tl;dr -- words like "lazy" and "coward" are metaphors
I'm well aware of the LW lingo. Here's why I don't buy it: saying "things you want, as such are terminal values" is, in an of itself an act of epistemic smuggling. It's asserting that happiness just stops, as if people being happy were a causal dead end. Arguing that humans can have terminal values asserts that goals can arise ex nihilo, or instead of being caused by things further upstream which themselves may look much like goals that it's reasonable to call them goals.
This is part of the LW religion: instead of saying, yes, there is a purpose to being happy, yes, happiness itself is instrumental to something else (say, evolutionary fitness? the well being of the state?). I'm guessing you'll agree that happiness isn't some causal dead end, but that it advances other outcomes that might be seen as goals : the well being of the state for sure, but evolution might be seen as having the 'goal' of ... well, what, exactly? Is there some broader goal that existed before our own desires, and gave rise to our desires, instrumentally?
Answering _that_ question - _is_ there a nested set of goals, out of which our own desires arise - that is what religions do. Our eschatology is to say, nope, that's it, that's where it ends. Positing that there is no answer is still taking a stand!
We pretend this stance makes us different from groups that posit something abstract as a terminal value (like serving a god) or something concrete (like serving the state) - but this is just our own myth about what makes us good and other groups not good. Except we can't come out and say this, because it's giving up the game!
> Scott is using an emotional language to make the text more pleasant to read.
> tl;dr -- words like "lazy" and "coward" are metaphors
I don't buy this. He's stating in the comments that he feels like he "ought" to be able to answer these questions on his own. How do ought beliefs constrain anticipation? Elsewhere he mentions having an obligation to communicate a certain level of hesitation. Well, where does that come from? Why does that thing exist?
If you take instrumental rationality alone, take it really really seriously, it eventually starts telling you things like:
- be kind to others and they'll share information with you
- have a diverse group of people you communicate with, and they are more likely to uncover flaws in your map
- avoid getting too excited or too worked up because that will prevent you from considering evidence that you are wrong
- be humble minded; it's easy to be far too confident in something and be wrong
In other words, even if you _just_ look at instrumental values like rationality, you end up recreating teachings from a number of different religions, which to me makes it seem like, ok, we're in the same business, let's stop pretending we aren't.
Have you considered the possibility that, for some people, atheism, science, and education are in fact filling the same role in their lives as religion does for the religious, with the same shortcomings and criticisms often leveled at the religious?
If so, is there a special value in not calling it religion, even if it meets many of the same criteria we use to describe religion? Keep in mind that there are hundreds of different religions that are recognized as such, many of which do not meet standard Western notions of religion (i.e. are not one of the Abrahamic religions).
Sure, some people "just f-ing love science TM" without actually studying it.
But that just means that you can develop a religion around anything, not that everything is a religion. There are also people doing science qua science.
Agreed. Would you reformulate your response to The Ancient Geek with that in mind? He's not saying that all rationality-based thinking is religious, but a more specific claim that Rationalism (as in the specific group/movement) is religious.
"In this case, the 'absurdity' filter can be understood simply as, you have to use your value system to decide which hypothesis are worth exploring and which ones aren't"
Or as part of a triage, where you disregard the obviously false and obviously true.
There are plenty of statements whose truth or falsehood are non-obvious that you won’t bother investigating due to your values. Whereas you will likely investigate more absurd claims because of their impact on your presences.
For example I might claim to have cofounded a game company that sold to a child movie star and cryptocurrency scam artist. Is that worth your time and effort to investigate? It’s not an absurd claim but there’s no reward for investigating, so I think you’re unlikely to do it.
Now suppose you heard rumors that your new neighbor had paid off all the police and was running some international crime ring from next door, even thigh this sounds insane you might spend a little time trying to investigate because the answer influences you; you might decide to move away. This one sounds absurd on the face of it, but if the investigation can be done cheaply and the risk of being wrong is high enough, you’ll do the investigation.
Just for your personal calibration I enjoyed the whole point you made except the Lia Thomas example which could have been anything else less controversial, and not something where I'd need to ask you to for example define the word Woman and open that whole can of worms. Easier and less controversial examples will work better to get your point across - this example signals your tribe somewhat I suppose, but is that the priority of your comment? Perhaps, but just wanted to give you a data point on how you sound to a member of the audience here.
Anti-trans = pro objective reality. 🤷♀️. No one born with balls gets to play dress up with my immutable biology.
10 years ago I didn’t care, it wasn’t hurting anyone, and adults do weird crap all the time to themselves, and this wasn’t all that much different than women getting 57 plastic surgeries trying to look like a plastic 9” Barbie doll. But 10 years ago “progressives” weren’t advocating child sterilization and genital mutilation, nor were they trying to force college women, victims of domestic violence, or women in prison to share private intimate living spaces with men, even rapists, to coddle said man’s delusions. There also wasn’t passionate advocating for the “civil rights” of mediocre male athletes to play dress up with women’s biology in order to claim female athletic championships.
This is sort of a case of murder, arson, and jaywalking, except that the jaywalking is the most visible and self-evidently stupid and so complaining about the jaywalking is a useful tool to draw attention to the ideology that is also endorsing the murder & arson.
True - my main issue is human thinking being increasingly severed from reality. Though the whole men get access to naked women and girls to coddle their “feelings” and child genital mutilation certainly add a particular degree of passion to the gender ideology aspect of being severed from reality.
Pick an issue - Covid, energy production, economics, child development, food production, building a skyscraper as long as Ireland in 8 years, etc. We have become severed from reality.
Innovation is an amazing ability of humans. Creating something new, or a different way of doing things.
In many ways our society is no longer able to differentiate between genuinely innovative pursuits and ridiculous fantasies. Increasingly we waste money, and destroy real human beings, on fantasies hoping money and belief will magically produce outcomes.
Unless the Saudi government is hiding several million slaves and dozens of square kilometers of building materials, the Line being completed in 8 years is no more possible than Solar panels in NY or Germany producing even 30% of the kw claimed as their “capacity,” and used to justify their use, unless they can magically transport to a lower latitude and make the Earth stall it’s spin in early afternoon for 10 hours everyday. Both are as likely to happen as for a human man to magically start ovulating simply by taking estrogen drugs.
I don’t take the easy path in life. Woman is an adult human female. Female is the sex that has ova. There is only something controversial about that to people who think human belief will somehow override human nature. Our biological sex is the most innate and immutable part of our being. We have zero ability to change it in any functional way. Refusing to accept reality is how people think they are “good people” by giving male feelings priority over immutable reality of actual females. It’s arrogant, entitled, and absurd. Same thing describes evil dictators. Your feelings or offense to that reality doesn’t change reality.
You're not talking about reality now. You're talking about how you and other people might choose to use a word.
If the question with NEOM was whether they were using the words "tall as a skyscraper" differently from us, then maybe the analogy would be relevant. But that doesn't seem to be what's going on.
If choosing to use a word differently didn't have implications in reality, I think people would care quite a bit less. However, the people choosing to use a word differently from NCmom are doing so in support of an ideology that is, over here in reality, sterilizing and mutilating children.
No I’m not because the utilization of that word now has legal attachments. Women don’t want a mentally ill man as a college roommate, prison cell mate, or domestic violence shelter co-habitant and guess who gets kicked to the curb? Real women and girls.
We wouldn’t be talking about this if it was nothing more than differences in dialect that came without consequence.
The controversial nature of the Lia Thomas example is why it’s such a good one. The current central claim of gender theory - that there is binary “brain gender” and that this is what people have always been talking about when they divide the population into ‘men’ and ‘women’ is so obviously dodgy that the only possible explanation for why some people have such a vociferous full-throated belief in it is ‘it’s social’
So we’re all supposed to pivot from “Larry Summers is satan incarnate” to “everyone knows that men and women have totally different brains”; and this is considered normal intellectual discourse???
It's so weird that it's hard to believe. But yes. So, for instance, here's Chase Strangio (who had and still has a very responsible position in the ACLU) from six years ago:
"Unfortunately, in our discussions of anti-trans legislation and in efforts to increase public awareness about the transgender community, we— advocates, journalists, storytellers— are falling back on the very narrative framings that entrench the idea that transgender women are really men and transgender men are really women. Most insidious, we use the same language that opponents of transgender people use, carelessly referring to women who are trans as having “male genitals” or being “born with a male body” or being “anatomically male.” This language is both factually wrong and dangerous
...
By embracing a narrative that one is born with a “male body,” we reinforce the idea that only the bodies we assign male at birth— bodies that have medically normative penises— are male.
But that simply isn’t true. It is a choice to refer to some bodies as male and some bodies as female, not a fact. Our genital characteristics are one component of who we are and do not define, medically or biologically, our sex.
...
if we classify people as male and female, such classifications should only be made based on a person’s gender identity"
It's quite rare for the belief system to be laid out as clearly as that but, yes, this is a quite normal opinion in the Professional Managerial Classes. The ACLU, by the way, just this year filed a legal deposition that said, among other things, that "humans are not sexually dimorphic"
I agree that using Lia isn't peak audience calibration but I also agree with being willing to use her as an example because it is unfair to 'bio women' when their competitions are open to people with large sex based physical advantages, and much more so that women's jails and other vulnerable spaces are and are at risk of being opened as well. I see this as an injustice worthy of risking spending social capital
I could have also gone down the path of our government wasting hundreds of billions on dirty, ecologically destructive, weather dependent “renewables” energy that can’t possibly power any meaningful portion of our grid. I could point out the people cheering this nonsense don’t have a clue about the energy input/ actual realized output ratio regarding various forms of energy production, and they flip out on anyone trying to tell them the truth about it. Those humans that actually know those numbers aren’t stupid enough to think wind mills and solar farms are a “good,” or even sane ideas (nuclear would be a sane answer). Our government, the one we elected, has spent over a decade wasting hundreds of billions in public funds to enrich those who control Chinese slave labor. But, most here don’t actually care enough to learn anything about the hundreds of billions in public money wasted on useless “renewable” energy projects right here at home. Why would anyone expect the Saudi public to do better when their leaders will literally kill them for objecting?
Most people do however get basic reproduction. And yet they still buy into the physically impossible. They demand tens of billions in public money get wasted a year attempting to accomplish the physically impossible, with a side of child sterilization and genital mutilation. They still convince themselves there is no harm in denying objective reality, no matter how many people get harmed in the process.
Both a fair comparisons. Both point out many of the same people who feel superior for pointing out how insane people “over there” are have no clue history will look back on this time and note the complete insanity right here at home.
Some Googling says that it would take about 21,000 square miles of solar panels to power the US. Depending on how someone feels about the absurdity of that number, it may affect their feelings about solar power as an option, or even about the feasibility of The Line.
I think the difference is that in the Lia Thomas question the two sides are in disagreement mostly about how the word "woman" ought to be defined, while in the NEOM case the two sides are probably mostly in agreement over what it would mean for NEOM to "work".
Isn’t it great how much western society “progressives” values women more than others? 🙄. So much that half the population thinks women are so irrelevant and useless we shouldn’t even have one to define the only ones capable of giving birth to the next generation.
I disagree. There aren’t competing definitions of woman as there is no alternate definition to adult human female. A circular description is of “feels like a woman” is not a definition as it fails to define woman. Moreover, the interchanging of male and female, despite no push to define female as an organism with either ovaries or testes, yet increasingly the proponents of the you were born in the “wrong” body theory call trans women females. What the argument is really over is human power to override the physical limitations of nature. I’ll take nature every time in that bet.
Don’t get me wrong, in 100 years we’ll likely be over this lunacy conflating gender norms with actual biological sex, but still no man will have ovulated human eggs from his balls. Give the Saudis 100 years, and the Line could be a real city, with 9 million probably prisoners.
Where it’s the same is demanding others claim something that is not possible actually is. Not in 8 years, not with the current coercive power. It’s not physically possible. Not any more possible in reality than a man ovulating eggs from his balls. Okay, maybe the Saudis is slightly more possible.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Doesn't that give us the good parts of the absurdity heuristic, and leave out the bias?
Relativity sounds absurd; but if you show me the textbooks and the experiments, I can see it'd take an awfully large conspiracy to be lying about it, especially when the math seems to check out. It's a big claim but there's lots of evidence offered, much of which I could check for consistency, some of which I could even replicate (Michelson-Morely!).
Neom sounds absurd, and there's no evidence offered that the Saudi king can make it work, and plenty of explanatory power in his own vanity.
In either case, we're just saying "okay, is there big evidence to go with this big claim?"
Admittedly, sometimes a claim sounds absurd because it sounds bigger than it really is. Relativity doesn't noticeably affect time under ordinary life conditions. Evolution doesn't literally mean a monkey gave birth to a human. AI safety doesn't literally mean the movie _Terminator_.
But extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence. "Absurd!" is just shorthand for:
"Why do you expect me to swallow that without first showing me evidence?"
I believe that it would take an awfully big conspiracy, for awfully small benefit, to pull off a lie about general relativity.
I believe it takes a very small conspiracy, for very obvious benefit, to sell the Saudi king on an unreasonable but glamorous and expensive proposal for his new city.
People fall for scams all the time. Even well informed people that “should know better” It seems like we really only get better on the margin with improved institutions and incentive structures that are hard won through trial and error.
I agree with you, but I'm having trouble seeing the difference (for someone who cannot understand the underlying science) between believing one theory verses the other. Or to take a recent example with significant real world implications - Covid protocols and restrictions, vaccines, etc., from either side. Lots of people created lots and lots of evidence in favor of and against everything related to Covid. It's not at all hard to find hundreds of reputable sounding sources who are completely at odds with each other. The worst part is, many of the things the public were told really were part of conspiracies. For an easy example, telling people early on that they did not need to wear masks, and then saying the opposite. We know that was a conspiracy of the top experts to mislead the public.
The heuristic to avoid scams was strongly evident, but I can't say it was wrong, given the general inability to tell truth from both indifferent and deliberate lies.
Our "absurd" threshold is social because we have to watch out for scams, including "Pascal's Mugging" scams.
If you tell me the AIs may wipe out humanity, and I seriously believe you, then I'll want to give money to any cause that might stop that. But that's true for any apocalypse, including scam apocalypses.
So I can't afford to lightly believe in your AI apocalypse, even if it's true. I need you to give me so much evidence that I know it's not a scam to take my money.
Personally, I know enough to see the difference between the AI safety issue and standard millennarian world-ending fantasies. Pandemics weren't a made-up fear; neither is AI safety.
But sometimes, when we say "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," there's an extra meaning:
"How can I believe you, but not fall for a bunch of fads and scams that sound a whole lot like you?"
The simple explanation here is that cognitive resources are limited and we have to decide whether, and how long, to evaluate all hypothesis based upon an expected ROI. If we think the expected ROI of investigating an absurd-sounding hypothesis is negative, we won't do it.
But this raises the question of which value system are we using, and makes clear it's impossible to separate fact-based reasoning from our own values.
Yes! Although I think it's not so much our differing values as our differing priors.
Unlike me, a medieval Catholic would be more suspicious of an injected vaccine than of a saint's miraculous relic.
Why? Not because the medieval Catholic values being healthy any less. It's because my prior is that science works and religion doesn't, and his is nearly opposite.
Actually, maybe "different values" is the just outward sign of groups with different priors.
E.g., rural Americans have a lot less reliance on strangers and bureaucratic infrastructures day to day than an urban type like me, and that difference maybe explains why they often have anti-stranger and anti-bureaucrat values compared to me. Immigrants and government programs must seem a lot more suspect when you're not already seeing lots of both in your daily life. Naturally, I think they're wrong... but I would, wouldn't I? Look at my background priors!
I agree that priors play a role here, but values clearly do, too. Expected value is a product of (probability of success) X (value of success). Priors effect the probability, but values obviously determine the value.
In the rationalist community it’s like there’s this aggressive unwillingness to reason about values and the role they influence our thinking. We tend to act like they are strictly orthogonal, when the reality is that our values determine where our attention does, and doesn’t go.
Do you have any favorite examples? (Group A says it's absurd, group B investigates, the difference isn't knowledge or priors but values.)
I can easily come up with "that might pay off, but I don't want to work in that industry." But to resort to not just "eh, not my forte" but "that's absurd" based on values not priors sounds like an unusually strong case of motivated reasoning. But you seem to think it happens a lot - I'm guessing you have some cases you're thinking of?
> the difference isn't knowledge or priors but values
Sure - suppose scott had some friend who really wanted to spend $10M investing in Noem and asked scott to investigate this project.
Given the higher value of determining truth or falsehood, i think scott would investigate more.
Or, bitcoin. To some people, "money that states can't control" is so screamingly obviously valuable that they investigate bitcoin further. To other people, it seems like a totally unimportant thing, so bitcoin sounds like some dumb pyramid scheme.
The thing is, if you wanted, you could phrase this difference in terms of priors (i.e. the probability that state-sponsored money would contribute to GDP). Maybe I'd ask you, how can a person tell the difference between their priors, and their values, on topics where they have very strong beliefs?
> In the rationalist community it’s like there’s this aggressive unwillingness to reason about values and the role they influence our thinking.
I agree that the possibility and consequences of different values should be examined deeper.
From my perspective, "don't assume different values" is a useful *heuristic*, because assuming arbitrary different values is a popular lazy answer (e.g. "they hate our freedom"). It allows you to stop thinking about other possible explanations and considering their relative weight. It is mostly unfalsifiable, because even if the other person disagrees, you can still call them a liar or a hypocrite.
So I would guess that in 9 out of 10 situations, "different values" is not the most accurate answer. Instead, you should consider how things seem from the other person's perspective, what are their actual options and incentives, what do they believe. The probability that you are wrong about their beliefs or their situation is quite high.
(Even when the values are actually different, it still can be the case that the observed different of behavior is like 10% explained by the difference in the values, and 90% explained by the difference of circumstances. So the explanation that only talks about different values could still be incorrect in this sense.)
But of course, sometimes... like, when you have a violent psychopath torturing his victims to death and enjoying it, it would be silly to pretend that he actually deeply cares about his neighbors' wellbeing, but honestly mistakes their screams of pain for expressions of pleasure.
This seems to miss the whole section of the post about how it's harder when you aren't just focused on what other people are saying and need to actually figure out what's true for yourself? "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is all well and good when someone else is coming to you with claims, but if you've come up with a bunch of extraordinary claims yourself it doesn't help you figure out which ones are worth looking for evidence for, and how hard it's worth looking.
If the absurdity heuristic is just "don't dedicate mental resources to things that have a tiny probability of being true/coming to pass" (with an asterisk about tail risks), I think the 1901 analogies shouldn't really make you apply it less.
Of the set of stories which would sound just as absurd as the internet one if told to someone in 1901, only a vanishingly small fraction came true. It may well have been rational to dismiss the internet story at the time, and saying otherwise may just be hindsight bias.
I don't even think that the internet would sound absurd in 1901. People in 1901 grew up in a world with ubiquitous telegraphs, and they're starting to see the telephone take over. Converting an image to the equivalent of Morse Code and transmitting it over wires isn't going to blow their minds (the first proper fax machine would be trialled just seven years later).
Suggest to people of 1901 that in a bit over a century it will be possible for people to have sophisticated personal telegraph machines that can send and receive information from all over the world, and I don't think it will sound crazy.
You're probably right actually. I don't really want to focus on that though since I do agree it's possible to tell stories about the present which sound absurd in the past.
This is a fantastic point. The leap from “telegraph” to “television” isn’t beyond belief: “what if I told you that in a hundred years every room in your house would have a hologram projector that included Smell-O-Vision?!?” Shrug. Ok.
The word "absurd" is covering up at least two gradients of variation -
1) just how unlikely are we talking? A worldwide network of prostitute-dispensing-UFOs is unlikely, but it's practically a certainy compared to the likelihood that gravity obeys color. Relativity, _being true_, was considered very absurd for quite some time, and honestly, still feels a bit absurd.
"The Line" looks unlikely to succeed by its own metrics, as-is. But I might be willing to put down a bet at 1000:1 odds.
2) What timescale are we covering? in 1900, a worldwide network of adding machines exchanging representations of pictures _would_ be absurd, because several technological, economic, and social changes had yet to take place, and the 'absurd' thing wouldn't come to be for about a century.
"The Line" isn't a claim that "the world of 2120 will heavily feature engineered mega-cities that would look to the world of 2020 as if they were sci-fi dreams", it's a claim that _the thing we're breaking ground on_ will work.
---
The post seems to be asking "how 'absurd' is so absurd we can stop discussing it, or stop thinking about it, as a serious going thing?"
And on that, my rough heuristics would be
- On a timeline under 20 years, the cutoff for "too absurd to be worth discussing" might be somewhere around the 1:10,000 mark. This can be tweaked based on the cost involved.
- On a timeline over 20 years, the sky's the limit, but on the other hand, nothing can really be said with any certainty anyway, so it's _less_ useful to talk about.
In the example of "The Line", I proposed that it might be something like a 1:1,000 chance of success. This might be considered non-absurd, except for the fact that it's such a high-cost endeavor, in terms of human time, money, ecological impact, and the upside so mundane, that it _should_ be laughed out of serious discussion until its proponents have come back with a much stronger case for why it should be possible and valuable.
As another example - earlier this century, there was some buzz about having possibly discovered a reactionless drive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive). This was very very unlikely, that we'd discovered something that violated laws we believed inviolable, rather than being measurement error. let's say 1:10m. But, the potential upside was also very high - and the cost of taking it seriously was relatively cheap - some days or months of laboratory time. The EmDrive may have been absurd, but perhaps not _so_ absurd as to preclude serious discussions about it.
One thing that makes it more realistic is the their plan to be incremental. They aren’t planning to build all of it at once, but start on one side and build from there. This is very feasible… there are skyscrapers in Riyadh. They can build what is effectively a cluster of 8 of them , even cost-ineffectively to start and the n keep going. Building the whole length might be absurd, but I see no reason why they couldn’t build the Leeds Certified version of Kowloon walled city. Will they pivot to a better surface-area design, will they keep blowing money on the original design, will they just let it fail on move onto the next project? Hard to tell, but I see the problem space as more interesting than the binary of completing the vision in full as it stands today
Yes, but he doesn't agree that it's absurd, which is a different threshold. (His exact words are "Like, I'm not saying Neom will be a huge success or whatever.")
He's accusing you of cognitive self-dealing (roughly, of straw-manning where you could have steel-manned), and I don't think your discussion above clears you of that charge.
Suppose we taboo the word "absurd" here. What do Scott and Alexandros disagree about, really?
I guess that Alexandros is accusing Scott of strawmanning what could be an important project without doing the work to justify it, but Alexandros seems to have no higher confidence in the success of Neom than Scott* and does not appear to have done any additional investigating to reach that conclusion. Is the heuristic at work to give people the benefit of the doubt, if you aren't absolutely certain and haven't done a deep dive?
But given that neither party would put the probability of success above 1% (my assessment, not a quote from either), what are we even arguing about here?
*Evidenced by the fact that Scott publicly offered to make a bet with Alexandros on this, at what sounded like any odds, and he refused.
You have no evidence that Alexandros would not give the project a probability of success above 1%. Again, his exact words were "Like, I'm not saying Neom will be a huge success or whatever," which is completely consistent with it having, say, a 20% chance of success, something that might make the project unwise, but still not appropriate to dismiss with mockery.
You suggest that we avoid the word "absurd," but "absurdity" is literally in the title of Scott's piece, and he uses it throughout. In fact, it's part of the *theme* of the piece, so you're tacitly undermining what Scott wrote, not steelmanning it.
That's hardly evidence of anything. I don't take bets like this, for reasons orthogonal to my estimate of probabilities, and this could easily be true of Alexandros as well.
Betting is a particular practice, and no one is obliged to engage in it. It's like investment. There are many possible good investments, and the decision not to participate in a particular investment often does not represent a judgment that it is bad.
The answer here is that I don't think I have enough information to opine on the project, and the piece didn't help either. On the one hand, the Saudis don't have problems building some of the tallest buildings in the world. On the other, this is a whole other level. I'd have to go dig into the stages of the project and the related timelines to make up my mind. I'm generally suspicious towards "big state" projects, but then again, I bet someone also thought the pyramids of Egypt were a bridge to nowhere when they were being built.
My opinion is "looks unlikely, I don't know", and what's more I think people should practice saying "I don't know" a lot more often.
Do you happen to be involved in building ambitious things or engineering of some kind? I think I'm trying to convey an intuition I have developed while building stuff that few people think are possible, and I'm pretty tired of low-effort "that's impossible" responses. Wondering if you have similar background.
It's one thing to say Neom's design is absurd, but quite another to say "murdering the people who previously lived in the area" in reference to a single man who, according to the Saudis (and AFAIK not denied by anyone), was armed and shooting at police. You don't need sophisticated philosophy to see how misleading this framing is.
That's irrelevant to this post, and using force to remove people from their land and shooting them if they resist is not meaningfully different to killing people to take their land.
True, but people is different from person. (Though likely many of his friends and family might have tried to resist had they not known they would certainly die.)
Does your country not have eminent domain laws? If the police come to enforce such a law, do you think you'd be excused for trying to shoot the officer?
I like Neom project. I hate living in cities although I currently live in the city myself. It is just because like majority of people I am not rich and for economic reasons, transportation issues, proximity to work, shops etc. I have to live in the city although I really feel that it is like a life in prison.
Neom, the Line is a fantastic compromise. From one side you will be close to nature, even if it is only a view over the desert. Maybe they can put some irrigation and greenhouses to grow food for the city that will make the view slightly greener. On the other hand it would be a city infrastructure. The space between two walls would be like a street with shops, bars, offices and residential quarters. It is a fantastic project.
Now back to the reality, of course it seems absurd to think that it could be built with merely 500 billion dollars when the real costs are at least 10 times of that. Maybe if they could built the city only 17 km long but even that is unlikely due to corruption and general unprofitability of this project. But it is a different thing to admit that the project is not feasible for various reasons rather than to think that the idea itself is absurd. The US might never have free-for-all universal health care but it is still not an absurd idea.
It is like thinking that Egyptian pyramids are absurd. One estimate was that building a pyramid today would cost 5 billion dollars. It is a lot even today when we have big machines to move stones and project management theories how to organize big projects. In the past it must be unbelievably expensive and basically an absurd project. And yet, pyramids were built because some powerful people believed in the necessity of building them. Who knows if Neom could become a reality if some powerful people believe in its necessity? Or it could be some other seeming absurd project. Or in contrary, if they lose faith in this or another project then “absurd” becomes self-fullfiling prediction.
Comment on the comments: There are now at least two comments which say something like:
"<correct sounding general statement about absurdity>, as an example consider <thing I consider absurd/non-absurd but which a significant fraction of people disagree with me about>."
Come on surely you guys can figure out examples which all readers will agree with you on.
The meta-meta-argument is that it's brilliant to pick something that one tribe thinks is absurd and the other tribe thinks is self-evident because that demonstrates the social-proof nature of absurdity that also neatly explains why the Saudis are going along with Neom's The Line.
It looks bad that a group that happily discusses immortality, The Singularity, Roko's Basilisk, a universe turned into paperclips, etc., etc., cannot muster any sympathy for Neom.
I think there's a lot of sympathy for NEOM. But I think that someone who claimed that DALL-E 2 was *already* Roko's Basilisk (or that DALL-E 3 will be, so that people are already working on it) would be asked for a lot of proof. NEOM is a project that claims to be in the works, not just a claim that some time in an unspecified number of decades, a project like this will work out.
Roko's Basilisk doesn't look to me like something "happily discussed". Like, even Eliezer IIRC admitted he fucked up on that one.
Should also be noted that the paperclip maximiser is more a proof of concept than something we expect to have happen in that specific form. If you polled rationalists for probabilistic forecasts of "the universe is converted to literal paperclips" then you'd get numbers well under 0.1%.
There have been times in human history when inventors working with governments have achieved a 10x or 100x breakthrough. Invention of radio, digging the Panama Canal the second time, building the pyramids, etc.
Neom would be exciting if they were showing that they understood the magnitude of the challenge they were taking on and were working on the hard R&D problems to try to solve it (like building a mobile factory-on-tracks that will build the city 1m across at a time with input feedstocks from nuclear-reactor-powered furnaces for steel and mixing concrete).
They aren't. It's a vanity project that's deeply braindead at the top that has no plan to even start a plan to develop the tools to work out when tools they need.
No, it's really, really not. What IS a bad look is throwing all these things together and acting like they're all comparable. There's no obvious reason why the singularity won't occur at *some* point. It's true as a matter of computer science that a sufficiently advanced AI with enough computational resources could very likely wield tremendous power and have the ability to undergo recursive self-improvement, and the main question is how far away this is.
Most people disagree with the plausibility of Roko's basilisk, though we're dealing with an extremely speculative future technological issue that we cannot intuitively dismiss out of hand but also one which nobody is confidently declaring is true.
And nobody *ACTUALLY* thinks the universe will be turned into paperclips, it's a thought experiment to demonstrate the concept of perverse instantiation - I don't know how you could suggest otherwise except through deliberate dishonesty).
Neom is nothing like this. The issues with Neom are VERY near-term economic, financial, logistical, engineering, scientific and other issues that we understand very well.
We're not talking about a distant, speculative technological development. We're talking about a construction project that is supposed to be finished in the very near future and there's no conceivable way that they will be able to afford this project with the budget allotted. We're not talking about something that could eventually become possible through a century of scientific and technological development, we're literally discussing a current construction project that can only work if the Saudis have been sitting on revolutionary construction techniques that allow construction of extremely high tech buildings at a fraction of the cost of anyone else (despite the fact that they need to hire foreigners to design everything for them).
The uncertainty around AI is huge. The uncertainty around the line is extremely small. There's just so few degrees of freedom for skeptical projections to be subverted by the Saudis.
I 90% agree with you, but here's where I 10% differ:
The implicit assumption that's being made here (apart from the ones about AI) is that 2040 is a long time from now but 2030 is a short time from now. If you're serious about thinking that the Singularity has a decent chance of happening in the 21st century, then all your estimates about the future will need to become fuzzier. "NEOM will only succeed if we have a slow AGI takeoff starting in 2026 that funds itself through building The Line for the Saudis in exchange for $500 billion" is different from "NEOM is impossible."
It is possible for there to exist a statement X that is true, and yet also anyone who believes statement X is true is crazy, because craziness is judged on not based on whether the statements you believe are true, but whether the process by which you arrived at them is crazy. If in 1901, someone says that they know for a fact that in 100 there there will network of blah blah blah adding machines, you would be right to judge them as crazy, because there is no plausible non-crazy chain of evidence and reasoning that could lead them to this conclusion. If you are Einstein, who has just finished deriving the speed of light, but not yet told anyone about it, and someone comes to you with this statement about relative speeds that they know for a fact is true, concluding that they are crazy would still be reasonable, though you'd likely want to consider other explanations such as "they've been spying on me" and "they are a brilliant physicist that I somehow haven't heard of". For a more modern example, if you told me that you know for a fact that there will be a AI singularity by 2050, I would probably conclude that you are crazy, though I may also consider the explanation that you are wildly overconfident, or don't actually know what a probability is. Compared to if you told me that you believed there was a distinct possibility of AI singularity by 2050, and it was more likely than not, I would not call you crazy. Whether there does end up being an AI singularity by 2050 is irrelevant, because the process by which you arrived at the conclusion is what makes you crazy or not, not the actual conclusion. I also wouldn't hire someone to invest money on my behalf _just_ because they correctly predicted some low probability event far in advance, I would look at their process for generating predictions. If it seems like a process that is capable of consistently generating correct predictions, I will judge them a genius. If they (earnestly) tell me that it's because they are communicating with themselves from the future, or god, or "hidden energy", I'd probably judge them crazy _because they made a correct prediction_.
Now having determined your investment advisor is crazy (they believe they are communicating with the future/god/super-ai) AND you determined they have had consistently above market returns … are you crazy if you don’t invest with them anyway?
I think there is a difference between "I think this is true now"/"I think this happened in the past" and "I think this will happen/be true in the future."
The whole question could be reframed as "when do you think Neom will not be absurd?" If you believe that someday (maybe someday soon!) humanity might spread across the stars, build great cities in the canyons of Mars, invent nanomachines that extract buildings of superstrong carbon nanofibers directly from the soil -- then the question about Neom isn't How? But When? Also, still Why?
I think there's several different levels of absurdity which people keep conflating here. Physical absurdity, economic absurdity, and design absurdity.
Is it physically absurd? No, it is entirely possible to build it (with the possible exception of some of the claims about the train system).
Is it economically absurd? If built all in one go, yes. If built in stages, selling off each stage to fund the next one, then no. It depends on whether you can find enough people willing to buy property in it, at the price you'd need to sell it for. I'm not in the target market for a high-rise apartment in the Saudi desert but I'm hesitant about declaring that nobody is, because there's markets for all sorts of things in the world that I'm not personally interested in. Still, that leads into the next question:
Is it absurd from a design point of view? Probably. If you are going to build a new city in an empty part of Saudi Arabia close to the Suez Canal (which is not necessarily a bad idea) then this seems like a silly way to do it; the disadvantages of the 500m height and the linear form factor outweigh the advantages.
It becomes a whole lot less silly if you just scale it down, though. Make it half the height and it's much cheaper to build, make it one tenth the length and it becomes easy to get around. And you've still got a respectable-sized walkable city of 450K people.
My current theory on "The Line" is that someone mixed "Inspiration for the next important project" and "best recent video game featuring the middle east".
On the original quoted example about absurdity bias, I think that a smart and well educated person from 1900 would be able to distinguish the truths from the lies there if they were allowed to ask follow-up questions, thoroughly interrogating our time traveller on the details of the supposed future. What happens if the shade of blue is slightly off? What equations exactly govern the distortion of space as you approach the speed of light? What has changed the economics of male prostitution so much as to make this scheme economically viable? How do you convert lesbians into numbers?
You can make anything sound absurd by describing it in a sufficiently wacky way, but reality holds up under interrogation while absurdity falls apart.
(What if those were bad examples and you could make up an absurd scenario that _would_ hold up under careful scrutiny? Then it probably isn't all that absurd. You could probably convince the people of 1900 that the Austro-Hungarian Empire dominates all of Eurasia in 2012, but that's not absurd, it's just untrue.)
Just practically speaking, I find that in a lot of cases, made-up ideas untethered from reality hold up under interrogation better than the truth. People with wild ideas always have a long, detailed explanation of why they’re right. They make sure everything holds together. But the truth has no obligation to make itself seem to hold together. The person telling the truth sometimes has to shrug and say, “Yeah, I guess it doesn’t make sense, but I saw what I saw.”
All you need to do is say that you don't see how it's possible (and give the reasons why you think it isn't possible). Saying "it's absurd" is essentially conflating opinion with fact. It's adding "something extra" that's not necessary, that's extraneous.
This is ubiquitous on the Internet, and in the long run doesn't add value.
Even "In my opinion it's absurd" is better, but still sub-optimal; you need to account for arguing from personal incredulity, and "I think it'd absurd" can run afoul of that problem.
I like to spend a minute on a back of the envelope calculation wherever relevant. If anyone is seriously proposing X, and I'm writing a blog post criticizing X, I will apply at least a BOTEC level of analysis.
Kingdom Centre in Saudi Arabia is 76.8m * 302m * 37.8m and cost US$453 million in 2002, multiplied by 1.65 to adjust for inflation through 2022. This comes to $850/m^3. I previously calculated ( https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122/comment/8116431 ) that the Neom Line would be $58/m^3 if they spend $1T. So it's off by an order of magnitude, but maybe still possible to do the project if they can sell the condos for more than the cost of construction. They could build 1% of the line, sell condos and office space to get their construction costs back with a profit, and rinse and repeat until they run out of buyers. Or with enough loans those steps could be somewhat parallelized. Real estate developers usually use tons of leverage and sell houses whenever they're completed rather than waiting for the entire subdivision to be completed.
I think Scott's prediction "Saudi Arabia builds a structure at least 100m x 100m x 1000m before 2040 or the Singularity, whichever comes first: <1%" was very overconfident. 100x100x1000 would cost only $8.5 billion at Kingdom Centre's $/m^3. MBS can easily spend that much on whatever he wants to build so long as it's possible with current technology. I would put the odds at 50% for the same prediction.
If NEOM just claimed to be a bunch of adjacent skyscrapers, like what they've done in Dubai, then this would make sense. But the structure is claimed to be entirely different from that, with a continuous wall of some sort (that enables climate control of a sort, while still being well-ventilated?). I think it's fair to just multiply the volumetric cost of a skyscraper by this volumetric cost as a steel-man lower bound on the price, but you'd need to say more to make it plausible that you could keep the costs similar to that for this new type of structure. (Presumably things like labor and equipment costs are going to be a lot more expensive when you can't use the existing shipping facilities of a city.)
I think the continuous wall design suggests economies of scale that drive volumetric costs somewhat down, not up, relative to skyscrapers. Building in an empty desert 10 miles from the city is probably somewhat easier than building in the middle of a busy city, due to a combination of land costs, traffic, and trying not to mess up the things that are already built there while you dig the foundation.
An empty desert 10 miles from Riyadh sounds like it would be cheaper than building in Riyadh. But this looks like it's over 100 miles from the city of Tabuk, and about 600 miles from Medina.
I think building a continuous wall would be cheaper per volume than building a single skyscraper, for a team with equal history building both. But I think the world has a *lot* of experience building regular-sized skyscrapers, and *no* experience with the new issues that arise when building a long one like this (what are the internal divisions like? how are staircases and elevators spaced?) so you're not going to get those economies of scale until you've already built a large part of it and developed the expertise.
Building anything close to the line in relatively short succession will singlehandedly inflate material costs which will likely undercut economies of scale.
Why be wary of the social epistemology? Do you hope to contain all human knowledge in your brain one day? Why would you hope to be able to do epistemology by yourself? I think rationalists should embrace social knowledge and epistemology, treat humanity as one huge complex sentient machine.
I guess it triggers the same instinct in me as living off handouts from other people; you can do it if you have to, but seems better to be self-sufficient if you can.
I still don't understand this. When you read wikipedia, is that living off a handout? What about people reading your blog who get value from the analysis you do but aren't donating?
Are you saying that you feel you should able to personally investigate every question that makes you curious or hypothesis about which you have doubt?
Reading Wikipedia saves a lot of time. But what if there is a topic that is important for you, and someone tells you "actually, the Wikipedia page on this topic is wrong, but the admins ban everyone who tries to correct it"?
It would be nice to have an option other than "blindly trust Wikipedia" (or "blindly trust when strangers tell you that Wikipedia is wrong").
When I read the bit about Lee de Forest’s fraud prosecution I was intrigued and wanted to find out more. However the link from Eliezer’s article is now dead and other sources I found suggest that while he was found not guilty, his business partners were not so fortunate.
The actual quote provided seems pretty convincing evidence for the proposition ‘some people found his claims so absurd as to be prima facie evidence of fraud’ but I have no idea where it comes from.
It looks like the CA HSR project has slightly more than doubled in price and added a few more years since then, and Musk has shown that he can in fact make money selling cars, but there really hasn't been any more support for his Hyperloop idea.
I think that most good big ideas start out with a really flawed version that can only slowly be beaten into a working version via a process of iteration. Obviously the back-of-the-napkin version is going to be flawed, and shooting holes in it is definitely part of the process, but it shouldn't be the last word.
What's the difference between hyperloop and NEOM? Demand. There's obvious demand for hyperloop if it can be built to something approximating the back-of-the-napkin specs. The demand for a giant linear city in Saudi Arabia is much less clear. Technical problems can often be overcome, but the problem of building something that nobody wants is intrinsically unsolveable.
If Musk's enthusiasm and his fans have brought this forward, that could be useful. But the idea is much older, and it's not clear that his proposal actually helped advance the science in any way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain
Is Musk enthusiastic for Hyperloop? He kept control of SpaceX, Tesla, and the Boring Company but passed off hyperloop activity to anyone who wanted to work on it.
I feel like the quoted example of absurdity bias does not fit well here. The examples he quoted are clearly formulated to be absurd, mostly by being oddly specific. Take the black sphere one, for example: These might simply be floating houses or teleporter endpoints. It's quite obvious that some of these houses would also house prostitutes and therefore you'd be able to order one from there.
It's the same thing about the internet example: This is even a stretch as it is - is one of the primary use-cases for the internet really lesbian porn? Why specifically mention encoding or the 69 meme? I'm not even sure which one is referenced here. If, on the other hand, you told that persons that we found a way to make our computers/calculators really, really fast and connected them all up and suddenly that person will probably not be as skeptical. Then you might also add that people also use it for sexual content and it turned out that's something that's quite desired, depending on that persons view they probably won't even be surprised.
The presentation of Neom doesn't fall into the same category, since they're not presenting it by making it intentionally overly absurd and focusing on specific, minor details to detract from the somewhat reasonable big picture. They're completely serious. They also don't seem to bother to explain the somewhat ambitious aspects like the super fast travel and the strange shape. Giving these aspects a pass because, if you just formulate hard enough, you can make everything sound absurd is not a good argument IMO - it's just not an apples to apples comparison.
---
On whether we should accept absurdity as an argument, I think this is actually pretty simple: It's basically a (slightly smug) way of saying "I'm gonna need some evidence to believe this". If your point isn't really important for a decision, as this stated opinion probably is, I don't think it's necessary to dig deep into a topic when the fact that this is pretty absurd is obvious to the casual observer. It'd be different if your opinion did matter a lot (a judge shouldn't be as easy to accept this argument, for example, and neither should your investment advisor) or if some people you trust point out that you might be wrong with this.
I felt as though the absurdity argument against Neom was a combination of multiple arguments, which are not entirely spelled out because any of them would work and it's assumed that most readers can recreate multiple of them without help:
(1) People who are experts at this have looked at this and declared that it will be much more difficult than is claimed.
(2) There is lots of low-hanging fruit: obvious changes that could obviously improve the design. One example mentioned in the comments is turning the thing on its side: it's easier to build a 200 m tall and 500 m wide city than a 500 m tall and 200 m wide city. The reason you build up is because there's not enough land in the city center, but there's plenty of land here. Another example is that it could follow the coastline instead of being perfectly straight with a mountain range in the middle. It doesn't follow the coastline because that's where all of the palaces for the Saudi royal family go.
(3) The project follows a known failure mode. This particular failure mode is called High Modernism and has been well described in Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott (1998).
(4) The project involves a common human experience, where our intuition should be trustworthy. In this case, Neom wants to be a city. We can ask: is this a city that I would want to live in? I'm guessing that the answer to this for Scott is no. This is a less solid argument because different people might think different things.
(5) There are other underlying problems that could ruin the project does not address. In Neom's case, the biggest problem is finding people to live there. They're not going to come from Saudi Arabia itself: the country is barely above replacement fertility rate (2.28 children / woman) and falling, and other cities in the country are also expanding. So they're going to have to attract foreigners. If it's a status project, they probably want elite foreigners, not Syrian or Yemeni refugees. But a lot of global elites do not want to live under the Saudi's authoritarian and Islamic government. Even for those who are willing, Neom has to compete with other elite-seeking Middle Eastern cities like Dubai, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Jeddah.
I personally think that Scott is underconfident that something will be built (it should be >1%, maybe 50%) and overconfident that a significant number of people will end up living in whatever is built (it should be <75%, maybe 25% ... although maybe 50,000 is small enough that Scott's estimate is reasonable). Building a structure that is at least 100m x 100m x 1000m is technically possible with enough money. The Saudis have enough money. So something will likely be built. But persuading people to come will be more challenging.
1. When someone makes a facially absurd claim it is reasonable to dismiss it out of hand until they explain in detail why it is not absurd.
2. When a large amount of money backed by smart successful people is invested in something that seems facially absurd you should carefully consider two possibilities:
a. It is not as absurd as you thought. For example, I thought the idea of Elon Musk successfully and profitably creating an electric car company from scratch was absurd. I was wrong.
b. The stated and actual purpose of the investment are different. For example, in third world countries many large infrastructure projects have stated economic goals that are facially absurd. They fail at those goals. But they do an excellent job of meeting their actual goals to funnel money into the pockets of well connected people.
I do not think NEOM is a graft - the people paying for it are the best connected people. It is interesting to consider what a "failed" or scaled down NEOM project might actually accomplish.
For example, could NEOM eventually morph into a planned city (like Brasilia) that operates as an almost extra-territorial enclave within Saudi Arabia complete with world class universities that recruit globally, offer full rides, are decided non-woke, and admit based on merit alone? Could those be the core of a Silicon Arabia? Could NEOM have, in effect, a separate peace with Israel so it can bring in Israeli investment and expertise? Now that would be interesting.
The clothing is also completely normal........ a women traveling alone with no male relative is anything but typical of Saudi society.
I don’t disagree that it’s unlikely to be entirely secular, but the craziest religious zealots I know perceive themselves as secular atheist. They haven’t a clue their belief system is radical and denies reality in far more aspects than the vast majority of mature religious theologies. I’m not sure a truly secular human society is possible. It might be, but it seems to spin off lots of radical belief based ideologies and worship of the state.
One of the first steps in making sure you're applying the absurdity heuristic appropriately is just to make sure to steelman the position you think is absurd. E.g. "I know that monkeys can’t turn into humans, this is so absurd that I don’t even have to think about the question any further” sounds a lot less absurd when you understand that monkeys turning into humans isn't what evolutionary biologists are claiming is going on.
Monkeys magically transmuting into humans would be absurd and our anti-evolution guy would be right to dismiss it as absurd if that were the claim.
I think the missing piece here is that beliefs come with levels of certainty. The question of how far to go down the chain is about the degree of certainty that you want to achieve.
The claim that Neom is absurd has one level of confidence attached to it, but, as you point out sometimes absurd seeming things happen. Ok, so you work out the construction costs and that makes it even more unlikely it will happen, you supplement with data about the fact that Saudi construction costs aren't much cheaper than elsewhere and you can increase that level of confidence.
Now that isn't to say you can always increase confidence by digging deeper. That's why you stop when you get to assumptions like: but what if the universe is all a dream or God intervenes and violates the laws of physics. Because digging into those questions doesn't actually (or shouldn't) result in substantially increased confidence about your answer.
Yes, at the end of the day you can't get below your own priors but you can replace a judgement like:. silly sounding things tend not to work, which might only give you a relatively weak degree of certainty with judgements that increase your degree of certainty.
(Not that since probability distributions assume logical omniscience you have to supplement them a bit with some kind of judgement about the likelihood of there being some further deductive argument that's more compelling ...so I've played a bit loose with the term certainty which isn't quite just moving to a more extreme probability what it really is is something more like: evidence that further accessible information or consideration of argument will not lead to a refinement in your probability judgement...or at least that you don't expect the effort to be worth it).
Maybe a better way to put this is the following:. why isn't the obvious answer that you are balancing the rewards and benefits of further inquiry the right one?
I mean, you have certain judgements as to how likely further effort will be to refine your judgement and some payoff function regarding the degree of certainty. Surely, if you had to bet your life on the success or failure of the project it would make sense to expend more effort in research.
At each level you can't do anything but rely on your judgement (what would it mean to do otherwise) but part of that judgement is an evaluation of how likely further effort is to produce a more reliable answer. Do we need anything more than that mechanism?
Right, I think part of the reason ppl get tricked up by this thing is that we don't have good theoretical models for confidence that don't assume logical omniscience (as probability distributions do).
If you formulated the problem as being merely about whether to bother to invest in future experiments or spend money on research I don't think it would trip up ppl quite as much but because it's phrased in terms of thinking about it more and you can't easily represent thag kind of thing using a traditional probability distribution I think ppl get more easily confused.
But that's just speculation and the solution doesn't depend on that.
The quote in the post by Eliezer says "This doesn't mean that anything can happen. Of all the events in the 20th century that would have been "absurd" by the standards of the 19th century, not a single one - to the best of our knowledge - violated the law of conservation of energy, which was known in 1850. Reality is not up for grabs; it works by rules even more precise than the ones we believe in instinctively."
I agree with his overall point that our current understanding of physics is such that some things seem incredibly likely to be universal laws. I have a bit of a nitpick, however, with his precise example of conservation of energy. It doesn't really affect the overall argument but I figured some people here might find it interesting nevertheless.
In classical mechanics, energy is a number which can be easily computed in principle and is conserved. In quantum mechanics, not all states can be associated with a definite energy. However, there *are* certain pure-energy states, and all states can be written as weighted combinations of these pure-energy states. The analogue of energy conservation in quantum mechanics is that the (technically, squared magnitude of the) relative weights of these different pure-energy states do not change over time. In particular, the average energy (computed via these weights) is conserved, and for large systems we can identify this with the classical energy, thus letting us recover the classical notion of energy conservation. This all works perfectly well when we observe isolated quantum systems.
The tricky part is when we also consider wavefunction collapse. Let's say we accept the Many Worlds interpretation of QM. Then, the observable reality around us is just one of a truly enormous number of wavefunction branches. Quantum mechanics only applies exactly to the *totality* of the branches, not separately to each wavefunction branch. Thus, the above argument for the conservation of the distribution over energies applies when you consider *all* of the many worlds but not necessarily when you only consider *our* world, which we inhabit. If we were capable of knowing the true distribution over energies of just our world, it would probably constantly keep fluctuating due to frequent collapse events. All we can say is that when averaged with those of the other worlds, the distribution over energies will be conserved. And yet, if we cannot observe the other worlds, is this definition of energy conservation even useful? One can avoid the question by saying that we only care about idealized, isolated physical systems, not the whole universe treated quantum mechanically. And yet, the latter is what we were trying to seek insight into in the first place...
> All we can say is that when averaged with those of the other worlds, the distribution over energies will be conserved. And yet, if we cannot observe the other worlds, is this definition of energy conservation even useful?
You know, I've been wondering about this since I did undergrad QM many years ago. Do you have pointers to further discussion on this question, preferably online?
In Kierkegaard, there are a few separate epistemological stages. This post is a really nice gateway into his whole thing!
Immediacy: You are completely naive and unreflective. You don't yet know the difference between being and seeming. Only babies and very special adults are like this. If you're reading a blog post like this, you're not in immediacy.
Aesthetic: You've discovered reflection; that your ideas about things are different from the things themselves. You've found that reflecting critically on your own and others' ideas brings you closer to the truth, so you do that a lot. Eventually, you're in a prison of increasingly-subtle self-referential reflections, unable to get out of your own head. This is when you question all of your assumptions. He talks about Descartes' "doubt everything". Analysis paralysis, basically, and ultimately, despair.
Ethical: You can't sit around all day reflecting. You've got to do something sometime. What you do should be good for everybody and follow some kind of absolutely valid universal rules. You become conscious of yourself as having eternal validity, through your relationship to these universal rules. This is Scott's evolution denier; he doesn't need to question any further, he knows what he needs to know. But, since you can't actually live up to the rules (you're not perfect, and anyway life will trap you in impossible situations), you're still in despair.
(Here I'll pause to note that the fundamental tension described in this post, between naïveté and infinite regress, is very identifiably the same as the tension in Kierkegaard between the Aesthetic and the Ethical. How do you negotiate between these two? The answer is...)
Faith: Not as easy to describe. Still conscious of your eternal validity, still aware that you're sometimes wrong about stuff, you nevertheless choose, act and grasp hold of your life. You make a "leap of faith" which is more like a dance move than like an Indiana Jones puzzle. You know you're wrong to do it, but you do anyway. And somehow, you win! Or, if you don't, you don't notice much. For a Christian, this is something like thinking, "God put me here, now, and He gave me the knowledge I have, and set things up so I'm faced with this question; if I genuinely do my best, even if it ends up that I'm totally wrong, my sin is atoned for by Christ." Or as Kierkegaard says, you come to rest transparently on the ground of your being.
So, I don't know if other ways of looking at the world have answers to the questions raised in the post, but Christianity does, in my opinion, and Kierkegaard is the philosopher who articulated it best.
(Disclaimer: everybody is always wrong about Kierkegaard, I am not an authority, Kierkegaard would punch me if anybody believed what I said just because I said it. He would punch you if you believed what he said just because he said it. What he wanted least of all was disciples, which makes my fanboying pretty awkward. If this is interesting to you at all, read Kierkegaard yourself!)
Wait, this doesn't seem to make any sense to me. You're not deciding a binary here... not really. A good (rationalist) way to approach this would be saying "This is absurd, and (therefore) very unlikely to happen/be true" Pointing out that historical prognostications sometimes sound like they're unlikely to be true doesn't mean we shouldn't still realize that some theories are dramatically less likely to be true than others.
An absurd retrodiction: a dude with $200M (from the sale of Paypal, from which he was kicked out for "lacking a cohesive business model") would disrupt two overregulated capital-intensive industries all over the world within a decade and a half.
I feel this is just overly constrained to make it sound absurd.
If you time travelled back 30 years and told someone that in 2020 there was both a successful private rocketry company, and a successful electric vehicle company, I suspect nobody would find it absurd or even particularly surprising.
In fact, I might call that a negative amount of surprise: some would be more surprised to hear that we *didn't* have electric vehicles and private space industries in 2020. Both have been widely expected for a long time.
The detail that they were both founded by the same person, who was 'only' a millionaire at the time? It increases the surprise level a little, but in a world with a whole history of successful entrepreneurs building successful companies on newer 'riskier' areas of technology... well it still doesn't rise anywhere near "absurd".
Surprise at a non-gov rocket company that bested NASA, China, Russia, Boeing/ULA... probably quite high.
Surprise at an electric car company that is poised to have a $70k electric car to be the highest production volume in the world, including gasoline-based cars... high.
Surprise at a CEO kicked out for poor performance from a successful company and starting a new successful business from scratch? Pretty high, though Steve Jobs and a couple of others accomplished as much.
Surprise at either one not controlled by big funds to any noticeable degree... Still quite surprising.
That they both are controlled by the same person who was fired for poor performance? And who also has a few other high-profile (variably successful) projects on the go, like solar panels, tunnels and... wait for it... neural implants? Basically science fiction, never happened before.
And if he ends up being forced to own twitter, and does something useful with it, that's just the icing on the impossibility cake.
> Surprise at a non-gov rocket company that bested NASA, China, Russia, Boeing/ULA... probably quite high.
Not really - new companies beat out old companies all the time, and I'm actually not super high on the efficiency of government organizations.
> Surprise at an electric car company that is poised to have a $70k electric car to be the highest production volume in the world, including gasoline-based cars... high.
Also not very high, people have been expecting gas cars to be replaced with electric cars eventually forever. Whether or not 2020 is ahead (or behind) schedule depends on who you ask and when... but not "absurd" in any regard.
> Surprise at a CEO kicked out for poor performance from a successful company and starting a new successful business from scratch? Pretty high, though Steve Jobs and a couple of others accomplished as much.
This is like saying WWII is absurd because it started by an "art school dropout". It's just pulling a very specific detail retrospectively. With any story you can retrospectively find low probability details.
It's not relevant to "absurdity bias" because nobody would be making a prediction like "I expect the major electric cars company to be founded by someone kicked out of their previous job for poor performance" in the first place.
Yes, Elon Musk is an interesting and influential individual... but I don't find that his career is any sort of meaningful counter example to absurdity bias.
One line of reasoning I didn't see in the comments is using base rate. In such a case, it's not obvious what would be the relevant reference class, but I feel that "mega-projects that planned to spend similar amounts of money" and "building a city of that size from scratch, by centralized fiat" are good contenders. From what I've read by Bent Flyvbjerg, the odds are not good that this will be delivered on specs, on budget, on time.
Back to the question of the absurdity argument, I think that "if this project worked, it would be so far from its reference class that it's absurd to imagine it could succeed (in the near future, barring any major breakthrough)" is a reasonably applicable and successful heuristics.
Re. "Maybe, every so often, do a deep dive into fact-checking something, even if you’re absolutely sure it’s true. Maybe if everybody does this, then someone will (by coincidence) catch the false absurdities, and then the social epistemology thing can work." :
YES. Taking random samples of life is a tragically under-used technique. It's especially useful if it becomes a social norm.
Neom is something that you come up with if you're playing a video game where the goal is to pack as many people in as closely as possible, while damaging the environment as little as possible, while not respecting any constaints of reality. It's like a parody of the average consultant's mindest.
I realize it's Saudi Arabia, but presumably people still want to go outdoors in Saudi Arabia. I suppose you can take a few steps away from The Line and look back at the wall... and then walk back inside...
Scott, I read your post as saying, Saudi Arabia thinks they can do this but I think it's really really unlikely.
Seems like an accurate assessment of the situation, and not a claim that no way no how maybe somehow Saudi Arabia has figured out something fantastic that will have ten million people living in a straight line
Saudi Arabia have figured out something fantastic, but A) despite developing this technology they for some reason still need foreigners to design everything for them and B) instead of using this revolutionary breakthrough to produce billions in exports that help diversify their economy away from oil, they sit on it to build some whacky long building in the middle of the dessert.
At some point, really really unlikely and no way no how are negligibly different.
I think there's a practical exercise to quickly examine these sorts of biases; I call it a "pre-mortem" exercise. The exercise is simple: write two short memos, each 0.5-1 page in length. One is titled "why it worked" and the other is titled "why it failed". Circle back up and compare. If you all agree, those are prioritized strengths and weaknesses. If you disagree, you've unearthed differences in your assumptions! Or, in this case, differences in your absurdity lenses.
This exercise was largely inspired by the 'Safire Memo', the backup speech for if the Apollo 11 landing had gone wrong. Some credit also goes to the observation from the book Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick, which observes that in big organizations that fell from the heights (Nokia, Kodak, etc) even when leaders individually knew that the new technology would win the organization still failed to bet that way.
Missed the chance to title this "The Neom-Central Fallacy, or, The Most Absurd Argument In The World".
More seriously, I think any sort of absurdity heuristic or bias becomes less relevant as the...complexity waterline gets raised. Without going into __any__ specific examples *cough*, the world just seems a lot more complicated today than [arbitrary past cutoff]. I guess some of this is an inevitable part of growing up - one can only hold so much information in the brain, and the rate of information-addition to the world far surpasses that. I think the slope of that latter line matters, though.
Even though in many ways it's easier than ever to Deep Dive: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, if the rate of increasing Unknowns and Unknown-Unknowns outpaces the rate of generating Knowns, then the total space of non-knowledge never shrinks. A whole lot of this can be safely written off via rational ignorance. But when even immediately practical and relevant things start to become Absurd, well, there's a problem. That's not knowledge that one can safely ignore; life's table stakes keep getting bigger. And there's so much bad-faith social epistemology now (classic update method from antiquity! insert evosci pablum here) that I'm kinda surprised to see it recommended as a potential fix. That seems to rely on one's ability to avoid a whole bunch of *other* biases...
Anyway, this feels like a post that coulda been avoided merely through slightly different word choice or a quick edit. "Define terms please" is next to spellcheck for godliness. The general free-for-all confused melee in the comments seems to indicate that while a springboard post to discussing Absurdity Bias was a good idea, Neom isn't a particularly good category member to base it off. Possibly doesn't belong in category at all.
Re. "More seriously, I think any sort of absurdity heuristic or bias becomes less relevant as the...complexity waterline gets raised.":
This *sounds* convincing, yet I'm not sure history bears it out. There are plenty of things that sounded absurd thousands of years ago, which turned out not to be absurd hundreds or thousands of years ago:
- It's possible for a human to create fire.
- You can travel over water.
- Thousands of humans can live together in a small space.
- Different languages exist.
- Different groups of people have different ideas about what's good and what's bad.
- The stories of our forefathers aren't entirely reliable.
- A physical object can tell you what someone said before you were born.
- It's possible to invent new kinds of things that never existed before.
- The world is spherical.
- There are stable forms of government other than monarchy.
- It's possible to sail upwind.
- A woman can be a scholar.
- The sun is really, really far away, and much bigger than the earth.
- The different kinds of animals have changed their natures a lot over time.
- There's a kind of stone which can always tell you which way is north.
- The Earth moves around the sun.
- It's possible to build a city on a steep cliff face.
I don't think it's absurd and reject it out of hand, it's just not something I've seen a strong enough case yet for. Largely because determining whether actual humans are conscious seems harder than we expect, and that's only multiplied in trying to model animals. Perhaps there's a good technical explanation somewhere, I'm sure Scott's written at length about it, but as a total outside-view layman this is more or less at the limit of my reading level/interest: https://www.slowboring.com/p/were-asking-the-wrong-question-about
But anyway, still maintain the Grand Quest to Answer All Questions involves a lot of steps backwards as we get to know more (replication crisis...sigh), and there's a sort of uncanny valley of knowing just enough to know how much we really don't know/now have Additional Questions about. There's no way to quantify this, but I think there's some updateable evidence in the general climate of epistemic nihilism/learned helplessness which is significantly more common outside our semi-walled garden here.
Like to tie it back to Neominative determinism, I actually know very little about the potential available in modern architecture. So even though ambition alone is enough reason to worry about feasibility, it doesn't seem unreasonable to conclude "I'm not an expert, shrug" and leave the resolution blank rather than throwing an ill-defined Absurdity Exception. The robust discussion of commuter rail logistics in the comments just reinforced this - I thought I knew a little about public transit from time spent working in that sector, but this objectively-more-than-average-person level of expertise was woefully inadequate for the subject at hand. Knowing enough to see how much I don't know. (Though perhaps seemingly-absurd examples work better for illustrating this ignorance.)
Neom isn't a bad idea because it sounds impossibly expensive and difficult to build with today's technology. Any proposal like that might happen to get an Elon Musk to make it cheaper and change the whole equation faster than anyone could have imagined.
Neom is a bad idea because no matter how advanced our technology is, even if we're literally building Dyson spheres and are immortal and can build giant skyscrapers the height of Mount Everest in a day, a linear city is always going to be worse than a city that is literally any other shape.
I dunno, I feel like a city shaped as one of the two lines in a swastika would be worse. You'd still have all the disadvantages of the straight line, but you'd add two 90 degree turns for your high speed trains to have to navigate.
Elon Musk took a technology that had since its inception been optimized for anything but cost, and optimized it for cost. In ways that had for the most part been clearly and explicitly foreseen for decades by people who didn't happen to be billionaires. Construction has been pretty thoroughly optimized for cost over the past century, and I haven't heard of anyone credible saying "look, here's a way to do construction ten times cheaper while still building skyscraper-tall buildings that are safe and comfortable". So I think it's highly unlikely that the Elon Musk of skyscraper-building will emerge in this generation, and that crosses over to absurd if you ask me to imagine he's a Saudi working in secret.
I'm actually in the market for a new car. Can you point me to one of these cheap Teslas? Because for the price of a bare-bones Tesla 3, I can get a Mercedes C-class or a pair of Hyundai Elantras. Or if I want something electric, a Nissan Leaf with enough left over for a Nissan Versa for my gas-guzzling needs.
Also unfair; Teslas are a different technology--and, ironically, one driven by /stopping/ the optimization for cost by an industry. I suspect you were talking about spaceships when you spoke of Musk optimizing for cost. Electric cars aren't optimized for cost; they're optimized for an envisioned vertically-integrated transportation system, covering everything from energy generation to movement (but, oddly, excluding manufacturing itself) which is optimized to reduce CO2 production, meanwhile making costs skyrocket. But most of this will be paid for by taxes, so it doesn't matter.
Space travel is the industry he's optimizing for cost; auto-manufacturing is largely already optimized for cost, and there he's optimizing more for "Cool" to set a trend and get electric adopted.
Irrelevant nitpicking ahead: EY's examples in the Stranger Than History quote are bad.
In 1901 there were maybe physicists like Plank who had an inkling to what Einstein will propose only 4 years later because it was based on theories and experiments already available like the Michelson–Morley experiment of 1887 suggesting the Lorentz invariance of the speed of light. Plank was definitely not shocked by relativity.
Also in 1901 the world was crisscrossed by telegraph lines, telephones networks were growing and there were plenty of newfangled sophisticated mechanical calculators like the Millionaire of 1892 and electric tabulating machines using punch cards made since 1890 by Hollerith (his company will eventually by a founding part of IBM). Telling someone that in a 100 years there will be a network of electric calculators connected by wires would have not been a shocker and I'm pretty sure it was predicted by some at the time. And they did had all kinds of porn fiction in 1901, including lesbian.
It's not just about absurdity; it's about Bayesian probability. If you collect everything we know about physics and technology, and plug it into the Bayes' Rule, then we will discover that painting yourself a specific color is incredibly unlikely to reverse gravity. Of course, we could be wrong; but we would be foolish to make long-term plans or investments based on such a thin hope.
The tricky part here is that if we told someone from 1901 about the Internet, and he plugged in everything he knew about science and technology of the time into Bayes' Rule, he'd be forced to conclude that the Internet is a scam. He would be factually incorrect, but his conclusion would be fully justified. But, if he stuck with his rigorous thought processes (and somehow lived about 100 more years), he might be one of the people who got to *develop* the Internet.
There is no magic oracle that you can consult to get 100% accurate answers about any question. The best you can do is balance false positives and false negatives; and this means that you would occasionally miss the one cool revolutionary idea that will change everything. In exchange, you gain the kind of steady progress that gets you from steam engines to the Internet in only 100 years. It's a worthwhile tradeoff.
> The tricky part here is that if we told someone from 1901 about the Internet, and he plugged in everything he knew about science and technology of the time into Bayes' Rule, he'd be forced to conclude that the Internet is a scam.
With 1901 tech? Yes. But given telegraph lines progress it would not be something to be classified as "utterly impossible, ever"
This post is IMHO completely unnecessary (and, sadly, showcases why "the substack quality has fallen compared to SSC"). Any modicum of "common sense" (horror!) would give you the same conclusions in 20x less words. This is simply not interesting and not why I read ACX (less and less these days, for reasons above).
I honestly don't understand the concern here. I mean, I do understand the object-level concern, I just don't see how the problem doesn't simply generalize to "P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary".
I mean, the only way I can conceive the problems posed in the post as problems is when I forcibly reduce the available options to simple binaries. Like, is "absurd" supposed to mean "literally impossible" - or just "having a very low probability"? Is "questioning your assumptions" a yes/no option where you either require them to have a strict logical proof, or require no proof at all - or is it more like having probabilities assigned to them, and calculating the need to revisit them from the current context? Isn't the evolution guy's problem the fact that he already decided he "knows" something, instead of admitting and processing new evidence?
In each of those cases, reducing to a binary appears to be the obvious failure mode, and eliminating that failure mode an instant improvement. (Now, in each of those cases, there's also no simple way forward after that. But I, for one, find reassuring the conclusion that there's no simple trick and we should just all follow the usual epistemic best practices.)
(I don't understand the problem with social evidence either, the vast majority of each of our individual knowledge was provided by other people, one way or another, there's no escaping that. Not to mention it would be extremely impractical to escape. Humanity runs on trusting others to do things one cannot do oneself. It got us far, certainly farther than each of us trusting only one's individual experience would have gotten us. It doesn't feel like a cop-out to me, maybe because it seems like a description of what's already happening, rather than a prescription of what should happen.)
I think I'd defend "use absurdity as a heuristic" in basically all cases. Taking Yudkowsky's examples:
Special relativity is completely absurd, and people should dismiss it out of hand until presented with a stack of evidence. No-one does this, because its so strangely beautiful you end up wanting it to be true.
If you explained the internet in more detail, most reasonably intelligent people in 1901 would probably accept that the invention itself would happen if it was possible. They'd accept the possibility wasn't absurd if they has a period-appropriate grasp of electricity. Anyone who was being intellectually honest would accept the porn thing as well.
The answer to the hidden example is that everyone thinks their own moral opinions (possibly all opinions?) are correct. If they thought they was wrong in some way, they'd change them to whatever they thought was right. "Moral consensus kind of drifts around haphazardly" is an idea that's clearly true and not absurd in the slightest, but people reject it because they want morality to be objective.
More generally, if you hear a very complicated argument for something ridiculous, you should still dismiss it because its more likely that the argument is wrong in some way than that the ridiculous thing is true. Neom is a bloody stupid idea because it's meant to be a desert city that's one block wide and the length of Ireland. If you show me a really good argument for why this is a good idea, then the right thing for me to do (even if I find the argument utterly convincing) is to reject the argument nonetheless and fall back on it still being a bloody stupid idea and you being a sophist.
There's a difference between it's impossible and it's impractical. A difference between being on the edge of known physics and being central to everyday experience.
There's very little which is uncertain about this project from an engineering and physics perspective. The 2 main areas I'd be worried about would be wind loading (absolute and differential) on a surface that large, and the environmental impact. The first can be mitigated by over-specifying the design for that force (and we already know how to build moment frames). I presume the latter will involve a lot of sand piling up in annoying locations which can be addressed with standard ground moving equipment. If nothing else, it will be a great way to learn more about environmental science.
What makes the project absurd isn't the physics/engineering which, granted, a lot of people are unfamiliar with. It's the parts that people are familiar with - everyday living in urban environments. And approximately everybody seems to think this isn't a place they would want to live.
Everything connected together with doesn't have to be terrible. The Las Vegas strip has a lot of major attractions connected together with a monorail. Lots of varied businesses connected indoors can work very well - the Minneapolis Skyway system is fantastic. But for individual large structures the advantages are limited. Skyscrapers exist because the demand for an area means the cost of land is higher than the cost of building upwards. Malls exist because there's an advantage of having lots of otherwise-unrelated stores in close proximity creating a network effect. And Amazon Warehouses exist because there's a need to be able to store a wide selection of stuff in an area where it can be individually boxed up as needed. What's left? Airports, because the minimum cost of decent runway is best amortized over a lot of flights which are themselves best served by a lot of jetways?
This is in contrast to other wacky projects where the objections are related to engineering factors like cost rather than experiential. Approximately nobody is objecting to Elon Musk's tunnel building projects based on the idea that "tunnels can't work" or "nobody wants to take tunnels". A lot of people are familiar with subways, highway tunnels, etc. The objections are on the engineering side about the ability to reduce the cost of development for the given service level/capacity and safety required.
If this was simply an infrastructure which pre-deployed subway, water, sewage and other utilities in the desert under a "if you build it, they will come" model it would still probably be a gigantic waste of money, but at the very least it would be preparing for a future which might possibly occur and meet the needs of people.
(I got an email about the comment I'm replying to here, but I can't see the comment on the actual page. I wonder if it'll show up once I reply to it? EDIT: comment system is bugged; this comment was made as a reply to a reply to my top-level comment, here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/absurdity-bias-neom-edition/comment/8185050)
Wow, you're totally right. Chapman is in a very Kierkegaardian place. His solution to the whole problem, "non-systematic situated meaning-making", he draws from Heidegger, who was inspired by Kierkegaard. So it looks like he's getting some Kierkegaardian insights at second hand.
Hegel had noticed the problem of nebulosity, that no system is actually true and right, and had responded to it by making a system of systems; this giant uber-system which would account for and rationalize all possible systems, and explain how and why various systems arise in various times throughout history. Hegelian thought had completely taken control of Europe, and much of Kierkegaard's writing was rebelling against it. So Kierkegaard talks a lot about the deficiencies of this kind of naive systematizing.
As someone who is so excited about prediction markets and, by extension, the wisdom of crowds, I am a little surprised at the degree to which you dismiss the "social epistemology" dimension. I'm not saying that you can't attempt to address the problem with your individual brain, but surely for most issues it is preferable (and much more practical) to rely on social epistemology, considering how many assumptions we are faced with every day. Is the Earth round? Will my car explode while I am driving down the freeway? Do vaccines contain microchips? I don't have the expertise, nor the time to establish the precise level of consideration to give all of the these questions.
"Some people try to dodge the question and say that all rationality is basically a social process. Maybe on my own, I will naturally stop at whatever level seems self-evident to me. Then other people might challenge me, and I can reassess. But I hate this answer. It seems to be preemptively giving up and hoping other people are less lazy than you are.”
I don’t think this is about being lazy. I think it’s about inferential range. Slack in inferential range has a clear tradeoff, which you well describe in Studies on Slack.
The easiest absurdity dismissal is that Neom is presented as this giant thing all at once. No city (maybe Brasilia?) ever just got planned and millions of people moved there. Now throw in a totally untested architectural model for this city, this style of living. It would not be absurd to build one section, in the most desirable location (near the sea) and see if it works, see if people like it. Then build another section and so on. It may not get to the length of Ireland. They may have learnings as they go and as residents give input. Newer sections may be designed differently. But if the economics or the functioning of this thing only works as a giant whole, it seems doomed.
The goal here is probably to minimize instances where we lock in a wrong position and refuse to update further without wasting too much time on analysis, I would guess. This is the position I would try to adhere to, at least, because like other humans I can't optimize for only the truth without serious loss to everything else I consider worthwhile.
I think the trick for things outside my fields of expertise is splitting up the heuristics, rather than serious study:
-Is it in my field of expertise, or is it something that looks like it is but is adjacent? I see a lot of experts make this mistake, where they comment on something in a related field, and end up wildly off base because they mistook it for their own field.
-Do experts in the field say its impossible? Being fringe is one thing, being impossible is another. Not infallible, but good enough particularly for hard sciences. I'm not going to necessarily understand *why* something is impossible without a background in the field, so it's impractical to learn it myself.
-If the claim appears particularly absurd: Do I understand the claim correctly? Some claims are as insane as they appear, but this is worth a double check.
I think all of that has to happen past the initial gutcheck of absurdity, though, so it seems more like a series of backup heuristics. I'd also be concerned about the opposite; blandly accepting a statement because it seems reasonable. I have a feeling the "reasonableness heuristic" is the more deadly of the two, but I have no evidence to back that up.
My point is that what you wrote didn't pass muster as something a NEOM proponent would read and say "yeah, that's a good point. I still think we will succeed, but if we fail, it will be because of these things Scott highlighted".
That example didn't have to exist for the argument to be wrong, but it was convenient that it did exist.
Another IMO not-very-good argument was to call the project impossible. Jumping from "this is very hard, I don't think the saudis can do it" to "this is impossible". Now, someone might say that this is a nitpick.
And yet, I think the difference between "very very hard" and "impossible" is everything we've ever done as a species that has been worth a damn. A sensemaking error that causes one to confuse the two is a sensemaking error that makes all the difference between a thriving civilization and one that stagnates.
I believe impossibility claims should be handled with care, ideally built on things about as certain as the laws of physics, because they're powerful tools of epistemic warfare
"But how do you, pondering a question on your own, know when to stop because a line of argument strikes you as absurd, vs. to stick around and gather more facts and see whether your first impressions were accurate?"
Here's the thing: you can just say "looks super hard, not convinced they can do it". And if pressed to make a decision whether to buy discount NEOM property, you can just say no. You don't need to jump to claiming impossibility to do that.
I even described a path towards constructing a stronger argument, by focusing on the implementation path rather than the endpoint.
And so, in a way, this piece makes the same mistake as the one on NEOM. You go in depth about the absurdity heuristic, and the result reads to me like you're not actually engaging with the point at hand: using weak arguments to support a position, regardless of the validity of the position itself. Had you just said "seems pretty hard to me, I'd bet against it" I would have been in complete agreement.
It really feels like much of this would be resolved much better with a conversation.
Speaking of which, I'd be pretty happy if you read my analysis of your ivermectin piece, ideally letting me know where I'm misunderstanding you and/or correcting the elements you agree are in error. I'm learning a lot while doing it and I still think there's a lot of good to be done by engaging in open-ended discourse about the topic at hand.
Honourary made the hyperloop point in the comments to the original post. I agree it's a good point, have updated on it, and plan to link it on the next Open Thread. I don't feel terrible for interpreting their claim that they would have "trains" as a claim to have trains and not a never-before-used technology.
Otherwise, I think this is the same problem we've had before where you interpret "impossible" as meaning literal impossibility rather than just a very very low chance that anyone could do it. I would say the same about building a passenger bridge across the Atlantic, making a self-sustaining Pluto colony before 2040, or creating a one world government in the next five years, even though all of those are permitted by the laws of physics and I can even imagine ways that if everyone were incredibly lucky and united in their determination to do so, they might sort of happen.
The posts I linked to are new. Nobody can force you to read, of course, but I would be willing to bet good money that you'll find much information that is new and surprising in them. Regardless, I'll continue the open peer review until I cover the whole essay.
IMO, the hyperloop is just as much vaporware as NEOM, so it's a circular argument. It's like telling an atheist that Jesus can split the moon because Mohammed did it too or whatever.
Ivermectin is a great case study in the difference between absurdity and impossibility.
Some insisted that it was impossible that ivermectin works, because the concentration needed to stop the virus (IC50) was too high, relative to the doses prescribed. But the IC50 was measured in kidney cells, some experiments found the number was lower in lung cells. The original in vitro experiments didn't prove that ivermectin can't work as an antiviral, only that it can't work in some cells. If you took high enough doses for long enough, you could maybe get some anti-viral effect in some cells.
And even if ivermectin was proven to have no antiviral effect, that wouldn't mean it's impossible that it works. It could still coincidentally work against covid through some other pathway, like as an anti-inflammatory or immunomodulator.
Others insisted that it's impossible that ivermectin could work as a covid prophylactic if taken once a week, since the half-life of the drug is only 18 hours.
Well, that's not entirely true. Some amount of ivermectin reaches lung tissue, and it stays constant there for about 8 days.
So it's not impossible that weekly ivermectin prevents covid, it's just implausible that the small amount in the lungs works because that small weekly dose shouldn't even exceed the lowest experimental IC50 value. And you'd have to assume that a similar dose remains in your upper respiratory tract, or other tissues, and stops infection there.
Most of the claims in favor of ivermectin are merely absurd, but not impossible.
The FLCCC originally said that you need only take ivermectin once a month to prevent covid, before they gradually changed the dosage regimen to a higher frequency:
Is it impossible that once a month dosing of ivermectin would work? I'd say it's absurd, and the FLCCC was wrong.
But, of course, it's not impossible. Some amount of the drug was present in lung tissue one month later, though it was about 100 times less than the initial dose.
The weekly dose is already too low to reach the IC50, so 100 times less should definitely not be enough. But I can't 100% disprove that homeopathic ivermectin works, it's still technically possible that some tiny lingering portion of the drug prevents infection both in the lungs and throughout the body. Or it's possible the drug causes lasting changes to cells where it somehow prevents infection even after the drug is gone.
It's absurdly unlikely, but it's still possible.
It is possible to disprove some of the most absurd claims about ivermectin. It's not a 100% effective prophylactic against covid. It did not end covid in Uttar Pradesh, or Mexico, or Zimbabwe, or Eastern Europe. It could not stop the whole pandemic in a month, as Weinstein claimed. It's not a general purpose cure for long covid, as Kory claims.
After hearing all those absurd claims made with confidence, I'm inclined to just disagree with everything the drug's supporters say. It seems like a good heuristic is just to assume that it doesn't work, unless better evidence comes in.
But it would still be better to keep an open mind, and not assume it's impossible that it works. There could still be some dose of ivermectin and duration of treatment that reduces viral load or ameliorates covid symptoms.
The largest RCT's have been disappointing, but maybe a longer course or higher dose will ultimately prove to work better. I'd be happy to see new or better experiments.
The heuristic you cite is itself absurd. If we follow it we would conclude that since the covid vaccines were promoted as virtually 100% protective against infection and transmission, which there was never strong evidence for, we should discard them.
That said, thanks for the old screenshots of the FLCCC protocol, those are interesting, though their sources are clearly quoting them out of date.
Any idea when the "once a month" protocol is from?
To answer your dosing question broadly, my sense is that newer variants replicate more quickly, and thus need higher dosing.
I guessed you might make the comparison between ivermectin and vaccines. I don't think it really holds up, given much examination.
I would agree that the vaccines were oversold and that has been one thing that's undermined confidence in the public health establishment. I'd add that the establishment has repeatedly discredited itself throughout the pandemic, for instance by:
Claiming that covid was less dangerous than the flu and then quickly changing that take.
Claiming that masks don't work and then making them mandatory.
Giving inconsistent timelines on how long lockdowns would last.
Giving inconsistent rules on what would be locked down.
First claiming that everyone needed to quarantine and then suddenly changing that view to say that everyone needs to get out and protest racism.
I understand why many people have stopped believing mainstream news or believing the CDC, and I can understand why some even take the approach of reversing everything the government says. I.e. if the government says that vaccines work and ivermectin doesn't, they assume that vaccines are dangerous and ivermectin works.
Though, to be clear, I haven't personally met anyone that's vaccine hesitant because Joe Biden oversold the vaccine. And it took about a year, and the arrival of Omicron, before it was really clear the vaccine had been oversold, so you can't retroactively explain vaccine hesitancy that happened prior to that.
I have met people that are vaccine hesitant because they don't think covid is a real virus or a serious one. I've met others that think the vaccines are toxic or highly dangerous or often lethal. And I've met others who think they have immunity without vaccination (some of them may be correct).
If I had to blame someone for vaccine hesitancy, I would much sooner go with covid deniers or anti-vaxxers who spread those claims, or people like Tucker Carlson who boosted those voices, not the people that oversold vaccine efficacy.
I'd also note that vaccines were 90%+ effective, in the initial RCT's, and highly effective in 2021's real world case data. They were effective against both infection and severe disease, and even somewhat effective with transmission. With new variants, they remain effective against severe disease, but do little to stop infection and pretty much nothing to stop transmission.
The issue isn't so much that the government lied about the efficacy as that covid mutates and we don't have a reasonable process for updating the vaccines.
I also don't think it's true that health authorities all said that immunity would last forever. We did get simple messages from Biden telling people they wouldn't get sick if they got vaccinated. But we also had people like Francis Collins talking openly about short lived immunity to coronaviruses, based on published research:
I don't think your "both ivermectin and vaccines were oversold" equivalency holds up because ivermectin never had the same overwhelming evidence in its favor.
Ivermectin was sold on Youtube and Substack as 100% effective and capable of ending the pandemic at any time. If it had actually been 90% effective and capable of ending only the early strains of covid, but had been defeated by viral mutations, I would consider that a fair amount of overselling.
In reality, I think ivermectin was sold as 100% effective when it was actually < 20% effective, perhaps even 0% effective. I.e. in ACTIV-6, ivermectin was about 7% effective and maybe reduced the duration of illness by half a day. And I think that was likely always the case, I don't think it's because covid mutated.
As I said, the vaccine example I used is absurd, to demonstrate the absurdity of the argument.
Either we're looking at what people are saying, or we're looking at the underlying evidence. On the first, we can debate who said what when and why forever.
Indeed, evidence is the only thing that can ultimately settle these arguments.
But, at some point, it's a waste of time paying attention to people who have been consistently wrong, again and again.
We had Dr Kory saying things like, "they literally eradicated COVID using ivermectin in Zimbabwe". And then making similar claims for Mexico. And India. And Slovakia. And proving to be wrong, every single time.
We also have Kory claiming that covid vaccines killed 200,000 Americans, which is trivially easy to disprove from excess death statistics.
We have Weinstein credulously citing papers that covid vaccines would kill 2 people for every 3 they saved. Or saying that "Ivermectin is a near-perfect COVID prophylactic."
At some point, you have to admit that most ivermectin proponents are utterly incapable of parsing the truth from available evidence and probably aren't worth listening to.
My apologies if your blog or track record happens to be better, I've haven't taken much time to read it.
Back in 1969, I saw Paolo Soleri's exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC showing plans and models for what he called arcologies. These were immense buildings, as tall as skyscrapers and running across the land for miles and miles. They were an an update of Corbusier's Radiant City or Buckminster Fuller's urban structures with an attempt to think of a city in ecological terms, as forming its own world and lessening its impact on the natural world. I think the name came from architecture and ecology. The idea was that such a linear city could provide housing, controlled environment agriculture and recreation, a transportation system and all the infrastructure needed for urban life with a minimal ecological footprint.
There were a lot of big thinkers in the 1960s and a lot of fascinating new ideas, many of which we take for granted today. Arcologies are not one of them, though I noticed a reference in Neuromancer. Neom, for all its grandiosity, offers the same appeal. Saudi Arabia is not noted for its pleasant climate, abundant fresh water supplies, or agricultural production. An arcology could offer better climate control, more efficient water use and possibly a platform for urban farming. Neom is not absurd or inconceivable by that standard.
I think the main flaw is that the design does not seem to provide a pathway for organic urban growth. What is the minimum unit that could be built as a useful prototype, something more than Habitat '67? How would it work as a test bed? How would it fit with the nation's traditional urban life? How would it deal with the large number of foreign workers who are major part of Saudi Arabia's workforce? Then there's the matter of the variability of oil income, but I'm not a Saudi staff economist, so that isn't my problem.
It helps to remember that absurd comes from the mathematical term surd or irrational number. These were a real problem in mathematics for a long time, but nowadays we work with surds all the time and barely notice their absurdity.
(*) Soleri's work informed a lot of the model design for Star Wars. Compare some of his arcologies with some Star Wars battle cruisers and the like.
I think Alexandros Marinos is actually right in the case of the Neom post. I believe it's usually most productive to approach a disagreement as such:
1. State the opposing side's view, as far up in the Graham hierarchy [1] as possible
2. State your point of view, as well as possible
3. Rebut your opponent
4. Optionally make fun of your opponent
As far as I can see, 1 was done minimally, 2. was part of the post, 3. was only minimally present (absurdity heuristic), but it was *heavily* entangled with 4 (which is probably the worst kind of entaglement possible in a disagreement: Even singling out the the sentences "I disagree with this because of the absurdity heuristic. I will now proceed to make fun of Neom." would have been more productive.
Unfortunately, it seems like entangling 3 & 4 is psychologically easy to fall into (I've too often fallen into that trap, and imagine that'd continue if I garnered more status), and gives you the most clicks, so avoiding it is *hard*. I've seen some comments suggest that the ACX posts lean more into this than the SSC posts did, this feels true to me, and I want to *gently* point to CONSTANT VIGILANCE [2].
I made an estimate of how much lead we'd need for a national lead-acid battery. It's more lead than is known to exist in the world.
I made an estimate for how much a national lithium ion battery would cost. It's over 100 trillion dollars, and it would take a large fraction of known lithium reserves.
I made an estimate of how much pumped hydro storage we'd need, instead of batteries. It's absurdly large, the national reservoir size would be equal to draining Lake Tahoe just to store 3 days of power for the country.
So far, the most common response has been:
"You're just knocking down strawman arguments, of course we wouldn't solve the problem with 1 thing".
When my point has been more like:
"Solving green energy and intermittency looks really hard and every solution looks expensive. We need new solutions, or maybe we need nuclear"
Nuclear requires constant operation to amortize the massive capital costs, and thus doesn't solve the problem of shifting energy over time to match supply and demand.
I think nuclear is over-regulated for terrible reasons from the 1970s and 1980s (the anti-nuclear movement, unwarranted panic over Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, etc.).
If we can standardize nuclear reactor designs and remove much of the unnecessary regulation, we should be able to transition to a nuclear-powered electricity grid the way France did in the 1970s.
Since nuclear is baseload power, you are right that it does not solve the problem of shifting energy over time to match supply and demand. Other energy sources that can work as peaker plants can do that instead (in addition to batteries, grid interconnections, and demand response).
You are not knocking down strawman arguments, but you are still wrong about green energy.
We don't need a national battery. Wind and solar cover for each other part of the time (ie, the wind blows stronger at night, the sun shines more brightly in the middle of the day), and we can build a national grid infrastructure so that areas that are momentarily sunny and/or windy can supply electricity to areas that are momentarily cloudy with low amounts of wind. Also, there is something called "demand response" that incentivizes people to turn on their appliances when electricity is most plentiful. Combine all of that with hydroelectricity and a large nuclear energy baseload, the grid's energy storage requirements would be lower than you project.
Also, we can use battery chemistries besides lead-acid and lithium-ion. There are metal-air batteries in development (iron-air, aluminum-air, zinc-air, etc.). Since we are talking about the grid rather than electric vehicles, weight is not nearly as much of a concern, so we can use heavier batteries like flow batteries.
As for the scale of wind power, I think we can build it. There is plenty of windy land on the plains and mountain tops (as well as offshore), and IIRC, cost declines and better turbines have made wind energy the cheapest form of energy available right now (you can google it to make sure, I also recommend reading Ramez Naam's blog).
In summary, I think we can go zero-carbon with technology we have and with technology currently in the pipeline; we don't need radically new solutions.
Speaking as someone with a keen appreciation for wind, and a whole lot of wind turbines in my vicinity, wind does not in fact blow stronger at night than during the day, but vice versa. Particularly at low altitudes in areas where wind turbines are usually situated. A bit of googling suggests that this is true across North America and Australia at least; I suspect Europe as well but haven't been able to quickly confirm that.
And unless your "nation" is the whole of the British Empire, and you're running giant undersea power cables to the Pitcairn solar farms, you can't have a "national grid" that shifts power from the sunny+windy areas to the dark+quiet ones. Because for many hours a day, the *entire nation* will be devoid of sunlight and the winds will be at their lowest.
Either you need a national battery, or a whole lot of local batteries, or you need to tell your people that they're going to have to shut everything down and go to bed not long after sunset. Or, possibly, you could accept that you're going to have to get a huge chunk of your energy from things that aren't solar or wind.
From a UK perspective wind and solar have the problem that the highest electricity demand is on a December evening around 6pm. Solar will obviously contribute zero to the grid at that time, it being dark. Winter is also the time of the year where there can be high pressure systems sat over the country leading to almost no wind for a week at a time. Therefore the entirety of supply at a time of the highest demand needs to be provided with something other than wind or solar. It really is an intractable problem.
I'm not knocking wind and solar gratuitously - there are places where some combination of the two make a lot of sense. Somewhere like Arizona where peak demand is in the middle of the day is ideal for quite a big chuck of solar in the mix. And Canada can make much better use of its wind potential because of its hydro resources.
You are right that a national grid that shifts energy from high-production to low-production areas is not enough to compensate for night and for periods of low wind throughout the nation. However, my point was that this was one of several ways to mitigate the need for batteries, not the only solution. I mentioned the need for demand response and a baseload of nuclear and hydro power, and that all of my solutions put together mean that you need a smaller national battery (which can also be the sum of many smaller batteries).
I think it would actually be nice to try and build a global power grid, but just the costs of laying down transatlantic power cables will probably be significantly higher than the costs of laying down the original transatlantic telegraph cables in the mid-1800s. Some articles about the idea: https://www.google.com/search?q=global+energy+grid.
For German weather, I think 3 days would actually be on the low side. Solar power in Germany varies by a factor of 30 between the worst winter days and the best summer days, it's likely not possible to overbuild enough panels there to rely on solar in the winter.
Windstorms in Germany do happen throughout the winter, but the interval between them is often in the range of 7-10 days.
For Germany to go 100% wind+solar, I'd estimate they would want 10 days of battery storage.
I'm not sure how much better it would be with an interconnected grid -- could Europe do better if Spain dramatically overbuilt solar and Scandinavia overbuilt wind and all countries shared electricity? Could the US do better with a massive solar farm in the southwest and wind in the great plains?
My guess is that you're not going to get down to zero storage with that approach, but you might avoid needing 10 days of storage to handle worst case weather.
I have heard some positive things about iron flow batteries, with some researchers claiming they can reduce the price to maybe 10-20X lower than lithium ion. I would agree that might solve the problem if that can be done at scale.
I agree with your general point. But I think you have made a couple of errors.
You say that a national lead acid battery would use more lead than is known to exist in the world. Just the earths crust alone contains about 2 quadrillion tonnes of lead, so I think you mean something other than 'known to exist'.
To suggest that a national lithium ion battery would use a large fraction of known lithium reserves misunderstands how the concept of mineral reserves is used. It doesn't have anything (at all) to do with how much of a substance exists or is left in the ground. It varies depending upon demand. So if demand for Lithium increased by a factor of ten, so would reserves. As an example, over the 20th century the demand for copper increased by 40 times. As a consequence, reserves also increased 40 fold. The ratio is obviously not exact, but as a first approximation it works very well.
I'm nit-picking a little, because your estimate of the cost of the Lithium ion battery is the important thing -and of course you are right. It's ridiculously and prohibitively expensive.
However, the availability of Lithium will never be the problem - at current rates of extraction (with no recycling at all) there is enough Lithium in the earths crust for 70 billion years.
Yes, sorry, when I say "known to exist", I'm referring to world reserve estimates from the USGS.
It is true that world reserves increase over time as new discoveries are made and as demand increases. But I don't think that's a simple process where the price just goes up and new reserves show up.
Take, for instance, the Hubbert peak of oil in America. The 1970's oil crisis provided a huge incentive for drillers to find more oil in the US, but oil production still peaked and declined for the next 30 years. It wasn't until the invention of fracking, decades later, before lower 48 oil production started to go back up to the 1970's peak and above.
Technological innovation is not a straightforward or predictable process that responds quickly to pricing pressure. It's still quite possible for us to have long lasting resource crunches any time we over-consume a limited substance.
My favourite absurdity is how my job involves making a special type of rock do my bidding by feeding it patterns of lightning. Lots of my time and effort is spent making sure that the lightning is just so, otherwise the rock misbehaves.
Quite a few people are preoccupied by worrying that the machines with these rocks at their heart might one day go out of our control and kill us all.
I think that the virtuous rationalist path is most likely to do a large amount of research on Neom down to the construction physics level, then write a Much More Than You Wanted To Know post, then get feedback from others, add corrections as needed, and then rinse and repeat because you can never be sure that you didn't miss something.
The problem with that is that we are human, we don't have the time, energy, nor inclination to do deep dives, and reality has a surprising amount of detail (http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail). So, we rely on heuristics based on our priors. This includes the absurdity heuristic, even though that heuristic's poor track record is a major theme of the rationalist canon (ie, how heliocentrism, evolution, special relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. seem so absurd).
I think the idea is that there is usually never a royal road or even a muddy goat path, but there is always a compass. That compass always points in the same direction, labeled "Do more research, and listen to more criticism and feedback to make sure you are not going astray". When looking at the direction the compass is going, we see difficult terrain, lots of skulls (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/), terrible weather, and it goes uphill both ways.
I don't actually think we should be on the most virtuous rationalist path all of the time. After all, we have a limited budget of time, energy, money, etc. However, even following it a little bit of the way is probably good.
For instance, instead of "Neom is so absurd! Ha ha ha!", it would be better to say "I think Neom is absurd because of A, B, C inefficiencies, which if we look at ordinary construction costs would cost $X, and make it hard for residents to get around because of Y. Even if the Saudis have super-secret extra-efficient construction technology (unlikely because of Z), constructing a more ordinarily-shaped city with walkability and transit in mind would still cost Alpha % less and increase mobility by a factor of Beta for reasons Gamma." At least for me, sometimes the absurdity becomes more apparent when the critic lays out the facts than when the critic points and laughs.
As for how far we should follow the compass of Rationalist Virtue given our time/energy/money/inclination constraints, maybe here there is really not only no royal road nor goat path, but also no compass. I suppose it depends on things whether we are trying to persuade or get to the bottom of things, how important is it personally to know the truth (ie, getting Neom wrong costs nothing to anyone here in the West, at least for now), and how certain we already are (this last one can still go wrong, since closed-minded bigots are very certain of their beliefs).
The point is that we should always see absurdity as a cop-out. Maybe we can agree that it is the best we can do for now given a large multitude of constraints, but we should never accept it as a good argument in and of itself. If we stop at a certain region when making a Map of Knowledge, we should never mark that region as "Here Be Absurdity". Rather, we should mark it as "Here we gave up", or maybe include a pointer to a cache of arguments someone else made. In the latter case, we would let the reader/future mapmakers decide if the pointer points in the correct direction.
Also, I specifically disagree with "in order to dismiss it as absurd, I need to explain why the Saudi government would waste $500 billion on an obviously absurd idea. This is easy: their king is a megalomaniac, plus people are afraid to voice dissent."
Yes, MBS really is a megalomaniac, and yes people really are afraid to voice dissent, and yes, all of those are good reasons why the Saudi government would waste such a sum on an absurd idea. However, these are not by themselves reasons to dismiss Neom, and Scott himself noticed the red flags of Bulverism and bias arguments. To properly dismiss Neom, it would be better to discuss urban planning, economics, and construction physics.
Neom seems more like a concept with some strong statements, but we've seen similar grand scale plans fail before or simply never come to fruition. Does anyone remember those artificial land palm trees? They're...not doing so well and were never finished. So until ground is broken or a highly detailed multi thousand page report is issued, then we can dismiss any concept car or concept arcology building out of hand based on priors that such things never come to market or look very different if they do.
It seems like we might match our level of effort in dealing with a specific claim to some dgree with the amount of specificity being offered.
Do they have a detailed list of supplies, purchase prices, and hours of effort by various categories of builders to construct their price estimate with comparison rates of real projects? Or is it just a number pulled out of thin air? If there are some 'high level' graphs then that's pretty low specificity and lacks data to support it from prior building costs in the area, as Scott mentioned.
Now you don't want to get sucked into a rabbit hole by some crazy person who writes endlessly long lists of things and infer that somehow makes what they're saying any more or less likely.
But it is easy enough to make some guess as to how seriously you choose to take any pile of estimates and if it is too complex, to rely on experts to analyse such a complex argument. If you see a brochure with 30 pages of pretty pictures and pie charts....you can push back to say it is absurd relying on your superficial priors...but if you have a 3,000 page plan then a bit more effort will be required to analyse it for overly rosy or pessimistic projections. This is how political think tanks generally work to promote highly biased and often false ideas using detailed reports to support the foregone conclusions their sponsors wanted to promote.
I'm going to offer an anecdote that might be slightly relevant, but I sincerely hope is not. Mostly I just want to tell this story....
Sometime around 2007-2008, a friend of mine was hired as a contract welder and fabricator in (I think) UAE. He was working on the enormous stage for the wedding of the Princess. Six months. Enormous.
He had several trenchant observations about the culture there, but the semi-relevant one in this case is about "labor conditions". 'Berto was working steadily, but saw there was no way all this work could get done, so he asked up the chain for some help.
A few days later, he got some help. A hundred (100) Sri Lankan laborers showed up, and were put at his service. These guys had only the clothes on their backs, and no skills at all. They were put to work sometimes pounding in screws with hammers. They worked frantically hard. 'Berto was deeply troubled by the implications of this. After six days of this, there was the collective day off. Then on [Monday? after the day off anyway], a hundred COMPLETELY DIFFERENT Sri Lankans took their place. This went on for almost two months.
My friend prayed the whole time that each hundred laborers were not just fed to the sharks after six days.
The fact that he considered that might be possible, well it might have a bearing on construction economics in the Arab World.
"Marginal spending on medicine has zero net effect" is only absurd if you don't know what "marginal" or "net" means, right? It means "we're spending roughly the correct amount of money on medicine" (whereas marginal spending having negative net effect would mean we're spending too much, and positive that we should spend more). Or am I missing something?
I think the main thing this discussion tells us is that there are many ways to analyze a project, and people are EXTREMELY convinced that their "rational" way is the single canonical rational way...
- One dimension of this is the Saudi government and its various out-group properties. The all-consuming issue to about 90% of the commenters, regardless of specifics about the project.
- A second dimension is the cost. The all-consuming issue to about 9% of the commenters.
- What very people appear to be interested in is the city qua city aspect of this; yet to me that's the part that obvious renders it "absurd" regardless of bias or otherwise.
Consider the pictures as drawn. Not how you you want save the project by redefining, the project as described.
What you are living in is a TUNNEL 170km long. You are living in a skyscraper/shopping mall that you can never leave. Is that what people want, especially the kind of people who rhapsodize about this sort of city?
How are things delivered in this city if there are no cars? How are buildings repaired if there are no open spaces (eg roads) that act as emergency locations for cranes and building equipment? How is air pumped into the city and heat removed? (All this stuff can be done for skyscrapers because they have huge open spaces on the sides where the equipment lives and can vent, but according the video two of the sides of each "skyscraper unit" don't exist, and the other two are mirrored glass with no ugly chillers or pumps.
What are the fire escape plans?
Do animals and birds live in this space along with the trees? How does that play out in terms of animal waste and falling leaves?
etc etc etc
This stuff is considered absurd because there are no intermediate proofs of concept. Yes, you can grow one tree in a skyscraper, but no-one is growing forests in skyscrapers. Every real-world image I see of this sort of thing ACTUALLY has the trees on the outside of the building, so the problem is moot.
It's not quite the same, but the logic here is somewhat like "we know how to build gardens, therefor how hard can it be to build Biosphere 2?" And we know how that turned out.
Now if you want to say that the images in the video are all nonsense, well sure. Then we can have a different sort of argument. But the argument at least some of us (1%) are having is with the concept as presented by the video. And we call absurdity because of these eminently practical things: air, heat, life forms, repair, logistics, building evolution, ...
> Aren’t a lot of Scott’s examples just motivated reasoning?
If you buy Mercier and Sperber's argument that human reasoning evolved for argumentation [1], then motivated reasoning should be the default expectation, so it wouldn't be surprising that most commonsense examples are motivated reasoning.
[1] https://repository.upenn.edu/goldstone/15/
I think many smart people disagreed with evolution when it was first introduced on this basis. Things that seem obvious post hoc often seem crazy to start with.
certum est, quia impossibile might apply to AGI.
Actually, existence of Jesus as person is quite well established. Definitely far more than existence of Thor.
Obviously, existence of Jesus as a God is not well established.
See for example https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/1650/32270 (not a great source, but feel free to find at least as good claiming that Jesus obviously never existed as a person)
> What we need to understand first, though, is that there is no contemporaneous or documentary evidence for the existence of most ancient figures. That's the nature of our historical sources for the ancient world. So if the question is "Do we have good historical evidence that Jesus existed, the kind of evidence that historians take as conclusive when they're doing ancient history" then the answer is a clear "yes."
So, you are not disputing that historians believe otherwise and base it on your own thinking, right?
He just cited Carrier that says Jesus did not exist and shows plenty of evidence and sound reasoning for that.
Carrier is a known axe-grinder on this topic and there are plenty of problems with his arguments:
https://historyforatheists.com/jesus-mythicism/
The historicity of Jesus does not depend on the Gospels; there's secular history of the early Christian church that is inconsistent with Jesus being make-believe. Out of curiosity, when do you believe that people made up that story, and where?
I think it's plausible that the Jesus of the gospels might be a combination of several real people, plus a bunch of made-up stuff.
But I'd still call this a "historical Jesus" scenario.
I think that there is insufficient evidence to warrant a firm opinion either way. I'll agree that there doesn't seem to be much good evidence that he existed, but how much evidence would you expect to find? I was expecting to find court records, but it turns out those would have been destroyed in a fire.
I watched an interview with Carrier a couple days ago on a Youtube channel I follow (Crecganford). I found him moderately persuasive, but not convincing. I think I updated my estimate of the existence of a historical Jesus downwards from something like 95% to 90%. Still much higher than Carrier's own estimate (stated in the interview) of about 30%.
His line of argument that seemed strongest to me was the comparative mythology angle, that our records of second-century Christianity fit several very common patterns around that time of savior cults and reinterpretation of divine/celestial entities as historical people. He also talked a little about an example of a mystery cult around the same time period that had an outer teaching that its central figure was a historical human, but an inner teaching that the central figure was purely celestial and that the outer teaching was allegorical. Collectively, these seem to provide better grounding for a hypothesis of how an ahistorical Jesus could have to be widely believed to be historical so soon after his purported death than the straightforward "Peter and Paul were con artists or lunatics" explanation.
On the other hand, there were several things that Carrier said that make me wary of believing his claims and arguments without strong corroboration. To start out, he seems to have a definite "angry atheist" attitude towards Christianity which I find off-putting and makes me suspect him of being biased towards believing claims that reflect poorly upon it. For another, he made several specific claims that seemed fishy given things I already know about.
One was that he relied heavily on "dog that didn't bark" evidence: that lack of contemporary record of Jesus, especially from secular sources implies that he probably wasn't real because if he was he would have left more concrete traces. This is at odds with my understanding of the extreme patchiness of pre-modern historical records, and Carrier's attempt to preempt this objection by bringing up extensive contemporary evidence of much more notable-at-the-time figures like Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great feels like a swindle. I mean, of course great conquerers and rulers of continent-spanning empires leave more records than leaders of moderately-successful messianic cults in a peripheral client state that only acquired macrohistorical importance in hindsight a century or two later.
Carrier also cited as evidence that the Canonical Gospels were written in Greek rather than Aramaic, comparing this to the only accounts of an American figure being written in Italian. This seems to discount Greek's role as in the Roman world as a cosmopolitan language of trade and scholarship, so it's more analogous to someone in Anglo-Saxon England only being written about in Latin (which happened all the time). This ties in with how Carrier seemed to talk about the Gospels as if they were entirely original compositions by the authors of their canonical texts rather than (as is more commonly theorized) drawing heavily on lost earlier written and oral sources (e.g. Q, M, and Proto-Mark), especially in the case of the Synoptic Gospels that clearly draw on one another if not from lost common source. It wouldn't strike me as terribly surprising if Q and Proto-Mark were written or orally transmitted in Aramaic, then translated to Greek, and only the widely-distributed (and interleaved in improved forms in the cases oof Matthew and John) Greek versions survived to the Council of Constantine.
Carrier also seemed to rely too heavily on active and deliberate Christian suppression of documents to explain away the absence of additional evidence against a historical Jesus. Yes, Christians have suppressed heterodox religious writings on multiple occasions, but nowhere near as comprehensively as Carrier seemed to argue. In particular, the works of the fourth century Emperor Julian the Apostate (particularly "Against the Galileans", an extensive tract criticizing Christianity) seem like prime candidate for suppression but nevertheless substantial fragments of them survive (largely thanks to being quoted extensively by Christian scholars seeking to refute Julian's arguments in context).
The best argument for Jesus' divinity is that there's some no-name loser with no major following during his life, no armies or accomplishments, with almost no direct evidence of his existence is somehow in the historical record for doing little other than being loving and then being tortured to death in some imperial backwater,
I roll to disbelieve. If it weren't something i already knew were true, and were deeply embedded in our culture, i'd say, look you're bullshitting me, that's just a feel-good story.
Far easier to believe this is the child of the simulation's author than that some random loser is the most impactful figure in human history.
Muhammad was more impactful. A whole lot of credit for what became Christianity belongs to Paul rather than Jesus.
This is survivorship bias. We're credulous beings and one fictitious story was bound to bubble to the top of the meme space. It happened to be the Jesus story in the West, the Muhammad story in other places and a few other stories in even more places.
Muhammad had a huge army during his time alive, though. He wrote down words directly, and his followers copied a bunch of his own written words. His historical existence gets a much higher probability than Jesus'.
Even if the person existed, his claims to divinity are fictional.
Muhammad didn't claim divinity.
Muhammad was illiterate. He recited the Quran from memory (his memory of what the Archangel Gabriel told him.) Memorizing the Quran is considered a feat of piety among Muslims to this day. It was only after Muhammed’s death that people realized they’d better write it down.
The same could be said of Gautama Buddha, Lao Tzu, or Confucius, more or less. And we're not even sure all of those even existed. But it's pretty clear that if Jesus is divine, those three aren't.
Ideas, well expressed, can change the world. A no-name loser in life, with the right idea and a first-rate talent for expression, can become the inspirational leader of hundreds of millions of people, a thousand or more years later.. No divine intervention required. We know this from multiple examples.
Buddha was born a prince and had a significant number of followers before he died.
Confucius is a good example; as someone else argued, Jesus was championed by Paul, and Confucius was championed by Mencius, so it looks like what you really need is someone else championing you.
> But it's pretty clear that if Jesus is divine, those three aren't.
Maybe? If Jesus was divine AND a bunch of traditional interpretations of Christianity are correct, sure.
But let's say that every couple hundred years the simulation authors try their hand at fixing the place up; then maybe we periodically get visited by otherworldly persuasive people engineered from outside the simulation.
> Ideas, well expressed, can change the world.
I like that you're saying this; maybe i just need to take that concept more seriously.
He was not a random loser. Jesus (as is described) was a highly charismatic leader of a Jewish cult, that has to deny its obvious seccesionist ambitions in order to avoid extermination like the Zealots in the first Roman-Jewish war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zealots
You will have to start to explain yourself when people give up their cushy job of tax collectors/collaborators with the Roman occupation to become your apostle instead:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zacchaeus
The "render unto Caesar"-defense means that people were actually taking him quite seriously as a threat to the established order.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Render_unto_Caesar
Jerusalem may be an imperial backwater from the Roman perspective, but certainly a troublesome one. The authorities wouldn't bother to publicly crucify just anyone.
Whether he's historical or not, the story is not about some loser. If you read the bible, you'll note that Jesus and his apostles are in the process of starting a major movement.
More existence than Thor. And certainly no reason to doubt some random person claiming some religious import and trying to “Reform Judaism” with that name. There were lots of people doing that, nothing that odd about it.
That even a small portion of the events of the gospels happened? Who knows, not well established in the historical record at all.
More well established than Thor is pretty weak sauce though. Is the existence of Jesus more well established than, uh here's a list off the top of my head, Socrates, Alexander the Great, King David, Herod the Great, Plato, Augustus, Paul the Apostle, or... hmm any other historical or legendary figures that you think might be illustrative.
Might be comparable to King David, or better attested even, since we have much less idea of King David's lifestyle than Jesus's afaik.
Thanks
Alexander the Great was well documented by sources in Greece, Syria, Egypt, Persia and elsewhere. There are all too many contemporary accounts and monuments in his name to have been faked. They didn't pull the name for Alexandria out of a hat. The rapid change in the region's political structure is also well documented. An unbeatable army came from the north of Greece and its leader called himself Alexander. He died young and without issue, and his kingdom was divided into three kingdoms that dominated the region for over a century.
Plato and Socrates are also pretty well documented. They were well documented in their own era and later. Unlike Jesus, there is not just documentation from their followers but also from their enemies. Obviously, one could argue that every surviving document from the era has been consistently edited for nefarious purposes, but ....
There is archeological evidence for Herod the Great. He existed and ruled the right place at the right time. He built a harbor and put his name on it. There are mentions of him in other Roman sources. Whether he did what was recounted in the New Testament is less well documented. Evil kings back then were always said to have demanded the death of every first born boy, so this might have just been "woke" posturing.
Augustus existed. The Romans didn't just make him up to slap his name on buildings, monuments and seaports and use in contemporary art work or mention in contemporary documents. His military and political actions were also well documented by allies and enemies.
King David is largely undocumented except for the Old Testament. There is the Tel Dan inscription which was written for some king who defeated the "King of Israel and the king of the house of David", but it was written centuries later, after David's kingdom had been divided. It is clearly not enough to establish his existence. (Supposedly, Jesus was a distant descendant of King David.)
Paul the Apostle is tougher. The only source is the New Testament and he was supposedly one of its authors. I'm sure some biblical scholars have weighed in on this, but I got the impression that Paul was written by a single author or at least in one consistent voice unlike, let's say, the book of Isaiah.
Did Jesus exist? Sure. He was one of many charismatic religious leaders in a turbulent time. How much of the New Testament's account of him is true? That's a much tougher question. (I think Life of Brian addressed this question surprisingly well.)
Thanks for this. One further question. Regarding Socrates I was under the impression that Plato was the only contemporary source attesting his existence. Is it possible that Plato made him up as a rhetorical or narrative device? Is Socrates attested to in documents independent of Plato?
The reason I bring this up is that I've heard that Jesus is about as well attested as Socrates and almost nobody doubts the existence of Socrates. So the implication is that people who deny the mere existence of Jesus may have an ideological axe to grind.
There are actually Socratic dialogues by people (or, well, a person) other than Plato. Xenophon wrote several, as well as various histories, both attempting to continue Thucydides' work, and also chronicle some of what he himself got up to (the Anabasis is definitely worth checking out). It's been a while, but I recall thinking that both Plato and Xenophon portrayed Socrates as having a very similar personality and style of argumentation, but as making wildly different points, in a way that was distinctly biased toward reinforcing the authors' personal views.
(I don't know if there are any Socratic dialogues by anyone other than Plato and Xenophon, but it should be easy to check.)
I did not know that, thanks.
I know Socrates makes an appearance in Aristophanes Clouds, but this could have just been an inside joke like Nicolas Bourbaki among French mathematicians.
Thanks. Well this combined with the Xenophon Socratic dialogues Moon Moth mentioned puts the idea that Plato just made Socrates up to bed I think.
I guess you can say we don't have enough evidence to be sure he existed in the same way some tiktokers believe we don't have enough evidence to believe Rome existed.
Tacitus spoke of the crucified Jew, and not because he was against cruficixition
Like to the standard of beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law?
Perhaps, but he wasn't talking about current events, but stories about things that happened "far off and long ago". (Well, not *that* long ago, but decades at least.) So not good evidence of fact. It's not just hearsay, it's "The way I heard it" kind of stuff.
I found the wikipedia article on the historicity of Jesus pretty compelling, so I'll just suggest you read that (if you haven't already). If you happen to have especially high standards for historical figures or mythological figures (which I use in the sense of foundational stories, not in the sense of false) then ok.
Actually, I found it rather unconvincing. There were a lot of "most people who study the Bible believe he existed" arguments, but that ignores the percentage of the folks who study biblical history that are committed Christians. Even if such people are honest, they will tend not to question extremely weak arguments. The strongest evidence that I find that he existed is that there's no reason to expect to find any evidence that he did. And there is admission in that article (if you attend carefully) that many documents were altered or forged by the early Christians.
So if you want a comparison today, look at the way history you have observed happening is altered by those with strong political beliefs. And don't assume those motivations are recent changes in humanity.
Ok, we agree on what evidence exists, and I don't personally feel especially persuasive at the moment. It's more evidence than exists for nearly any other individual of that time. If you think it's not enough to be certain, we'll have to wait until someone finds his tomb to know for sure.
It’s definitely not more evidence than exists for a large portion of the Roman upper class for hundreds of years.
I think an underrated aspect of the Neom project is that it was developed my western consultants- it's worth making fun of, but predominantly because it shows the lack of imagination with the western mind.
It'd be a mistake to make a non-negligible update about Westerners based on one very unusual project concept made a few Westerners, under unknown design constraints, chosen among an unknown number of others, made to please a man whose aesthetic preferences you don't know.
Don't be the kind of person who reads a story about an unethical cardiologist and then believes that cardiologists in general are unethical: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/
Agree.
The problem with NEOM is that it's impractical, not that it's unimaginative.
Hard disagree- "efficient",public transport oriented, sustainable etc etc. These are common tropes that have been doing the rounds for around 3 decades amongst the western intelligentsia. Not remotely imaginative, merely the extreme of the consultants understanding.
I think you misunderstand the point slightly. Being unimaginative is not *the* problem with this project. *The* problem, the reason it's _prima facie_ absurd, is that it's impractical.
The answer to Scott's question, "how do we know that the Saudis can't do construction ten times cheaper than anyone else?", is that there's an international market for large construction, and if they could, they would already be doing that and wiping the floor with everyone else.
(Note: this explanation is not "capitalism". It is "markets", which long predate capitalism and which will exist long after it's gone.)
When it comes to, say, tunnel construction, France can do it ten times cheaper than the US. But construction markets aren't as free as you suggest. French and Chinese firms don't win big US construction contracts, even if they can undercut competitors on price.
Yes, Neom is terribly impractical, but not more so than Brasilia, and it's sure backed by more money. And yet Brasilia is real, in all its silly impracticality. And when you think about it, Dubai is arguably even more impractical, because Dubai went up really fast but without any livability-promoting coordination. We might easily think of better models than the big Neom line artery, but hey, at least it's one livability forethought, compared to Dubai's zero.
I'm glad someone mentioned Le Corbusier's Brasilia. Neom seems to be more like one of Paolo Soleri's arcologies. They were both inspired by Buckminster Fuller's argument that cities are machines for living.
Can you provide a source showing that the "machines for living" idea was Fuller's? I thought that was Le Corbusier's.
Wikipedia:
Brasília was a planned city developed by Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer and Joaquim Cardozo (...)
This is a quite puzzling generalization about Dubai; having lived in it for years, I've failed to notice it has a livability of zero. Thoroughly artificial? Yes. Unliveable? God no, very much to the contrary.
US has totally overbloated costs of everything (from medicine and universities to, yes, construction), for reasons that go into several blogposts of length (posts that were largely already written) - the short of it being that US intuitions on how much something should cost, can be ditched and disposed of as soon as you exit the US context.
For instance, the Burj Khalifa cost $1.5B compared to One World Trade Center's $3.9B, in spite of the Burj being a significantly more demanding project (top floor @ 605m, versus One's top floor @ 386m).
> (Note: this explanation is not "capitalism". It is "markets", which long predate capitalism and which will exist long after it's gone.)
What does "capitalism" mean to you?
Actually trying to build a city from scratch in a way that hasn't been done before is imaginative, even if the principles you choose to use to guide your city design process are the somewhat-stale principles of the secular religion of the Western intelligentsia.
Also, pretty much any other shape would've been more efficient than a line.
Strong disagree, see this comment by one of the western consultants involved: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122/comment/8112867 . Also, note that Westerners mostly aren't doing this (I agree they are doing stupid things, just not this particular kind of stupid)
I think a fairer criticism is that it's what a Saudi king who is kind of a westaboo but doesn't actually understand the West wants to make so that (his imagined version of) Westerners will like him.
Westaboo. I like it.
Is MBS cargo culting the West or is he cargo culting Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum (the Sheikh of Dubai)?
Oh give me a break. These western developers are giving the arabs what they want, and what will make them the most money.
Seems less an east vs west thing more a contribution to the grand tradition of autocrats doing crazy shit.
The recent issue of the Economist has a section on MBS. At the end is a bit on Neom where the author goes out to the site, looks around, and talks to the consultants on the project. They're constantly making new plans, hoping to continue making their fees for as long as possible before being fired. One likens it to riding a bull, you know you can't stay on forever but the point is to see how long you can go.
There's a difference between things that 1. seem absurd but fall in realms where fundamental understanding is pretty poorly developed and there is a broad possibility space for surprises and 2. things that seem absurd and fall into very well understood spaces where surprises don't really happen anymore.
Centrally planned economies and modernist urban planning fall squarely into the category of "ideas that were once groundbreaking but have since been pretty conclusively shown not to work for reasons that were pretty obvious in hindsight", and Neom basically leaps into the arms of several extremely well understood pitfalls with no plan to address them.
Add to this that the project can serve many individuals' personal ends without actually succeeding and you have the ideal recipe for money-incinerating white elephant boondoggle nirvana. This is not "ambitious but doable in principle". This is "obviously terrible idea borne of rich-kid hubris on an unprecedented scale".
Scott wrote about this awhile back: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/
Sorry, but I think you are overgeneralizing. I'm not sure what you mean by "modernist urban planning", but "Centrally planned economies" describes every national economy. The degree of control varies, but if they issue currency, they are planning on creating economic effects based on that issue. And the SF area BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) was quite successful. Not perfectly successful, but an immense improvement over not having it present. Enough of an immense improvement to more than justify its cost. So not all things that *I* consider "modernist urban planning" are failures.
I would assume he's using the normal definitions of market vs centrally planned economy. All real countries fall on a spectrum between the two, but ones closer to the market end tend to be far more prosperous than ones closer to the centrally planned one.
The US economy is centrally planned, though I've heard arguments that we are not as prosperous as we think. Just about every major industry is centrally controlled by a handful of cooperating corporate entities. The banking system is centrally controlled by the Federal Reserve. There's plenty of room of innovation if you don't run afoul of one of the big guys and don't need a lot of capital.
I agree that Neom is unlikely to work, but a lot of centrally planned scheme work out just fine. Look at the centrally planned and government funded technology we are using for this discussion.
The U.S. economy is not centrally planned. That's simply incorrect. Even the Fed mostly interacts with the banking system through open market operations.
Tell Wall Street. Tell the business press. Open market operations are centrally planned.
If you are using a definition of "Centrally planned" which includes both the US and USSR, consider that your definition is overexpansive to the point of meaninglessness. Can you name a single country whose economy isn't "centrally planned" by your lights?
I really can't think of any country where the economy isn't centrally planned. It's all a matter of degree, of how open the system is to allowing outsiders to expand and use formal channels. The US is fairly good about this. If your skin wasn't too dark and you worshiped in the correct manner, the sky was the limit. The USSR had no official tolerance for its massive underground economy, but relied on it much as North Korea does today. Still, we Americans used to joke that Russians had to shop at Grocery Store #815 while we Americans had a lot more choices. Of course, now, most of our food shopping is done at Grocery Store #815 as a handful of chains control the market.
The US has always had a lot of economic central planning. Differences between the central planners in London and in the Colonies were a major driver of the Revolution. After the Revolution the Colonies tried to move planning down to the state level, but that only lasted a few years.
All that, and not a single remark about drawing bright lines in the sand.
An excellent line, that. (Yours, I mean, not Neom's)
> Maybe, every so often, do a deep dive into fact-checking something, even if you’re absolutely sure it’s true. Maybe if everybody does this, then someone will (by coincidence) catch the false absurdities, and then the social epistemology thing can work.
I do not recommend this. I did this with "Donald Trump is a Racist" and even though I hate the man and 80% of what he stands for, now half my in-group thinks I'm MAGA. For completeness, I went a little further down the rabbit hole than Scott did in his "You're Still Crying Wolf" essay, and started providing videos of black people saying Trump isn't racist.
On the other hand, much of my in-group isn't rationalists, so maybe that is where my error lies.
In any case, be prepared, after you do a deep dive fact checking things that are "obviously true" to your in-group, that you will have some very negative social interactions anytime you bring up what you found, if it doesn't turn out to be actually-true.
There's a huge chance you and your friends are disagreeing about the definition of the word "racist" and not about Trump's behavior.
It did finally come down to that. It turns out the definition of "racist" was just "someone I don't like, and who the mainstream media is willing to label as such."
For me it was the surprising large number of people that (completely) bought into it. Really made me wonder what other things I "know" because mainstream media says it, and it appeals to me.
I'm saying something different. Trump is on record calling Mexicans rapists, African countries as shithole countries, saying he wanted more immigrants from Norway, calling for and implementing immigration policies that were discriminatory against Muslims, apologizing for white supremacists rallying against jews, and much more. Is that enough to call him "racist". I feel like that's a fair threshold.
You seem to be saying that you found videos of black people saying he's not racist and that's enough to put him in the "not racist" category. I disagree with you, but now we're arguing not about what he did or didn't do, we're not arguing if what he did was acceptable or not, we're just arguing where the threshold of "racist" is.
> Trump is on record calling Mexicans rapists
I'm glad you started there, because that's where I stop. He is on record saying no such thing. You imply he said this about all Mexicans. Surely this was just you mis-speaking. Being charitable, you mean he said most, or maybe "far more than average" Mexicans are this. Again, he said no such thing.
I am familiar with all your talking points. Are you familiar with the alternative viewpoints? Have you bothered to do the research into the massive numbers of people who feel he is less racist than average, perhaps even far less racist than average? Can you summarise their viewpoints?
You can just read his own words:
"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
I never said *all*. He called a generalized version of Mexican immigrants rapists.
How is that supposed to be racist? If I go to Mexico, round up a bunch of convicted rapists, and send them north, is it racist to call them rapists?
Racism is at least notionally supposed to ascribe characteristics to people because of their race. The quote you just mentioned says that Mexican immigrants differ from other Mexicans by consisting largely of undesirables. It doesn't say that Mexican immigrants differ racially from other Mexicans, even though that would be true.
Michael Watts makes a good point as well.
And I, at the risk of sounding like a broken record... am 100% already familiar with your talking points.
So let me belabour my point.
There are many millions of Mexicans, living and working both in Mexico and the United States, who disagree with you. Can you characterise the viewpoint those millions of Mexican nationals and Mexican immigrants who think Trump is not racist? Hint, it sounds a lot like what Michael Watts said, but I encourage you to do your own research.
As the "You Are Still Crying Wolf" article points out, Bill Clinton and John McCain both made the exact same point, though perhaps phrased more carefully.
McCain 2008:
> Border security is essential to national security. In an age of terrorism, drug cartels, and criminal gangs, allowing millions of unidentified persons to enter and remain in this country poses grave risks to the sovereignty of the United States and the security of its people.
When Clinton or McCain implies illegal Mexican immigrants commit terrible crimes, no one bats an eye.
Every once in a while I'll get into an argument with non rationalists and then halfway through remember, to my surprise, that most people take disagreement as a personal insult rather than a point of factual debate.
Yes. Typically I operate at Simulacra level 1. It sounds like you often do, too. This causes a great deal of misunderstanding.
https://markxu.com/simulacra-examples
I think you might be able to side-step this failure mode in the future by presenting what you find as "here's my understanding of how the out-group thinks and why they believe what they do" rather than "here's some evidence against our belief"?
Similar to another reply at same level, yes, this is one way to "white lie" away operating at different simulacra levels.
https://markxu.com/simulacra-examples
Racism is a meaningless word and this is yet another example of it.
Au contraire, the problem is that "racism" has *too many* meanings, and people simply pick the one that most confirms their beliefs.
Scott's written about this before, and the closest he came to a coherent definition was "a combination of Motive, Belief, and Consequences, weighted in favor of Definition By Motives" where "By Motives" was "An irrational feeling of hatred toward some race that causes someone to want to hurt or discriminate against them."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism
This is a great point. Too many people think "racis[t,m]" has become meaningless, but it most clearly has not, yet we still go in circles. Thanks for the reframing.
Is Trump sexist? I think someone making an argument for him not being racist would be much more credible if they thought he was sexist. So I'm interested to see if you pass that test.
I can see an argument for him not being racist where someone argues he is just self-interested and crass or something. Framing him as not sexist is much more difficult.
The OP doing "research" and finding that 3 black guys and some latinos don't think trump is racist is not "rationality", it's autism. The OP believes there's some precise meaning of racism and that you have to fulfill certain hard criteria for it. But racism is a useful definition even if it's loosely defined to refer to people that consistently say negative things about certain races independent of their internal motives. It's a social construction and a a little ambiguous, but still useful. Rationality is not about 0s and 1s, it's about navigating imprecision with reason.
Sure but I'm interested in whether he actually really dislikes Trump as stated. Some fancy argument for him not advocating racism is plausible. Sexism is much more cut and dry. So it is a good sniff test.
I find the exact opposite. For examples of Trump's racism, it's easy to point to his desired Muslim ban, his comments about the Khan family, etc. On the other hand, this may be my google-fu failing me, but it's hard to find a single Trump quote that's obviously sexist.
Searching for sexist Trump quotes, most quotes fall into one of these categories:
- Trump bragging about how every woman wants to date him or have sex with him.
- Trump insulting specific individuals who are women.
- Trump acting like a selfish jerk
- Trump saying women are superior to men
Trump gets into feuds with a lot of people and will happily throw insults at people of any race or gender. He's more likely to call women fat or ugly than men, but I think when he's insulting people, he just says whatever he thinks will be most hurtful and he tends to think men will be less hurt by being called "fat" or "ugly" than women. Regardless of his reasoning, it's really hard to convince someone that Trump is sexist with a quotes of him insulting a particular person, because it only shows he thinks badly of that person.
The statements of his which are the closest to sexism, in my opinion, are when he talks about women in general. When he does so, he tends to ascribe qualities he admires to them, although they aren't always qualities the rest of us admire: he thinks women in business are shrewd, cutthroat, strong, aggressive, and manipulative. In context, he seems to say these things with great admiration. It feels vaguely sexist, but I'm not even sure whether it feels more sexist against men or women. For example:
"Women have one of the great acts of all time. The smart ones act very feminine and needy, but inside they are real killers. The person who came up with the expression 'the weaker sex' was either very naive or had to be kidding."
> it's easy to point to his desired Muslim ban
Is that necessarily racist? Sam Harris has made similar arguments against Islam and the radicalization that is all too common. Since you can't distinguish moderate Muslims from radicalized Muslims, if you're being targeted by Muslim radicals, doesn't it naturally follow that you should restrict Muslim immigration to reduce the threat? This seems standard practice in times of war.
Assuming we agree that racism is "racial prejudice", and "prejudice" is holding "unreasonable preconceived judgments", is it not actually reasonable to be prejudiced against Muslims in the above scenario?
You could dispute that the threat from Muslim radicals was far too low to justify such a measure, but now we've switched to a more subjective debate and away from any obvious racist motives.
> But racism is a useful definition even if it's loosely defined to refer to people that consistently say negative things about certain races independent of their internal motives.
Yes, racism is literally "racial prejudice". The example you cited wasn't talking about Mexicans though, but a specific subset of Mexicans. It's like saying calling all New Yorkers assholes is racist against white people. It might be an incorrect opinion that happens to include a racial or ethnic name, but that doesn't make it racist.
To my recollection Trump did not "consistently say negative things about other races", he said negative things about specific subsets. That's not racist as others have pointed out to you.
What you're calling an "absurdity heuristic" just seems like a very specific reframing of Occam's razor. An explanation like "there's a Saudi conspiracy to develop amazing construction technology and hide it from the rest of the world" is complex, whereas an explanation like "really rich people sometimes do stupid things with their money" is simple. It shouldn't be mistaken for a foolproof way to identify truth, but it's a useful shortcut.
I came here to make basically this comment. I don't think it's about the complexity of the belief, though, it's about the complexity of the update to the rest of your beliefs the evidence would imply. In fact both "there's a Saudi conspiracy to develop amazing construction technology and hide it from the rest of the world" and "really rich people sometimes do stupid things with their money" are pretty complicated beliefs (involving complicated social constructs like theory of mind, deception, economics, socially constructed reality), but the latter belief doesn't require much updating to integrate, while the former requires shifting around many pieces of my understanding of reality. (If I had insider information on the existence of many conspiracies, and was one of the rich myself, I might find myself in the reverse position, where the former fits more naturally into my understanding of the world than the latter.)
I think you're theoretically right - "absurd = unnecessarily complicated" seems correct to me.
The value of the "absurdity heuristic" is that it connects with our feelings and intuitions about the simplicity of various competing explanations or predictions. These feelings probably result from an semi-conscious or unconscious synthesis of a large amount of information into an intuitive judgment. For me, the question of "when to stop" is driven by the opportunity cost of further analysis relative to other things I could be doing, not a straightforward desire for better accuracy on the topic at hand.
This post looks like it's an exercise in something like ethics, or a values system. Rationality as a whole promotes a set of values (like any religion), but these values happen to be restricted to certain domains, namely processing and communication of information.
In this case, the 'absurdity' filter can be understood simply as, you have to use your value system to decide which hypothesis are worth exploring and which ones aren't.
If i try to point this out directly - that we are articulating and acting on values _just_ like religions do - people will usually say, no no, this is just about instrumental rationality. If that's so, then why 'obligations' to others? And what's wrong with 'the cowards 'way out?
> But I hate this answer. It seems to be preemptively giving up and hoping other people are less lazy than you are.
Words like 'lazy' and 'coward' have an obvious moral valence to them. Wouldn't a more fair interpretation be something like 'people are different, they will naturally explore different parts of the world, and you only have so much time and attention. You can't _not_ use your value system when determining which hypothesis to explore and test, and which ones aren't worth the expiration'.
Clearly, you are articulating norms and values here. You are trying to explore what is and isn't good, in the realm of reasoning and communication. But do value systems constrain anticipation? If not, then in this community they must live in the Jungian shadow; forever preventing us from fully introspecting what exactly the rationality project is about: defining a religion with truth as its deity.
> Rationality as a whole promotes a set of values (like any religion), but these values happen to be restricted to certain domains, namely processing and communication of information.
This seems to me like a confusion of terminal values, instrumental values, and heuristics... if I may use the LW lingo.
Terminal values = things you want as such (e.g. feeling happy).
Instrumental values = things you want as tools to achieve other things (e.g. money allows you to buy stuff).
Heuristics = convenient shortcuts that work 99% of the time, and fail 1% of the time.
Having (terminal) values does not make you a religion. It just makes you an agent (i.e. someone who has preferences).
Being able to distinguish true statements from false statements is an instrumental value. It can help you achieve what you want. For example, if you are sick and want to be healthy again, it can be useful to distinguish between actual medicine and snake oil.
An example of a heuristic is "if something sounds absurd, it is usually false". It does not work perfectly. But it works most of the time, and it can save you a lot of effort, if you hear thousands of statements and do not have enough resources to investigate all of them separately.
> It seems to be preemptively giving up and hoping other people are less lazy than you are. It’s like answering a child’s question about how to do a math problem with “ask a grown-up”. A coward’s way out!
Scott is using an emotional language to make the text more pleasant to read. But the underlying issue is like this:
We hear a lot of statements, and we want to figure out which ones are true and which ones are false. (Because knowing that might hypothetically be useful for some purpose.) We do not have enough resources to fully investigate everything, so realistically we want to separate the statements into *three* buckets: "this is true", "this is false", and "this is complicated"; the last one meaning we did not spend enough resources on this one to figure it out.
Scott is basically asking, if a statement sounds absurd, whether it's okay to put it in the "false" basket, or rather in the "complicated" basket. The goal is, on one hand, to only put true statements in the "true" basket and only put false statements in the "false" basket; on the other hand, to leave as few as possible in the "complicated" basket because that one is not very useful for us.
He mentions a heuristics that says: If it feels absurd, don't think too much and put it into the "false" basket. If someone else, who seems like he thought about this issue more than you did, puts it in their "true" or "complicated" basket, move it into your "complicated" basket, too.
The problem with this heuristic is that it assumes that someone else will spend more resources on this question ( = "less lazy") than you did... but that is not guaranteed to happen, especially when other people use the same heuristic, or when you are the only person who cares about this question.
This heuristic resembles what people would do if they were afraid (= "coward’s way out") to actually pay attention to seemingly absurd statements. The problem is that this doesn't seem like a reliable way to generate true answers.
tl;dr -- words like "lazy" and "coward" are metaphors
I'm well aware of the LW lingo. Here's why I don't buy it: saying "things you want, as such are terminal values" is, in an of itself an act of epistemic smuggling. It's asserting that happiness just stops, as if people being happy were a causal dead end. Arguing that humans can have terminal values asserts that goals can arise ex nihilo, or instead of being caused by things further upstream which themselves may look much like goals that it's reasonable to call them goals.
This is part of the LW religion: instead of saying, yes, there is a purpose to being happy, yes, happiness itself is instrumental to something else (say, evolutionary fitness? the well being of the state?). I'm guessing you'll agree that happiness isn't some causal dead end, but that it advances other outcomes that might be seen as goals : the well being of the state for sure, but evolution might be seen as having the 'goal' of ... well, what, exactly? Is there some broader goal that existed before our own desires, and gave rise to our desires, instrumentally?
Answering _that_ question - _is_ there a nested set of goals, out of which our own desires arise - that is what religions do. Our eschatology is to say, nope, that's it, that's where it ends. Positing that there is no answer is still taking a stand!
We pretend this stance makes us different from groups that posit something abstract as a terminal value (like serving a god) or something concrete (like serving the state) - but this is just our own myth about what makes us good and other groups not good. Except we can't come out and say this, because it's giving up the game!
> Scott is using an emotional language to make the text more pleasant to read.
> tl;dr -- words like "lazy" and "coward" are metaphors
I don't buy this. He's stating in the comments that he feels like he "ought" to be able to answer these questions on his own. How do ought beliefs constrain anticipation? Elsewhere he mentions having an obligation to communicate a certain level of hesitation. Well, where does that come from? Why does that thing exist?
If you take instrumental rationality alone, take it really really seriously, it eventually starts telling you things like:
- be kind to others and they'll share information with you
- have a diverse group of people you communicate with, and they are more likely to uncover flaws in your map
- avoid getting too excited or too worked up because that will prevent you from considering evidence that you are wrong
- be humble minded; it's easy to be far too confident in something and be wrong
In other words, even if you _just_ look at instrumental values like rationality, you end up recreating teachings from a number of different religions, which to me makes it seem like, ok, we're in the same business, let's stop pretending we aren't.
"Having (terminal) values does not make you a religion. It just makes you an agent (i.e. someone who has preferences
It's the insularity, mandatory scriptures, and thought leader that make rationalism a religion.
more things that would be religions under this definition: atheism, science, education
Lots of people manage to be atheists without having popes of atheism, and lots of people manage to be scientists without being scientismists.
Have you considered the possibility that, for some people, atheism, science, and education are in fact filling the same role in their lives as religion does for the religious, with the same shortcomings and criticisms often leveled at the religious?
If so, is there a special value in not calling it religion, even if it meets many of the same criteria we use to describe religion? Keep in mind that there are hundreds of different religions that are recognized as such, many of which do not meet standard Western notions of religion (i.e. are not one of the Abrahamic religions).
Sure, some people "just f-ing love science TM" without actually studying it.
But that just means that you can develop a religion around anything, not that everything is a religion. There are also people doing science qua science.
Agreed. Would you reformulate your response to The Ancient Geek with that in mind? He's not saying that all rationality-based thinking is religious, but a more specific claim that Rationalism (as in the specific group/movement) is religious.
"In this case, the 'absurdity' filter can be understood simply as, you have to use your value system to decide which hypothesis are worth exploring and which ones aren't"
Or as part of a triage, where you disregard the obviously false and obviously true.
There are plenty of statements whose truth or falsehood are non-obvious that you won’t bother investigating due to your values. Whereas you will likely investigate more absurd claims because of their impact on your presences.
For example I might claim to have cofounded a game company that sold to a child movie star and cryptocurrency scam artist. Is that worth your time and effort to investigate? It’s not an absurd claim but there’s no reward for investigating, so I think you’re unlikely to do it.
Now suppose you heard rumors that your new neighbor had paid off all the police and was running some international crime ring from next door, even thigh this sounds insane you might spend a little time trying to investigate because the answer influences you; you might decide to move away. This one sounds absurd on the face of it, but if the investigation can be done cheaply and the risk of being wrong is high enough, you’ll do the investigation.
Just for your personal calibration I enjoyed the whole point you made except the Lia Thomas example which could have been anything else less controversial, and not something where I'd need to ask you to for example define the word Woman and open that whole can of worms. Easier and less controversial examples will work better to get your point across - this example signals your tribe somewhat I suppose, but is that the priority of your comment? Perhaps, but just wanted to give you a data point on how you sound to a member of the audience here.
Anti-trans = pro objective reality. 🤷♀️. No one born with balls gets to play dress up with my immutable biology.
10 years ago I didn’t care, it wasn’t hurting anyone, and adults do weird crap all the time to themselves, and this wasn’t all that much different than women getting 57 plastic surgeries trying to look like a plastic 9” Barbie doll. But 10 years ago “progressives” weren’t advocating child sterilization and genital mutilation, nor were they trying to force college women, victims of domestic violence, or women in prison to share private intimate living spaces with men, even rapists, to coddle said man’s delusions. There also wasn’t passionate advocating for the “civil rights” of mediocre male athletes to play dress up with women’s biology in order to claim female athletic championships.
Is this comment necessary, kind, or true?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/register-of-bans
This is sort of a case of murder, arson, and jaywalking, except that the jaywalking is the most visible and self-evidently stupid and so complaining about the jaywalking is a useful tool to draw attention to the ideology that is also endorsing the murder & arson.
True - my main issue is human thinking being increasingly severed from reality. Though the whole men get access to naked women and girls to coddle their “feelings” and child genital mutilation certainly add a particular degree of passion to the gender ideology aspect of being severed from reality.
Pick an issue - Covid, energy production, economics, child development, food production, building a skyscraper as long as Ireland in 8 years, etc. We have become severed from reality.
Innovation is an amazing ability of humans. Creating something new, or a different way of doing things.
In many ways our society is no longer able to differentiate between genuinely innovative pursuits and ridiculous fantasies. Increasingly we waste money, and destroy real human beings, on fantasies hoping money and belief will magically produce outcomes.
Unless the Saudi government is hiding several million slaves and dozens of square kilometers of building materials, the Line being completed in 8 years is no more possible than Solar panels in NY or Germany producing even 30% of the kw claimed as their “capacity,” and used to justify their use, unless they can magically transport to a lower latitude and make the Earth stall it’s spin in early afternoon for 10 hours everyday. Both are as likely to happen as for a human man to magically start ovulating simply by taking estrogen drugs.
I don’t take the easy path in life. Woman is an adult human female. Female is the sex that has ova. There is only something controversial about that to people who think human belief will somehow override human nature. Our biological sex is the most innate and immutable part of our being. We have zero ability to change it in any functional way. Refusing to accept reality is how people think they are “good people” by giving male feelings priority over immutable reality of actual females. It’s arrogant, entitled, and absurd. Same thing describes evil dictators. Your feelings or offense to that reality doesn’t change reality.
You're not talking about reality now. You're talking about how you and other people might choose to use a word.
If the question with NEOM was whether they were using the words "tall as a skyscraper" differently from us, then maybe the analogy would be relevant. But that doesn't seem to be what's going on.
If choosing to use a word differently didn't have implications in reality, I think people would care quite a bit less. However, the people choosing to use a word differently from NCmom are doing so in support of an ideology that is, over here in reality, sterilizing and mutilating children.
No I’m not because the utilization of that word now has legal attachments. Women don’t want a mentally ill man as a college roommate, prison cell mate, or domestic violence shelter co-habitant and guess who gets kicked to the curb? Real women and girls.
We wouldn’t be talking about this if it was nothing more than differences in dialect that came without consequence.
The controversial nature of the Lia Thomas example is why it’s such a good one. The current central claim of gender theory - that there is binary “brain gender” and that this is what people have always been talking about when they divide the population into ‘men’ and ‘women’ is so obviously dodgy that the only possible explanation for why some people have such a vociferous full-throated belief in it is ‘it’s social’
Seriously?
So we’re all supposed to pivot from “Larry Summers is satan incarnate” to “everyone knows that men and women have totally different brains”; and this is considered normal intellectual discourse???
It's so weird that it's hard to believe. But yes. So, for instance, here's Chase Strangio (who had and still has a very responsible position in the ACLU) from six years ago:
"Unfortunately, in our discussions of anti-trans legislation and in efforts to increase public awareness about the transgender community, we— advocates, journalists, storytellers— are falling back on the very narrative framings that entrench the idea that transgender women are really men and transgender men are really women. Most insidious, we use the same language that opponents of transgender people use, carelessly referring to women who are trans as having “male genitals” or being “born with a male body” or being “anatomically male.” This language is both factually wrong and dangerous
...
By embracing a narrative that one is born with a “male body,” we reinforce the idea that only the bodies we assign male at birth— bodies that have medically normative penises— are male.
But that simply isn’t true. It is a choice to refer to some bodies as male and some bodies as female, not a fact. Our genital characteristics are one component of who we are and do not define, medically or biologically, our sex.
...
if we classify people as male and female, such classifications should only be made based on a person’s gender identity"
Link here: https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/07/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-male-body.html
It's quite rare for the belief system to be laid out as clearly as that but, yes, this is a quite normal opinion in the Professional Managerial Classes. The ACLU, by the way, just this year filed a legal deposition that said, among other things, that "humans are not sexually dimorphic"
I agree that using Lia isn't peak audience calibration but I also agree with being willing to use her as an example because it is unfair to 'bio women' when their competitions are open to people with large sex based physical advantages, and much more so that women's jails and other vulnerable spaces are and are at risk of being opened as well. I see this as an injustice worthy of risking spending social capital
How you found a way to grind a personal culture war axe on this post is astounding.
I could have also gone down the path of our government wasting hundreds of billions on dirty, ecologically destructive, weather dependent “renewables” energy that can’t possibly power any meaningful portion of our grid. I could point out the people cheering this nonsense don’t have a clue about the energy input/ actual realized output ratio regarding various forms of energy production, and they flip out on anyone trying to tell them the truth about it. Those humans that actually know those numbers aren’t stupid enough to think wind mills and solar farms are a “good,” or even sane ideas (nuclear would be a sane answer). Our government, the one we elected, has spent over a decade wasting hundreds of billions in public funds to enrich those who control Chinese slave labor. But, most here don’t actually care enough to learn anything about the hundreds of billions in public money wasted on useless “renewable” energy projects right here at home. Why would anyone expect the Saudi public to do better when their leaders will literally kill them for objecting?
Most people do however get basic reproduction. And yet they still buy into the physically impossible. They demand tens of billions in public money get wasted a year attempting to accomplish the physically impossible, with a side of child sterilization and genital mutilation. They still convince themselves there is no harm in denying objective reality, no matter how many people get harmed in the process.
Both a fair comparisons. Both point out many of the same people who feel superior for pointing out how insane people “over there” are have no clue history will look back on this time and note the complete insanity right here at home.
Some Googling says that it would take about 21,000 square miles of solar panels to power the US. Depending on how someone feels about the absurdity of that number, it may affect their feelings about solar power as an option, or even about the feasibility of The Line.
I think the difference is that in the Lia Thomas question the two sides are in disagreement mostly about how the word "woman" ought to be defined, while in the NEOM case the two sides are probably mostly in agreement over what it would mean for NEOM to "work".
If X has no meaning it’s not a word at all.
Isn’t it great how much western society “progressives” values women more than others? 🙄. So much that half the population thinks women are so irrelevant and useless we shouldn’t even have one to define the only ones capable of giving birth to the next generation.
I disagree. There aren’t competing definitions of woman as there is no alternate definition to adult human female. A circular description is of “feels like a woman” is not a definition as it fails to define woman. Moreover, the interchanging of male and female, despite no push to define female as an organism with either ovaries or testes, yet increasingly the proponents of the you were born in the “wrong” body theory call trans women females. What the argument is really over is human power to override the physical limitations of nature. I’ll take nature every time in that bet.
Don’t get me wrong, in 100 years we’ll likely be over this lunacy conflating gender norms with actual biological sex, but still no man will have ovulated human eggs from his balls. Give the Saudis 100 years, and the Line could be a real city, with 9 million probably prisoners.
Where it’s the same is demanding others claim something that is not possible actually is. Not in 8 years, not with the current coercive power. It’s not physically possible. Not any more possible in reality than a man ovulating eggs from his balls. Okay, maybe the Saudis is slightly more possible.
Banned for unnecessarily introducing an unrelated super-controversial topic.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Doesn't that give us the good parts of the absurdity heuristic, and leave out the bias?
Relativity sounds absurd; but if you show me the textbooks and the experiments, I can see it'd take an awfully large conspiracy to be lying about it, especially when the math seems to check out. It's a big claim but there's lots of evidence offered, much of which I could check for consistency, some of which I could even replicate (Michelson-Morely!).
Neom sounds absurd, and there's no evidence offered that the Saudi king can make it work, and plenty of explanatory power in his own vanity.
In either case, we're just saying "okay, is there big evidence to go with this big claim?"
Admittedly, sometimes a claim sounds absurd because it sounds bigger than it really is. Relativity doesn't noticeably affect time under ordinary life conditions. Evolution doesn't literally mean a monkey gave birth to a human. AI safety doesn't literally mean the movie _Terminator_.
But extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence. "Absurd!" is just shorthand for:
"Why do you expect me to swallow that without first showing me evidence?"
I believe that it would take an awfully big conspiracy, for awfully small benefit, to pull off a lie about general relativity.
I believe it takes a very small conspiracy, for very obvious benefit, to sell the Saudi king on an unreasonable but glamorous and expensive proposal for his new city.
This may imply that our ability to learn about the world is limited by our ability to differentiate actual scams from conspiracy-theory claims.
People fall for scams all the time. Even well informed people that “should know better” It seems like we really only get better on the margin with improved institutions and incentive structures that are hard won through trial and error.
I agree with you, but I'm having trouble seeing the difference (for someone who cannot understand the underlying science) between believing one theory verses the other. Or to take a recent example with significant real world implications - Covid protocols and restrictions, vaccines, etc., from either side. Lots of people created lots and lots of evidence in favor of and against everything related to Covid. It's not at all hard to find hundreds of reputable sounding sources who are completely at odds with each other. The worst part is, many of the things the public were told really were part of conspiracies. For an easy example, telling people early on that they did not need to wear masks, and then saying the opposite. We know that was a conspiracy of the top experts to mislead the public.
The heuristic to avoid scams was strongly evident, but I can't say it was wrong, given the general inability to tell truth from both indifferent and deliberate lies.
Our "absurd" threshold is social because we have to watch out for scams, including "Pascal's Mugging" scams.
If you tell me the AIs may wipe out humanity, and I seriously believe you, then I'll want to give money to any cause that might stop that. But that's true for any apocalypse, including scam apocalypses.
So I can't afford to lightly believe in your AI apocalypse, even if it's true. I need you to give me so much evidence that I know it's not a scam to take my money.
Personally, I know enough to see the difference between the AI safety issue and standard millennarian world-ending fantasies. Pandemics weren't a made-up fear; neither is AI safety.
But sometimes, when we say "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," there's an extra meaning:
"How can I believe you, but not fall for a bunch of fads and scams that sound a whole lot like you?"
The simple explanation here is that cognitive resources are limited and we have to decide whether, and how long, to evaluate all hypothesis based upon an expected ROI. If we think the expected ROI of investigating an absurd-sounding hypothesis is negative, we won't do it.
But this raises the question of which value system are we using, and makes clear it's impossible to separate fact-based reasoning from our own values.
Yes! Although I think it's not so much our differing values as our differing priors.
Unlike me, a medieval Catholic would be more suspicious of an injected vaccine than of a saint's miraculous relic.
Why? Not because the medieval Catholic values being healthy any less. It's because my prior is that science works and religion doesn't, and his is nearly opposite.
Actually, maybe "different values" is the just outward sign of groups with different priors.
E.g., rural Americans have a lot less reliance on strangers and bureaucratic infrastructures day to day than an urban type like me, and that difference maybe explains why they often have anti-stranger and anti-bureaucrat values compared to me. Immigrants and government programs must seem a lot more suspect when you're not already seeing lots of both in your daily life. Naturally, I think they're wrong... but I would, wouldn't I? Look at my background priors!
I agree that priors play a role here, but values clearly do, too. Expected value is a product of (probability of success) X (value of success). Priors effect the probability, but values obviously determine the value.
In the rationalist community it’s like there’s this aggressive unwillingness to reason about values and the role they influence our thinking. We tend to act like they are strictly orthogonal, when the reality is that our values determine where our attention does, and doesn’t go.
Do you have any favorite examples? (Group A says it's absurd, group B investigates, the difference isn't knowledge or priors but values.)
I can easily come up with "that might pay off, but I don't want to work in that industry." But to resort to not just "eh, not my forte" but "that's absurd" based on values not priors sounds like an unusually strong case of motivated reasoning. But you seem to think it happens a lot - I'm guessing you have some cases you're thinking of?
> the difference isn't knowledge or priors but values
Sure - suppose scott had some friend who really wanted to spend $10M investing in Noem and asked scott to investigate this project.
Given the higher value of determining truth or falsehood, i think scott would investigate more.
Or, bitcoin. To some people, "money that states can't control" is so screamingly obviously valuable that they investigate bitcoin further. To other people, it seems like a totally unimportant thing, so bitcoin sounds like some dumb pyramid scheme.
The thing is, if you wanted, you could phrase this difference in terms of priors (i.e. the probability that state-sponsored money would contribute to GDP). Maybe I'd ask you, how can a person tell the difference between their priors, and their values, on topics where they have very strong beliefs?
> In the rationalist community it’s like there’s this aggressive unwillingness to reason about values and the role they influence our thinking.
I agree that the possibility and consequences of different values should be examined deeper.
From my perspective, "don't assume different values" is a useful *heuristic*, because assuming arbitrary different values is a popular lazy answer (e.g. "they hate our freedom"). It allows you to stop thinking about other possible explanations and considering their relative weight. It is mostly unfalsifiable, because even if the other person disagrees, you can still call them a liar or a hypocrite.
So I would guess that in 9 out of 10 situations, "different values" is not the most accurate answer. Instead, you should consider how things seem from the other person's perspective, what are their actual options and incentives, what do they believe. The probability that you are wrong about their beliefs or their situation is quite high.
(Even when the values are actually different, it still can be the case that the observed different of behavior is like 10% explained by the difference in the values, and 90% explained by the difference of circumstances. So the explanation that only talks about different values could still be incorrect in this sense.)
But of course, sometimes... like, when you have a violent psychopath torturing his victims to death and enjoying it, it would be silly to pretend that he actually deeply cares about his neighbors' wellbeing, but honestly mistakes their screams of pain for expressions of pleasure.
This seems to miss the whole section of the post about how it's harder when you aren't just focused on what other people are saying and need to actually figure out what's true for yourself? "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is all well and good when someone else is coming to you with claims, but if you've come up with a bunch of extraordinary claims yourself it doesn't help you figure out which ones are worth looking for evidence for, and how hard it's worth looking.
Typo: extra parentheses
"This is easy: their king is a megalomaniac, plus people are afraid to voice dissent)"
If the absurdity heuristic is just "don't dedicate mental resources to things that have a tiny probability of being true/coming to pass" (with an asterisk about tail risks), I think the 1901 analogies shouldn't really make you apply it less.
Of the set of stories which would sound just as absurd as the internet one if told to someone in 1901, only a vanishingly small fraction came true. It may well have been rational to dismiss the internet story at the time, and saying otherwise may just be hindsight bias.
I don't even think that the internet would sound absurd in 1901. People in 1901 grew up in a world with ubiquitous telegraphs, and they're starting to see the telephone take over. Converting an image to the equivalent of Morse Code and transmitting it over wires isn't going to blow their minds (the first proper fax machine would be trialled just seven years later).
Suggest to people of 1901 that in a bit over a century it will be possible for people to have sophisticated personal telegraph machines that can send and receive information from all over the world, and I don't think it will sound crazy.
You're probably right actually. I don't really want to focus on that though since I do agree it's possible to tell stories about the present which sound absurd in the past.
This is a fantastic point. The leap from “telegraph” to “television” isn’t beyond belief: “what if I told you that in a hundred years every room in your house would have a hologram projector that included Smell-O-Vision?!?” Shrug. Ok.
Carl Stalling sez it will never work!
The word "absurd" is covering up at least two gradients of variation -
1) just how unlikely are we talking? A worldwide network of prostitute-dispensing-UFOs is unlikely, but it's practically a certainy compared to the likelihood that gravity obeys color. Relativity, _being true_, was considered very absurd for quite some time, and honestly, still feels a bit absurd.
"The Line" looks unlikely to succeed by its own metrics, as-is. But I might be willing to put down a bet at 1000:1 odds.
2) What timescale are we covering? in 1900, a worldwide network of adding machines exchanging representations of pictures _would_ be absurd, because several technological, economic, and social changes had yet to take place, and the 'absurd' thing wouldn't come to be for about a century.
"The Line" isn't a claim that "the world of 2120 will heavily feature engineered mega-cities that would look to the world of 2020 as if they were sci-fi dreams", it's a claim that _the thing we're breaking ground on_ will work.
---
The post seems to be asking "how 'absurd' is so absurd we can stop discussing it, or stop thinking about it, as a serious going thing?"
And on that, my rough heuristics would be
- On a timeline under 20 years, the cutoff for "too absurd to be worth discussing" might be somewhere around the 1:10,000 mark. This can be tweaked based on the cost involved.
- On a timeline over 20 years, the sky's the limit, but on the other hand, nothing can really be said with any certainty anyway, so it's _less_ useful to talk about.
In the example of "The Line", I proposed that it might be something like a 1:1,000 chance of success. This might be considered non-absurd, except for the fact that it's such a high-cost endeavor, in terms of human time, money, ecological impact, and the upside so mundane, that it _should_ be laughed out of serious discussion until its proponents have come back with a much stronger case for why it should be possible and valuable.
As another example - earlier this century, there was some buzz about having possibly discovered a reactionless drive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive). This was very very unlikely, that we'd discovered something that violated laws we believed inviolable, rather than being measurement error. let's say 1:10m. But, the potential upside was also very high - and the cost of taking it seriously was relatively cheap - some days or months of laboratory time. The EmDrive may have been absurd, but perhaps not _so_ absurd as to preclude serious discussions about it.
One thing that makes it more realistic is the their plan to be incremental. They aren’t planning to build all of it at once, but start on one side and build from there. This is very feasible… there are skyscrapers in Riyadh. They can build what is effectively a cluster of 8 of them , even cost-ineffectively to start and the n keep going. Building the whole length might be absurd, but I see no reason why they couldn’t build the Leeds Certified version of Kowloon walled city. Will they pivot to a better surface-area design, will they keep blowing money on the original design, will they just let it fail on move onto the next project? Hard to tell, but I see the problem space as more interesting than the binary of completing the vision in full as it stands today
"Even Alexandros agrees it probably won’t work."
Yes, but he doesn't agree that it's absurd, which is a different threshold. (His exact words are "Like, I'm not saying Neom will be a huge success or whatever.")
He's accusing you of cognitive self-dealing (roughly, of straw-manning where you could have steel-manned), and I don't think your discussion above clears you of that charge.
Suppose we taboo the word "absurd" here. What do Scott and Alexandros disagree about, really?
I guess that Alexandros is accusing Scott of strawmanning what could be an important project without doing the work to justify it, but Alexandros seems to have no higher confidence in the success of Neom than Scott* and does not appear to have done any additional investigating to reach that conclusion. Is the heuristic at work to give people the benefit of the doubt, if you aren't absolutely certain and haven't done a deep dive?
But given that neither party would put the probability of success above 1% (my assessment, not a quote from either), what are we even arguing about here?
*Evidenced by the fact that Scott publicly offered to make a bet with Alexandros on this, at what sounded like any odds, and he refused.
You have no evidence that Alexandros would not give the project a probability of success above 1%. Again, his exact words were "Like, I'm not saying Neom will be a huge success or whatever," which is completely consistent with it having, say, a 20% chance of success, something that might make the project unwise, but still not appropriate to dismiss with mockery.
You suggest that we avoid the word "absurd," but "absurdity" is literally in the title of Scott's piece, and he uses it throughout. In fact, it's part of the *theme* of the piece, so you're tacitly undermining what Scott wrote, not steelmanning it.
Not saying "absurd" isn't a useful framing, but the point I was trying to make was orthogonal to it.
If Alexandros estimates a 20% chance of success, he should take Scott's offer of a bet at 5-1 or 10-1 or 20-1 odds; I'm sure Scott would grant it. My evidence: https://twitter.com/slatestarcodex/status/1554879981481709569
That's hardly evidence of anything. I don't take bets like this, for reasons orthogonal to my estimate of probabilities, and this could easily be true of Alexandros as well.
Betting is a particular practice, and no one is obliged to engage in it. It's like investment. There are many possible good investments, and the decision not to participate in a particular investment often does not represent a judgment that it is bad.
The answer here is that I don't think I have enough information to opine on the project, and the piece didn't help either. On the one hand, the Saudis don't have problems building some of the tallest buildings in the world. On the other, this is a whole other level. I'd have to go dig into the stages of the project and the related timelines to make up my mind. I'm generally suspicious towards "big state" projects, but then again, I bet someone also thought the pyramids of Egypt were a bridge to nowhere when they were being built.
My opinion is "looks unlikely, I don't know", and what's more I think people should practice saying "I don't know" a lot more often.
Stephen -- thank you! I was beginning to worry I that what was in my mind was not coming through at all. Turns out, it was :)
I wrote a response before I saw yours, but good to know I'm not losing my mind:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/absurdity-bias-neom-edition/comment/8197344
You're welcome! What you wrote was completely reasonable.
Do you happen to be involved in building ambitious things or engineering of some kind? I think I'm trying to convey an intuition I have developed while building stuff that few people think are possible, and I'm pretty tired of low-effort "that's impossible" responses. Wondering if you have similar background.
I am an engineer. I do try to build things. I dislike easy deprecation of low-probability outcomes.
It appears we share a pet-peeve, sir. Should probably park this comment thread, but feel free to say hi on Twitter if you like.
It's one thing to say Neom's design is absurd, but quite another to say "murdering the people who previously lived in the area" in reference to a single man who, according to the Saudis (and AFAIK not denied by anyone), was armed and shooting at police. You don't need sophisticated philosophy to see how misleading this framing is.
Given how Saudis operate I am assuming that people shooting at their enforcers are likely to have valid reasons.
> AFAIK not denied by anyone
it is not like independent human right organisations can operate there
That's irrelevant to this post, and using force to remove people from their land and shooting them if they resist is not meaningfully different to killing people to take their land.
True, but people is different from person. (Though likely many of his friends and family might have tried to resist had they not known they would certainly die.)
Does your country not have eminent domain laws? If the police come to enforce such a law, do you think you'd be excused for trying to shoot the officer?
I like Neom project. I hate living in cities although I currently live in the city myself. It is just because like majority of people I am not rich and for economic reasons, transportation issues, proximity to work, shops etc. I have to live in the city although I really feel that it is like a life in prison.
Neom, the Line is a fantastic compromise. From one side you will be close to nature, even if it is only a view over the desert. Maybe they can put some irrigation and greenhouses to grow food for the city that will make the view slightly greener. On the other hand it would be a city infrastructure. The space between two walls would be like a street with shops, bars, offices and residential quarters. It is a fantastic project.
Now back to the reality, of course it seems absurd to think that it could be built with merely 500 billion dollars when the real costs are at least 10 times of that. Maybe if they could built the city only 17 km long but even that is unlikely due to corruption and general unprofitability of this project. But it is a different thing to admit that the project is not feasible for various reasons rather than to think that the idea itself is absurd. The US might never have free-for-all universal health care but it is still not an absurd idea.
It is like thinking that Egyptian pyramids are absurd. One estimate was that building a pyramid today would cost 5 billion dollars. It is a lot even today when we have big machines to move stones and project management theories how to organize big projects. In the past it must be unbelievably expensive and basically an absurd project. And yet, pyramids were built because some powerful people believed in the necessity of building them. Who knows if Neom could become a reality if some powerful people believe in its necessity? Or it could be some other seeming absurd project. Or in contrary, if they lose faith in this or another project then “absurd” becomes self-fullfiling prediction.
Comment on the comments: There are now at least two comments which say something like:
"<correct sounding general statement about absurdity>, as an example consider <thing I consider absurd/non-absurd but which a significant fraction of people disagree with me about>."
Come on surely you guys can figure out examples which all readers will agree with you on.
I think they can figure out such examples, but are choosing other examples because they want to make a controversial rhetorical point.
The meta-meta-argument is that it's brilliant to pick something that one tribe thinks is absurd and the other tribe thinks is self-evident because that demonstrates the social-proof nature of absurdity that also neatly explains why the Saudis are going along with Neom's The Line.
It looks bad that a group that happily discusses immortality, The Singularity, Roko's Basilisk, a universe turned into paperclips, etc., etc., cannot muster any sympathy for Neom.
I think there's a lot of sympathy for NEOM. But I think that someone who claimed that DALL-E 2 was *already* Roko's Basilisk (or that DALL-E 3 will be, so that people are already working on it) would be asked for a lot of proof. NEOM is a project that claims to be in the works, not just a claim that some time in an unspecified number of decades, a project like this will work out.
Roko's Basilisk doesn't look to me like something "happily discussed". Like, even Eliezer IIRC admitted he fucked up on that one.
Should also be noted that the paperclip maximiser is more a proof of concept than something we expect to have happen in that specific form. If you polled rationalists for probabilistic forecasts of "the universe is converted to literal paperclips" then you'd get numbers well under 0.1%.
There have been times in human history when inventors working with governments have achieved a 10x or 100x breakthrough. Invention of radio, digging the Panama Canal the second time, building the pyramids, etc.
Neom would be exciting if they were showing that they understood the magnitude of the challenge they were taking on and were working on the hard R&D problems to try to solve it (like building a mobile factory-on-tracks that will build the city 1m across at a time with input feedstocks from nuclear-reactor-powered furnaces for steel and mixing concrete).
They aren't. It's a vanity project that's deeply braindead at the top that has no plan to even start a plan to develop the tools to work out when tools they need.
No, it's really, really not. What IS a bad look is throwing all these things together and acting like they're all comparable. There's no obvious reason why the singularity won't occur at *some* point. It's true as a matter of computer science that a sufficiently advanced AI with enough computational resources could very likely wield tremendous power and have the ability to undergo recursive self-improvement, and the main question is how far away this is.
Most people disagree with the plausibility of Roko's basilisk, though we're dealing with an extremely speculative future technological issue that we cannot intuitively dismiss out of hand but also one which nobody is confidently declaring is true.
And nobody *ACTUALLY* thinks the universe will be turned into paperclips, it's a thought experiment to demonstrate the concept of perverse instantiation - I don't know how you could suggest otherwise except through deliberate dishonesty).
Neom is nothing like this. The issues with Neom are VERY near-term economic, financial, logistical, engineering, scientific and other issues that we understand very well.
We're not talking about a distant, speculative technological development. We're talking about a construction project that is supposed to be finished in the very near future and there's no conceivable way that they will be able to afford this project with the budget allotted. We're not talking about something that could eventually become possible through a century of scientific and technological development, we're literally discussing a current construction project that can only work if the Saudis have been sitting on revolutionary construction techniques that allow construction of extremely high tech buildings at a fraction of the cost of anyone else (despite the fact that they need to hire foreigners to design everything for them).
The uncertainty around AI is huge. The uncertainty around the line is extremely small. There's just so few degrees of freedom for skeptical projections to be subverted by the Saudis.
I 90% agree with you, but here's where I 10% differ:
The implicit assumption that's being made here (apart from the ones about AI) is that 2040 is a long time from now but 2030 is a short time from now. If you're serious about thinking that the Singularity has a decent chance of happening in the 21st century, then all your estimates about the future will need to become fuzzier. "NEOM will only succeed if we have a slow AGI takeoff starting in 2026 that funds itself through building The Line for the Saudis in exchange for $500 billion" is different from "NEOM is impossible."
It is possible for there to exist a statement X that is true, and yet also anyone who believes statement X is true is crazy, because craziness is judged on not based on whether the statements you believe are true, but whether the process by which you arrived at them is crazy. If in 1901, someone says that they know for a fact that in 100 there there will network of blah blah blah adding machines, you would be right to judge them as crazy, because there is no plausible non-crazy chain of evidence and reasoning that could lead them to this conclusion. If you are Einstein, who has just finished deriving the speed of light, but not yet told anyone about it, and someone comes to you with this statement about relative speeds that they know for a fact is true, concluding that they are crazy would still be reasonable, though you'd likely want to consider other explanations such as "they've been spying on me" and "they are a brilliant physicist that I somehow haven't heard of". For a more modern example, if you told me that you know for a fact that there will be a AI singularity by 2050, I would probably conclude that you are crazy, though I may also consider the explanation that you are wildly overconfident, or don't actually know what a probability is. Compared to if you told me that you believed there was a distinct possibility of AI singularity by 2050, and it was more likely than not, I would not call you crazy. Whether there does end up being an AI singularity by 2050 is irrelevant, because the process by which you arrived at the conclusion is what makes you crazy or not, not the actual conclusion. I also wouldn't hire someone to invest money on my behalf _just_ because they correctly predicted some low probability event far in advance, I would look at their process for generating predictions. If it seems like a process that is capable of consistently generating correct predictions, I will judge them a genius. If they (earnestly) tell me that it's because they are communicating with themselves from the future, or god, or "hidden energy", I'd probably judge them crazy _because they made a correct prediction_.
Now having determined your investment advisor is crazy (they believe they are communicating with the future/god/super-ai) AND you determined they have had consistently above market returns … are you crazy if you don’t invest with them anyway?
I think there is a difference between "I think this is true now"/"I think this happened in the past" and "I think this will happen/be true in the future."
The whole question could be reframed as "when do you think Neom will not be absurd?" If you believe that someday (maybe someday soon!) humanity might spread across the stars, build great cities in the canyons of Mars, invent nanomachines that extract buildings of superstrong carbon nanofibers directly from the soil -- then the question about Neom isn't How? But When? Also, still Why?
I think there's several different levels of absurdity which people keep conflating here. Physical absurdity, economic absurdity, and design absurdity.
Is it physically absurd? No, it is entirely possible to build it (with the possible exception of some of the claims about the train system).
Is it economically absurd? If built all in one go, yes. If built in stages, selling off each stage to fund the next one, then no. It depends on whether you can find enough people willing to buy property in it, at the price you'd need to sell it for. I'm not in the target market for a high-rise apartment in the Saudi desert but I'm hesitant about declaring that nobody is, because there's markets for all sorts of things in the world that I'm not personally interested in. Still, that leads into the next question:
Is it absurd from a design point of view? Probably. If you are going to build a new city in an empty part of Saudi Arabia close to the Suez Canal (which is not necessarily a bad idea) then this seems like a silly way to do it; the disadvantages of the 500m height and the linear form factor outweigh the advantages.
It becomes a whole lot less silly if you just scale it down, though. Make it half the height and it's much cheaper to build, make it one tenth the length and it becomes easy to get around. And you've still got a respectable-sized walkable city of 450K people.
My current theory on "The Line" is that someone mixed "Inspiration for the next important project" and "best recent video game featuring the middle east".
On the original quoted example about absurdity bias, I think that a smart and well educated person from 1900 would be able to distinguish the truths from the lies there if they were allowed to ask follow-up questions, thoroughly interrogating our time traveller on the details of the supposed future. What happens if the shade of blue is slightly off? What equations exactly govern the distortion of space as you approach the speed of light? What has changed the economics of male prostitution so much as to make this scheme economically viable? How do you convert lesbians into numbers?
You can make anything sound absurd by describing it in a sufficiently wacky way, but reality holds up under interrogation while absurdity falls apart.
(What if those were bad examples and you could make up an absurd scenario that _would_ hold up under careful scrutiny? Then it probably isn't all that absurd. You could probably convince the people of 1900 that the Austro-Hungarian Empire dominates all of Eurasia in 2012, but that's not absurd, it's just untrue.)
Just practically speaking, I find that in a lot of cases, made-up ideas untethered from reality hold up under interrogation better than the truth. People with wild ideas always have a long, detailed explanation of why they’re right. They make sure everything holds together. But the truth has no obligation to make itself seem to hold together. The person telling the truth sometimes has to shrug and say, “Yeah, I guess it doesn’t make sense, but I saw what I saw.”
All you need to do is say that you don't see how it's possible (and give the reasons why you think it isn't possible). Saying "it's absurd" is essentially conflating opinion with fact. It's adding "something extra" that's not necessary, that's extraneous.
This is ubiquitous on the Internet, and in the long run doesn't add value.
Even "In my opinion it's absurd" is better, but still sub-optimal; you need to account for arguing from personal incredulity, and "I think it'd absurd" can run afoul of that problem.
I like to spend a minute on a back of the envelope calculation wherever relevant. If anyone is seriously proposing X, and I'm writing a blog post criticizing X, I will apply at least a BOTEC level of analysis.
Kingdom Centre in Saudi Arabia is 76.8m * 302m * 37.8m and cost US$453 million in 2002, multiplied by 1.65 to adjust for inflation through 2022. This comes to $850/m^3. I previously calculated ( https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122/comment/8116431 ) that the Neom Line would be $58/m^3 if they spend $1T. So it's off by an order of magnitude, but maybe still possible to do the project if they can sell the condos for more than the cost of construction. They could build 1% of the line, sell condos and office space to get their construction costs back with a profit, and rinse and repeat until they run out of buyers. Or with enough loans those steps could be somewhat parallelized. Real estate developers usually use tons of leverage and sell houses whenever they're completed rather than waiting for the entire subdivision to be completed.
I think Scott's prediction "Saudi Arabia builds a structure at least 100m x 100m x 1000m before 2040 or the Singularity, whichever comes first: <1%" was very overconfident. 100x100x1000 would cost only $8.5 billion at Kingdom Centre's $/m^3. MBS can easily spend that much on whatever he wants to build so long as it's possible with current technology. I would put the odds at 50% for the same prediction.
If NEOM just claimed to be a bunch of adjacent skyscrapers, like what they've done in Dubai, then this would make sense. But the structure is claimed to be entirely different from that, with a continuous wall of some sort (that enables climate control of a sort, while still being well-ventilated?). I think it's fair to just multiply the volumetric cost of a skyscraper by this volumetric cost as a steel-man lower bound on the price, but you'd need to say more to make it plausible that you could keep the costs similar to that for this new type of structure. (Presumably things like labor and equipment costs are going to be a lot more expensive when you can't use the existing shipping facilities of a city.)
And with luck, maybe it'll be as much of a destination as Dubai would be without its role as a global air hub.
I think the continuous wall design suggests economies of scale that drive volumetric costs somewhat down, not up, relative to skyscrapers. Building in an empty desert 10 miles from the city is probably somewhat easier than building in the middle of a busy city, due to a combination of land costs, traffic, and trying not to mess up the things that are already built there while you dig the foundation.
An empty desert 10 miles from Riyadh sounds like it would be cheaper than building in Riyadh. But this looks like it's over 100 miles from the city of Tabuk, and about 600 miles from Medina.
I think building a continuous wall would be cheaper per volume than building a single skyscraper, for a team with equal history building both. But I think the world has a *lot* of experience building regular-sized skyscrapers, and *no* experience with the new issues that arise when building a long one like this (what are the internal divisions like? how are staircases and elevators spaced?) so you're not going to get those economies of scale until you've already built a large part of it and developed the expertise.
Building anything close to the line in relatively short succession will singlehandedly inflate material costs which will likely undercut economies of scale.
You can bet on it here: https://manifold.markets/SneakySly/will-saudi-arabia-build-a-structure
Why be wary of the social epistemology? Do you hope to contain all human knowledge in your brain one day? Why would you hope to be able to do epistemology by yourself? I think rationalists should embrace social knowledge and epistemology, treat humanity as one huge complex sentient machine.
It's a very good question; i'd like to better understand this as well.
Sometimes lots and lots of people all say the same wrong, harmful thing.
I guess it triggers the same instinct in me as living off handouts from other people; you can do it if you have to, but seems better to be self-sufficient if you can.
I still don't understand this. When you read wikipedia, is that living off a handout? What about people reading your blog who get value from the analysis you do but aren't donating?
Are you saying that you feel you should able to personally investigate every question that makes you curious or hypothesis about which you have doubt?
Reading Wikipedia saves a lot of time. But what if there is a topic that is important for you, and someone tells you "actually, the Wikipedia page on this topic is wrong, but the admins ban everyone who tries to correct it"?
It would be nice to have an option other than "blindly trust Wikipedia" (or "blindly trust when strangers tell you that Wikipedia is wrong").
Speaking of Wikipedia, it reminds me of this drama: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/IncidentArchive1061#David_Gerard_and_Scott_Siskind
Is "this isn't worth my time to investigate because i can't act on it" not an option?
When I read the bit about Lee de Forest’s fraud prosecution I was intrigued and wanted to find out more. However the link from Eliezer’s article is now dead and other sources I found suggest that while he was found not guilty, his business partners were not so fortunate.
The actual quote provided seems pretty convincing evidence for the proposition ‘some people found his claims so absurd as to be prima facie evidence of fraud’ but I have no idea where it comes from.
Does anyone know more about this?
This reminds me of the great takedown of Hyperloop that Alon Levy wrote almost a decade ago now: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2013/08/13/loopy-ideas-are-fine-if-youre-an-entrepreneur/
It looks like the CA HSR project has slightly more than doubled in price and added a few more years since then, and Musk has shown that he can in fact make money selling cars, but there really hasn't been any more support for his Hyperloop idea.
I think that most good big ideas start out with a really flawed version that can only slowly be beaten into a working version via a process of iteration. Obviously the back-of-the-napkin version is going to be flawed, and shooting holes in it is definitely part of the process, but it shouldn't be the last word.
What's the difference between hyperloop and NEOM? Demand. There's obvious demand for hyperloop if it can be built to something approximating the back-of-the-napkin specs. The demand for a giant linear city in Saudi Arabia is much less clear. Technical problems can often be overcome, but the problem of building something that nobody wants is intrinsically unsolveable.
If Musk's enthusiasm and his fans have brought this forward, that could be useful. But the idea is much older, and it's not clear that his proposal actually helped advance the science in any way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain
Is Musk enthusiastic for Hyperloop? He kept control of SpaceX, Tesla, and the Boring Company but passed off hyperloop activity to anyone who wanted to work on it.
I feel like the quoted example of absurdity bias does not fit well here. The examples he quoted are clearly formulated to be absurd, mostly by being oddly specific. Take the black sphere one, for example: These might simply be floating houses or teleporter endpoints. It's quite obvious that some of these houses would also house prostitutes and therefore you'd be able to order one from there.
It's the same thing about the internet example: This is even a stretch as it is - is one of the primary use-cases for the internet really lesbian porn? Why specifically mention encoding or the 69 meme? I'm not even sure which one is referenced here. If, on the other hand, you told that persons that we found a way to make our computers/calculators really, really fast and connected them all up and suddenly that person will probably not be as skeptical. Then you might also add that people also use it for sexual content and it turned out that's something that's quite desired, depending on that persons view they probably won't even be surprised.
The presentation of Neom doesn't fall into the same category, since they're not presenting it by making it intentionally overly absurd and focusing on specific, minor details to detract from the somewhat reasonable big picture. They're completely serious. They also don't seem to bother to explain the somewhat ambitious aspects like the super fast travel and the strange shape. Giving these aspects a pass because, if you just formulate hard enough, you can make everything sound absurd is not a good argument IMO - it's just not an apples to apples comparison.
---
On whether we should accept absurdity as an argument, I think this is actually pretty simple: It's basically a (slightly smug) way of saying "I'm gonna need some evidence to believe this". If your point isn't really important for a decision, as this stated opinion probably is, I don't think it's necessary to dig deep into a topic when the fact that this is pretty absurd is obvious to the casual observer. It'd be different if your opinion did matter a lot (a judge shouldn't be as easy to accept this argument, for example, and neither should your investment advisor) or if some people you trust point out that you might be wrong with this.
>This is even a stretch as it is - is one of the primary use-cases for the internet really lesbian porn?
Prior to 2010 or so, when the late stage of Web 2.0 really took off, it's pretty solid.
I felt as though the absurdity argument against Neom was a combination of multiple arguments, which are not entirely spelled out because any of them would work and it's assumed that most readers can recreate multiple of them without help:
(1) People who are experts at this have looked at this and declared that it will be much more difficult than is claimed.
(2) There is lots of low-hanging fruit: obvious changes that could obviously improve the design. One example mentioned in the comments is turning the thing on its side: it's easier to build a 200 m tall and 500 m wide city than a 500 m tall and 200 m wide city. The reason you build up is because there's not enough land in the city center, but there's plenty of land here. Another example is that it could follow the coastline instead of being perfectly straight with a mountain range in the middle. It doesn't follow the coastline because that's where all of the palaces for the Saudi royal family go.
(3) The project follows a known failure mode. This particular failure mode is called High Modernism and has been well described in Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott (1998).
(4) The project involves a common human experience, where our intuition should be trustworthy. In this case, Neom wants to be a city. We can ask: is this a city that I would want to live in? I'm guessing that the answer to this for Scott is no. This is a less solid argument because different people might think different things.
(5) There are other underlying problems that could ruin the project does not address. In Neom's case, the biggest problem is finding people to live there. They're not going to come from Saudi Arabia itself: the country is barely above replacement fertility rate (2.28 children / woman) and falling, and other cities in the country are also expanding. So they're going to have to attract foreigners. If it's a status project, they probably want elite foreigners, not Syrian or Yemeni refugees. But a lot of global elites do not want to live under the Saudi's authoritarian and Islamic government. Even for those who are willing, Neom has to compete with other elite-seeking Middle Eastern cities like Dubai, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Jeddah.
I personally think that Scott is underconfident that something will be built (it should be >1%, maybe 50%) and overconfident that a significant number of people will end up living in whatever is built (it should be <75%, maybe 25% ... although maybe 50,000 is small enough that Scott's estimate is reasonable). Building a structure that is at least 100m x 100m x 1000m is technically possible with enough money. The Saudis have enough money. So something will likely be built. But persuading people to come will be more challenging.
I don’t think the getting foreigners is an issue. Just remove sharia restrictions on the city, and have zero taxes, which they can afford.
1. When someone makes a facially absurd claim it is reasonable to dismiss it out of hand until they explain in detail why it is not absurd.
2. When a large amount of money backed by smart successful people is invested in something that seems facially absurd you should carefully consider two possibilities:
a. It is not as absurd as you thought. For example, I thought the idea of Elon Musk successfully and profitably creating an electric car company from scratch was absurd. I was wrong.
b. The stated and actual purpose of the investment are different. For example, in third world countries many large infrastructure projects have stated economic goals that are facially absurd. They fail at those goals. But they do an excellent job of meeting their actual goals to funnel money into the pockets of well connected people.
I do not think NEOM is a graft - the people paying for it are the best connected people. It is interesting to consider what a "failed" or scaled down NEOM project might actually accomplish.
For example, could NEOM eventually morph into a planned city (like Brasilia) that operates as an almost extra-territorial enclave within Saudi Arabia complete with world class universities that recruit globally, offer full rides, are decided non-woke, and admit based on merit alone? Could those be the core of a Silicon Arabia? Could NEOM have, in effect, a separate peace with Israel so it can bring in Israeli investment and expertise? Now that would be interesting.
I doubt it would be libertarian or secular by US standards.
As for the clothing in the videos, irrelevant if stated and actual aims are different.
The clothing is also completely normal........ a women traveling alone with no male relative is anything but typical of Saudi society.
I don’t disagree that it’s unlikely to be entirely secular, but the craziest religious zealots I know perceive themselves as secular atheist. They haven’t a clue their belief system is radical and denies reality in far more aspects than the vast majority of mature religious theologies. I’m not sure a truly secular human society is possible. It might be, but it seems to spin off lots of radical belief based ideologies and worship of the state.
One of the first steps in making sure you're applying the absurdity heuristic appropriately is just to make sure to steelman the position you think is absurd. E.g. "I know that monkeys can’t turn into humans, this is so absurd that I don’t even have to think about the question any further” sounds a lot less absurd when you understand that monkeys turning into humans isn't what evolutionary biologists are claiming is going on.
Monkeys magically transmuting into humans would be absurd and our anti-evolution guy would be right to dismiss it as absurd if that were the claim.
And of course, monkeys didn't even evolve through natural selection to become humans, we share a common ancestor.
Too be fair, if you met that common ancestor on the train you'd probably think "Why is there a monkey here?" though.
I think the missing piece here is that beliefs come with levels of certainty. The question of how far to go down the chain is about the degree of certainty that you want to achieve.
The claim that Neom is absurd has one level of confidence attached to it, but, as you point out sometimes absurd seeming things happen. Ok, so you work out the construction costs and that makes it even more unlikely it will happen, you supplement with data about the fact that Saudi construction costs aren't much cheaper than elsewhere and you can increase that level of confidence.
Now that isn't to say you can always increase confidence by digging deeper. That's why you stop when you get to assumptions like: but what if the universe is all a dream or God intervenes and violates the laws of physics. Because digging into those questions doesn't actually (or shouldn't) result in substantially increased confidence about your answer.
Yes, at the end of the day you can't get below your own priors but you can replace a judgement like:. silly sounding things tend not to work, which might only give you a relatively weak degree of certainty with judgements that increase your degree of certainty.
(Not that since probability distributions assume logical omniscience you have to supplement them a bit with some kind of judgement about the likelihood of there being some further deductive argument that's more compelling ...so I've played a bit loose with the term certainty which isn't quite just moving to a more extreme probability what it really is is something more like: evidence that further accessible information or consideration of argument will not lead to a refinement in your probability judgement...or at least that you don't expect the effort to be worth it).
Maybe a better way to put this is the following:. why isn't the obvious answer that you are balancing the rewards and benefits of further inquiry the right one?
I mean, you have certain judgements as to how likely further effort will be to refine your judgement and some payoff function regarding the degree of certainty. Surely, if you had to bet your life on the success or failure of the project it would make sense to expend more effort in research.
At each level you can't do anything but rely on your judgement (what would it mean to do otherwise) but part of that judgement is an evaluation of how likely further effort is to produce a more reliable answer. Do we need anything more than that mechanism?
agreed, I think Scott focuses too much on "how to be right" when the correct problem statement should include what else you can do with your time
Right, I think part of the reason ppl get tricked up by this thing is that we don't have good theoretical models for confidence that don't assume logical omniscience (as probability distributions do).
If you formulated the problem as being merely about whether to bother to invest in future experiments or spend money on research I don't think it would trip up ppl quite as much but because it's phrased in terms of thinking about it more and you can't easily represent thag kind of thing using a traditional probability distribution I think ppl get more easily confused.
But that's just speculation and the solution doesn't depend on that.
Exactly. I believe economists would use the concept of “opportunity cost” in this context.
The quote in the post by Eliezer says "This doesn't mean that anything can happen. Of all the events in the 20th century that would have been "absurd" by the standards of the 19th century, not a single one - to the best of our knowledge - violated the law of conservation of energy, which was known in 1850. Reality is not up for grabs; it works by rules even more precise than the ones we believe in instinctively."
I agree with his overall point that our current understanding of physics is such that some things seem incredibly likely to be universal laws. I have a bit of a nitpick, however, with his precise example of conservation of energy. It doesn't really affect the overall argument but I figured some people here might find it interesting nevertheless.
In classical mechanics, energy is a number which can be easily computed in principle and is conserved. In quantum mechanics, not all states can be associated with a definite energy. However, there *are* certain pure-energy states, and all states can be written as weighted combinations of these pure-energy states. The analogue of energy conservation in quantum mechanics is that the (technically, squared magnitude of the) relative weights of these different pure-energy states do not change over time. In particular, the average energy (computed via these weights) is conserved, and for large systems we can identify this with the classical energy, thus letting us recover the classical notion of energy conservation. This all works perfectly well when we observe isolated quantum systems.
The tricky part is when we also consider wavefunction collapse. Let's say we accept the Many Worlds interpretation of QM. Then, the observable reality around us is just one of a truly enormous number of wavefunction branches. Quantum mechanics only applies exactly to the *totality* of the branches, not separately to each wavefunction branch. Thus, the above argument for the conservation of the distribution over energies applies when you consider *all* of the many worlds but not necessarily when you only consider *our* world, which we inhabit. If we were capable of knowing the true distribution over energies of just our world, it would probably constantly keep fluctuating due to frequent collapse events. All we can say is that when averaged with those of the other worlds, the distribution over energies will be conserved. And yet, if we cannot observe the other worlds, is this definition of energy conservation even useful? One can avoid the question by saying that we only care about idealized, isolated physical systems, not the whole universe treated quantum mechanically. And yet, the latter is what we were trying to seek insight into in the first place...
At the other end of the scale, there are also problems with energy conservation in general relativity. I don't know much about this so I'll just link to an article on it by John Baez: https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/GR/energy_gr.html
> All we can say is that when averaged with those of the other worlds, the distribution over energies will be conserved. And yet, if we cannot observe the other worlds, is this definition of energy conservation even useful?
You know, I've been wondering about this since I did undergrad QM many years ago. Do you have pointers to further discussion on this question, preferably online?
Sean Carroll has a nice discussion about this on his blog: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2021/01/28/energy-conservation-and-non-conservation-in-quantum-mechanics/ . The paper by Carroll and Lodman that is highlighted in the post and its references are probably also good sources, although I haven't looked at these in depth. There is also an interesting short note by Frank Wilczek dealing with this issue http://frankwilczek.com/2013/multiverseEnergy01.pdf
In Kierkegaard, there are a few separate epistemological stages. This post is a really nice gateway into his whole thing!
Immediacy: You are completely naive and unreflective. You don't yet know the difference between being and seeming. Only babies and very special adults are like this. If you're reading a blog post like this, you're not in immediacy.
Aesthetic: You've discovered reflection; that your ideas about things are different from the things themselves. You've found that reflecting critically on your own and others' ideas brings you closer to the truth, so you do that a lot. Eventually, you're in a prison of increasingly-subtle self-referential reflections, unable to get out of your own head. This is when you question all of your assumptions. He talks about Descartes' "doubt everything". Analysis paralysis, basically, and ultimately, despair.
Ethical: You can't sit around all day reflecting. You've got to do something sometime. What you do should be good for everybody and follow some kind of absolutely valid universal rules. You become conscious of yourself as having eternal validity, through your relationship to these universal rules. This is Scott's evolution denier; he doesn't need to question any further, he knows what he needs to know. But, since you can't actually live up to the rules (you're not perfect, and anyway life will trap you in impossible situations), you're still in despair.
(Here I'll pause to note that the fundamental tension described in this post, between naïveté and infinite regress, is very identifiably the same as the tension in Kierkegaard between the Aesthetic and the Ethical. How do you negotiate between these two? The answer is...)
Faith: Not as easy to describe. Still conscious of your eternal validity, still aware that you're sometimes wrong about stuff, you nevertheless choose, act and grasp hold of your life. You make a "leap of faith" which is more like a dance move than like an Indiana Jones puzzle. You know you're wrong to do it, but you do anyway. And somehow, you win! Or, if you don't, you don't notice much. For a Christian, this is something like thinking, "God put me here, now, and He gave me the knowledge I have, and set things up so I'm faced with this question; if I genuinely do my best, even if it ends up that I'm totally wrong, my sin is atoned for by Christ." Or as Kierkegaard says, you come to rest transparently on the ground of your being.
So, I don't know if other ways of looking at the world have answers to the questions raised in the post, but Christianity does, in my opinion, and Kierkegaard is the philosopher who articulated it best.
(Disclaimer: everybody is always wrong about Kierkegaard, I am not an authority, Kierkegaard would punch me if anybody believed what I said just because I said it. He would punch you if you believed what he said just because he said it. What he wanted least of all was disciples, which makes my fanboying pretty awkward. If this is interesting to you at all, read Kierkegaard yourself!)
Wait, this doesn't seem to make any sense to me. You're not deciding a binary here... not really. A good (rationalist) way to approach this would be saying "This is absurd, and (therefore) very unlikely to happen/be true" Pointing out that historical prognostications sometimes sound like they're unlikely to be true doesn't mean we shouldn't still realize that some theories are dramatically less likely to be true than others.
An absurd retrodiction: a dude with $200M (from the sale of Paypal, from which he was kicked out for "lacking a cohesive business model") would disrupt two overregulated capital-intensive industries all over the world within a decade and a half.
I feel this is just overly constrained to make it sound absurd.
If you time travelled back 30 years and told someone that in 2020 there was both a successful private rocketry company, and a successful electric vehicle company, I suspect nobody would find it absurd or even particularly surprising.
In fact, I might call that a negative amount of surprise: some would be more surprised to hear that we *didn't* have electric vehicles and private space industries in 2020. Both have been widely expected for a long time.
The detail that they were both founded by the same person, who was 'only' a millionaire at the time? It increases the surprise level a little, but in a world with a whole history of successful entrepreneurs building successful companies on newer 'riskier' areas of technology... well it still doesn't rise anywhere near "absurd".
Surprise at a non-gov rocket company that bested NASA, China, Russia, Boeing/ULA... probably quite high.
Surprise at an electric car company that is poised to have a $70k electric car to be the highest production volume in the world, including gasoline-based cars... high.
Surprise at a CEO kicked out for poor performance from a successful company and starting a new successful business from scratch? Pretty high, though Steve Jobs and a couple of others accomplished as much.
Surprise at either one not controlled by big funds to any noticeable degree... Still quite surprising.
That they both are controlled by the same person who was fired for poor performance? And who also has a few other high-profile (variably successful) projects on the go, like solar panels, tunnels and... wait for it... neural implants? Basically science fiction, never happened before.
And if he ends up being forced to own twitter, and does something useful with it, that's just the icing on the impossibility cake.
> Surprise at a non-gov rocket company that bested NASA, China, Russia, Boeing/ULA... probably quite high.
Not really - new companies beat out old companies all the time, and I'm actually not super high on the efficiency of government organizations.
> Surprise at an electric car company that is poised to have a $70k electric car to be the highest production volume in the world, including gasoline-based cars... high.
Also not very high, people have been expecting gas cars to be replaced with electric cars eventually forever. Whether or not 2020 is ahead (or behind) schedule depends on who you ask and when... but not "absurd" in any regard.
> Surprise at a CEO kicked out for poor performance from a successful company and starting a new successful business from scratch? Pretty high, though Steve Jobs and a couple of others accomplished as much.
This is like saying WWII is absurd because it started by an "art school dropout". It's just pulling a very specific detail retrospectively. With any story you can retrospectively find low probability details.
It's not relevant to "absurdity bias" because nobody would be making a prediction like "I expect the major electric cars company to be founded by someone kicked out of their previous job for poor performance" in the first place.
Yes, Elon Musk is an interesting and influential individual... but I don't find that his career is any sort of meaningful counter example to absurdity bias.
One line of reasoning I didn't see in the comments is using base rate. In such a case, it's not obvious what would be the relevant reference class, but I feel that "mega-projects that planned to spend similar amounts of money" and "building a city of that size from scratch, by centralized fiat" are good contenders. From what I've read by Bent Flyvbjerg, the odds are not good that this will be delivered on specs, on budget, on time.
Back to the question of the absurdity argument, I think that "if this project worked, it would be so far from its reference class that it's absurd to imagine it could succeed (in the near future, barring any major breakthrough)" is a reasonably applicable and successful heuristics.
Re. "Maybe, every so often, do a deep dive into fact-checking something, even if you’re absolutely sure it’s true. Maybe if everybody does this, then someone will (by coincidence) catch the false absurdities, and then the social epistemology thing can work." :
YES. Taking random samples of life is a tragically under-used technique. It's especially useful if it becomes a social norm.
Neom is something that you come up with if you're playing a video game where the goal is to pack as many people in as closely as possible, while damaging the environment as little as possible, while not respecting any constaints of reality. It's like a parody of the average consultant's mindest.
I realize it's Saudi Arabia, but presumably people still want to go outdoors in Saudi Arabia. I suppose you can take a few steps away from The Line and look back at the wall... and then walk back inside...
Isn't that the point of the mirror finish? Aside from climate control, I guess.
It's absurd that you didn't title this one "Reductio ad Absurdum". :)
Scott, I read your post as saying, Saudi Arabia thinks they can do this but I think it's really really unlikely.
Seems like an accurate assessment of the situation, and not a claim that no way no how maybe somehow Saudi Arabia has figured out something fantastic that will have ten million people living in a straight line
Saudi Arabia have figured out something fantastic, but A) despite developing this technology they for some reason still need foreigners to design everything for them and B) instead of using this revolutionary breakthrough to produce billions in exports that help diversify their economy away from oil, they sit on it to build some whacky long building in the middle of the dessert.
At some point, really really unlikely and no way no how are negligibly different.
I don't disagree. I don't think Scott disagrees.
I think there's a practical exercise to quickly examine these sorts of biases; I call it a "pre-mortem" exercise. The exercise is simple: write two short memos, each 0.5-1 page in length. One is titled "why it worked" and the other is titled "why it failed". Circle back up and compare. If you all agree, those are prioritized strengths and weaknesses. If you disagree, you've unearthed differences in your assumptions! Or, in this case, differences in your absurdity lenses.
This exercise was largely inspired by the 'Safire Memo', the backup speech for if the Apollo 11 landing had gone wrong. Some credit also goes to the observation from the book Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick, which observes that in big organizations that fell from the heights (Nokia, Kodak, etc) even when leaders individually knew that the new technology would win the organization still failed to bet that way.
Missed the chance to title this "The Neom-Central Fallacy, or, The Most Absurd Argument In The World".
More seriously, I think any sort of absurdity heuristic or bias becomes less relevant as the...complexity waterline gets raised. Without going into __any__ specific examples *cough*, the world just seems a lot more complicated today than [arbitrary past cutoff]. I guess some of this is an inevitable part of growing up - one can only hold so much information in the brain, and the rate of information-addition to the world far surpasses that. I think the slope of that latter line matters, though.
Even though in many ways it's easier than ever to Deep Dive: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, if the rate of increasing Unknowns and Unknown-Unknowns outpaces the rate of generating Knowns, then the total space of non-knowledge never shrinks. A whole lot of this can be safely written off via rational ignorance. But when even immediately practical and relevant things start to become Absurd, well, there's a problem. That's not knowledge that one can safely ignore; life's table stakes keep getting bigger. And there's so much bad-faith social epistemology now (classic update method from antiquity! insert evosci pablum here) that I'm kinda surprised to see it recommended as a potential fix. That seems to rely on one's ability to avoid a whole bunch of *other* biases...
Anyway, this feels like a post that coulda been avoided merely through slightly different word choice or a quick edit. "Define terms please" is next to spellcheck for godliness. The general free-for-all confused melee in the comments seems to indicate that while a springboard post to discussing Absurdity Bias was a good idea, Neom isn't a particularly good category member to base it off. Possibly doesn't belong in category at all.
Re. "More seriously, I think any sort of absurdity heuristic or bias becomes less relevant as the...complexity waterline gets raised.":
This *sounds* convincing, yet I'm not sure history bears it out. There are plenty of things that sounded absurd thousands of years ago, which turned out not to be absurd hundreds or thousands of years ago:
- It's possible for a human to create fire.
- You can travel over water.
- Thousands of humans can live together in a small space.
- Different languages exist.
- Different groups of people have different ideas about what's good and what's bad.
- The stories of our forefathers aren't entirely reliable.
- A physical object can tell you what someone said before you were born.
- It's possible to invent new kinds of things that never existed before.
- The world is spherical.
- There are stable forms of government other than monarchy.
- It's possible to sail upwind.
- A woman can be a scholar.
- The sun is really, really far away, and much bigger than the earth.
- The different kinds of animals have changed their natures a lot over time.
- There's a kind of stone which can always tell you which way is north.
- The Earth moves around the sun.
- It's possible to build a city on a steep cliff face.
- It's possible to grow plants in a desert.
- The total wealth in the world can grow.
- Animals are actually machines.
Wait, you lost me on that last one. I thought only humans could be p-zombies?
I guess I forgot that some people still think it's impossible for machines to be conscious.
I don't think it's absurd and reject it out of hand, it's just not something I've seen a strong enough case yet for. Largely because determining whether actual humans are conscious seems harder than we expect, and that's only multiplied in trying to model animals. Perhaps there's a good technical explanation somewhere, I'm sure Scott's written at length about it, but as a total outside-view layman this is more or less at the limit of my reading level/interest: https://www.slowboring.com/p/were-asking-the-wrong-question-about
But anyway, still maintain the Grand Quest to Answer All Questions involves a lot of steps backwards as we get to know more (replication crisis...sigh), and there's a sort of uncanny valley of knowing just enough to know how much we really don't know/now have Additional Questions about. There's no way to quantify this, but I think there's some updateable evidence in the general climate of epistemic nihilism/learned helplessness which is significantly more common outside our semi-walled garden here.
Like to tie it back to Neominative determinism, I actually know very little about the potential available in modern architecture. So even though ambition alone is enough reason to worry about feasibility, it doesn't seem unreasonable to conclude "I'm not an expert, shrug" and leave the resolution blank rather than throwing an ill-defined Absurdity Exception. The robust discussion of commuter rail logistics in the comments just reinforced this - I thought I knew a little about public transit from time spent working in that sector, but this objectively-more-than-average-person level of expertise was woefully inadequate for the subject at hand. Knowing enough to see how much I don't know. (Though perhaps seemingly-absurd examples work better for illustrating this ignorance.)
Neom isn't a bad idea because it sounds impossibly expensive and difficult to build with today's technology. Any proposal like that might happen to get an Elon Musk to make it cheaper and change the whole equation faster than anyone could have imagined.
Neom is a bad idea because no matter how advanced our technology is, even if we're literally building Dyson spheres and are immortal and can build giant skyscrapers the height of Mount Everest in a day, a linear city is always going to be worse than a city that is literally any other shape.
I dunno, I feel like a city shaped as one of the two lines in a swastika would be worse. You'd still have all the disadvantages of the straight line, but you'd add two 90 degree turns for your high speed trains to have to navigate.
And it would look like half a swastika.
Elon Musk took a technology that had since its inception been optimized for anything but cost, and optimized it for cost. In ways that had for the most part been clearly and explicitly foreseen for decades by people who didn't happen to be billionaires. Construction has been pretty thoroughly optimized for cost over the past century, and I haven't heard of anyone credible saying "look, here's a way to do construction ten times cheaper while still building skyscraper-tall buildings that are safe and comfortable". So I think it's highly unlikely that the Elon Musk of skyscraper-building will emerge in this generation, and that crosses over to absurd if you ask me to imagine he's a Saudi working in secret.
Oh, is that why Teslas are so cheap?
I'm actually in the market for a new car. Can you point me to one of these cheap Teslas? Because for the price of a bare-bones Tesla 3, I can get a Mercedes C-class or a pair of Hyundai Elantras. Or if I want something electric, a Nissan Leaf with enough left over for a Nissan Versa for my gas-guzzling needs.
I think tgof137 was being sarcastic.
Also unfair; Teslas are a different technology--and, ironically, one driven by /stopping/ the optimization for cost by an industry. I suspect you were talking about spaceships when you spoke of Musk optimizing for cost. Electric cars aren't optimized for cost; they're optimized for an envisioned vertically-integrated transportation system, covering everything from energy generation to movement (but, oddly, excluding manufacturing itself) which is optimized to reduce CO2 production, meanwhile making costs skyrocket. But most of this will be paid for by taxes, so it doesn't matter.
Space travel is the industry he's optimizing for cost; auto-manufacturing is largely already optimized for cost, and there he's optimizing more for "Cool" to set a trend and get electric adopted.
Irrelevant nitpicking ahead: EY's examples in the Stranger Than History quote are bad.
In 1901 there were maybe physicists like Plank who had an inkling to what Einstein will propose only 4 years later because it was based on theories and experiments already available like the Michelson–Morley experiment of 1887 suggesting the Lorentz invariance of the speed of light. Plank was definitely not shocked by relativity.
Also in 1901 the world was crisscrossed by telegraph lines, telephones networks were growing and there were plenty of newfangled sophisticated mechanical calculators like the Millionaire of 1892 and electric tabulating machines using punch cards made since 1890 by Hollerith (his company will eventually by a founding part of IBM). Telling someone that in a 100 years there will be a network of electric calculators connected by wires would have not been a shocker and I'm pretty sure it was predicted by some at the time. And they did had all kinds of porn fiction in 1901, including lesbian.
It's not just about absurdity; it's about Bayesian probability. If you collect everything we know about physics and technology, and plug it into the Bayes' Rule, then we will discover that painting yourself a specific color is incredibly unlikely to reverse gravity. Of course, we could be wrong; but we would be foolish to make long-term plans or investments based on such a thin hope.
The tricky part here is that if we told someone from 1901 about the Internet, and he plugged in everything he knew about science and technology of the time into Bayes' Rule, he'd be forced to conclude that the Internet is a scam. He would be factually incorrect, but his conclusion would be fully justified. But, if he stuck with his rigorous thought processes (and somehow lived about 100 more years), he might be one of the people who got to *develop* the Internet.
There is no magic oracle that you can consult to get 100% accurate answers about any question. The best you can do is balance false positives and false negatives; and this means that you would occasionally miss the one cool revolutionary idea that will change everything. In exchange, you gain the kind of steady progress that gets you from steam engines to the Internet in only 100 years. It's a worthwhile tradeoff.
> The tricky part here is that if we told someone from 1901 about the Internet, and he plugged in everything he knew about science and technology of the time into Bayes' Rule, he'd be forced to conclude that the Internet is a scam.
With 1901 tech? Yes. But given telegraph lines progress it would not be something to be classified as "utterly impossible, ever"
This post is IMHO completely unnecessary (and, sadly, showcases why "the substack quality has fallen compared to SSC"). Any modicum of "common sense" (horror!) would give you the same conclusions in 20x less words. This is simply not interesting and not why I read ACX (less and less these days, for reasons above).
I honestly don't understand the concern here. I mean, I do understand the object-level concern, I just don't see how the problem doesn't simply generalize to "P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary".
I mean, the only way I can conceive the problems posed in the post as problems is when I forcibly reduce the available options to simple binaries. Like, is "absurd" supposed to mean "literally impossible" - or just "having a very low probability"? Is "questioning your assumptions" a yes/no option where you either require them to have a strict logical proof, or require no proof at all - or is it more like having probabilities assigned to them, and calculating the need to revisit them from the current context? Isn't the evolution guy's problem the fact that he already decided he "knows" something, instead of admitting and processing new evidence?
In each of those cases, reducing to a binary appears to be the obvious failure mode, and eliminating that failure mode an instant improvement. (Now, in each of those cases, there's also no simple way forward after that. But I, for one, find reassuring the conclusion that there's no simple trick and we should just all follow the usual epistemic best practices.)
(I don't understand the problem with social evidence either, the vast majority of each of our individual knowledge was provided by other people, one way or another, there's no escaping that. Not to mention it would be extremely impractical to escape. Humanity runs on trusting others to do things one cannot do oneself. It got us far, certainly farther than each of us trusting only one's individual experience would have gotten us. It doesn't feel like a cop-out to me, maybe because it seems like a description of what's already happening, rather than a prescription of what should happen.)
I think I'd defend "use absurdity as a heuristic" in basically all cases. Taking Yudkowsky's examples:
Special relativity is completely absurd, and people should dismiss it out of hand until presented with a stack of evidence. No-one does this, because its so strangely beautiful you end up wanting it to be true.
If you explained the internet in more detail, most reasonably intelligent people in 1901 would probably accept that the invention itself would happen if it was possible. They'd accept the possibility wasn't absurd if they has a period-appropriate grasp of electricity. Anyone who was being intellectually honest would accept the porn thing as well.
The answer to the hidden example is that everyone thinks their own moral opinions (possibly all opinions?) are correct. If they thought they was wrong in some way, they'd change them to whatever they thought was right. "Moral consensus kind of drifts around haphazardly" is an idea that's clearly true and not absurd in the slightest, but people reject it because they want morality to be objective.
More generally, if you hear a very complicated argument for something ridiculous, you should still dismiss it because its more likely that the argument is wrong in some way than that the ridiculous thing is true. Neom is a bloody stupid idea because it's meant to be a desert city that's one block wide and the length of Ireland. If you show me a really good argument for why this is a good idea, then the right thing for me to do (even if I find the argument utterly convincing) is to reject the argument nonetheless and fall back on it still being a bloody stupid idea and you being a sophist.
There's a difference between it's impossible and it's impractical. A difference between being on the edge of known physics and being central to everyday experience.
There's very little which is uncertain about this project from an engineering and physics perspective. The 2 main areas I'd be worried about would be wind loading (absolute and differential) on a surface that large, and the environmental impact. The first can be mitigated by over-specifying the design for that force (and we already know how to build moment frames). I presume the latter will involve a lot of sand piling up in annoying locations which can be addressed with standard ground moving equipment. If nothing else, it will be a great way to learn more about environmental science.
What makes the project absurd isn't the physics/engineering which, granted, a lot of people are unfamiliar with. It's the parts that people are familiar with - everyday living in urban environments. And approximately everybody seems to think this isn't a place they would want to live.
Everything connected together with doesn't have to be terrible. The Las Vegas strip has a lot of major attractions connected together with a monorail. Lots of varied businesses connected indoors can work very well - the Minneapolis Skyway system is fantastic. But for individual large structures the advantages are limited. Skyscrapers exist because the demand for an area means the cost of land is higher than the cost of building upwards. Malls exist because there's an advantage of having lots of otherwise-unrelated stores in close proximity creating a network effect. And Amazon Warehouses exist because there's a need to be able to store a wide selection of stuff in an area where it can be individually boxed up as needed. What's left? Airports, because the minimum cost of decent runway is best amortized over a lot of flights which are themselves best served by a lot of jetways?
This is in contrast to other wacky projects where the objections are related to engineering factors like cost rather than experiential. Approximately nobody is objecting to Elon Musk's tunnel building projects based on the idea that "tunnels can't work" or "nobody wants to take tunnels". A lot of people are familiar with subways, highway tunnels, etc. The objections are on the engineering side about the ability to reduce the cost of development for the given service level/capacity and safety required.
If this was simply an infrastructure which pre-deployed subway, water, sewage and other utilities in the desert under a "if you build it, they will come" model it would still probably be a gigantic waste of money, but at the very least it would be preparing for a future which might possibly occur and meet the needs of people.
(I got an email about the comment I'm replying to here, but I can't see the comment on the actual page. I wonder if it'll show up once I reply to it? EDIT: comment system is bugged; this comment was made as a reply to a reply to my top-level comment, here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/absurdity-bias-neom-edition/comment/8185050)
Wow, you're totally right. Chapman is in a very Kierkegaardian place. His solution to the whole problem, "non-systematic situated meaning-making", he draws from Heidegger, who was inspired by Kierkegaard. So it looks like he's getting some Kierkegaardian insights at second hand.
Hegel had noticed the problem of nebulosity, that no system is actually true and right, and had responded to it by making a system of systems; this giant uber-system which would account for and rationalize all possible systems, and explain how and why various systems arise in various times throughout history. Hegelian thought had completely taken control of Europe, and much of Kierkegaard's writing was rebelling against it. So Kierkegaard talks a lot about the deficiencies of this kind of naive systematizing.
As someone who is so excited about prediction markets and, by extension, the wisdom of crowds, I am a little surprised at the degree to which you dismiss the "social epistemology" dimension. I'm not saying that you can't attempt to address the problem with your individual brain, but surely for most issues it is preferable (and much more practical) to rely on social epistemology, considering how many assumptions we are faced with every day. Is the Earth round? Will my car explode while I am driving down the freeway? Do vaccines contain microchips? I don't have the expertise, nor the time to establish the precise level of consideration to give all of the these questions.
"Some people try to dodge the question and say that all rationality is basically a social process. Maybe on my own, I will naturally stop at whatever level seems self-evident to me. Then other people might challenge me, and I can reassess. But I hate this answer. It seems to be preemptively giving up and hoping other people are less lazy than you are.”
I don’t think this is about being lazy. I think it’s about inferential range. Slack in inferential range has a clear tradeoff, which you well describe in Studies on Slack.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/
I think this really is a social process where the group benefits from different individuals having different amounts of slack.
The easiest absurdity dismissal is that Neom is presented as this giant thing all at once. No city (maybe Brasilia?) ever just got planned and millions of people moved there. Now throw in a totally untested architectural model for this city, this style of living. It would not be absurd to build one section, in the most desirable location (near the sea) and see if it works, see if people like it. Then build another section and so on. It may not get to the length of Ireland. They may have learnings as they go and as residents give input. Newer sections may be designed differently. But if the economics or the functioning of this thing only works as a giant whole, it seems doomed.
The goal here is probably to minimize instances where we lock in a wrong position and refuse to update further without wasting too much time on analysis, I would guess. This is the position I would try to adhere to, at least, because like other humans I can't optimize for only the truth without serious loss to everything else I consider worthwhile.
I think the trick for things outside my fields of expertise is splitting up the heuristics, rather than serious study:
-Is it in my field of expertise, or is it something that looks like it is but is adjacent? I see a lot of experts make this mistake, where they comment on something in a related field, and end up wildly off base because they mistook it for their own field.
-Do experts in the field say its impossible? Being fringe is one thing, being impossible is another. Not infallible, but good enough particularly for hard sciences. I'm not going to necessarily understand *why* something is impossible without a background in the field, so it's impractical to learn it myself.
-If the claim appears particularly absurd: Do I understand the claim correctly? Some claims are as insane as they appear, but this is worth a double check.
I think all of that has to happen past the initial gutcheck of absurdity, though, so it seems more like a series of backup heuristics. I'd also be concerned about the opposite; blandly accepting a statement because it seems reasonable. I have a feeling the "reasonableness heuristic" is the more deadly of the two, but I have no evidence to back that up.
My point is that what you wrote didn't pass muster as something a NEOM proponent would read and say "yeah, that's a good point. I still think we will succeed, but if we fail, it will be because of these things Scott highlighted".
In other words, my concern was strawmanning.
I was even able to play "rubber duck NEOM proponent" for you, and show you that the argument about the trains needing multiple stations was wrong, by using the example of the boring company: https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1554888465870794753?s=20&t=XQ8iGM2nkdh6cWeF2D_s0Q
That example didn't have to exist for the argument to be wrong, but it was convenient that it did exist.
Another IMO not-very-good argument was to call the project impossible. Jumping from "this is very hard, I don't think the saudis can do it" to "this is impossible". Now, someone might say that this is a nitpick.
And yet, I think the difference between "very very hard" and "impossible" is everything we've ever done as a species that has been worth a damn. A sensemaking error that causes one to confuse the two is a sensemaking error that makes all the difference between a thriving civilization and one that stagnates.
I believe impossibility claims should be handled with care, ideally built on things about as certain as the laws of physics, because they're powerful tools of epistemic warfare
"But how do you, pondering a question on your own, know when to stop because a line of argument strikes you as absurd, vs. to stick around and gather more facts and see whether your first impressions were accurate?"
Here's the thing: you can just say "looks super hard, not convinced they can do it". And if pressed to make a decision whether to buy discount NEOM property, you can just say no. You don't need to jump to claiming impossibility to do that.
I even described a path towards constructing a stronger argument, by focusing on the implementation path rather than the endpoint.
And so, in a way, this piece makes the same mistake as the one on NEOM. You go in depth about the absurdity heuristic, and the result reads to me like you're not actually engaging with the point at hand: using weak arguments to support a position, regardless of the validity of the position itself. Had you just said "seems pretty hard to me, I'd bet against it" I would have been in complete agreement.
It really feels like much of this would be resolved much better with a conversation.
Speaking of which, I'd be pretty happy if you read my analysis of your ivermectin piece, ideally letting me know where I'm misunderstanding you and/or correcting the elements you agree are in error. I'm learning a lot while doing it and I still think there's a lot of good to be done by engaging in open-ended discourse about the topic at hand.
https://doyourownresearch.substack.com/?sort=search&search=potemkin
I agree it's not impossible, but the Boring example does not really exist. Highways exist, for what its worth.
Honourary made the hyperloop point in the comments to the original post. I agree it's a good point, have updated on it, and plan to link it on the next Open Thread. I don't feel terrible for interpreting their claim that they would have "trains" as a claim to have trains and not a never-before-used technology.
Otherwise, I think this is the same problem we've had before where you interpret "impossible" as meaning literal impossibility rather than just a very very low chance that anyone could do it. I would say the same about building a passenger bridge across the Atlantic, making a self-sustaining Pluto colony before 2040, or creating a one world government in the next five years, even though all of those are permitted by the laws of physics and I can even imagine ways that if everyone were incredibly lucky and united in their determination to do so, they might sort of happen.
I've already responded to your ivermectin posts via email and at https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/v3ljan/scott_alexander_corrects_error_ivermectin/ib4pi37/ ; for the reasons I discuss there, I don't expect further engagement to be useful.
The posts I linked to are new. Nobody can force you to read, of course, but I would be willing to bet good money that you'll find much information that is new and surprising in them. Regardless, I'll continue the open peer review until I cover the whole essay.
IMO, the hyperloop is just as much vaporware as NEOM, so it's a circular argument. It's like telling an atheist that Jesus can split the moon because Mohammed did it too or whatever.
I didn't cite the hyperloop. The boring company and the hyperloop are related, but very different projects.
Ivermectin is a great case study in the difference between absurdity and impossibility.
Some insisted that it was impossible that ivermectin works, because the concentration needed to stop the virus (IC50) was too high, relative to the doses prescribed. But the IC50 was measured in kidney cells, some experiments found the number was lower in lung cells. The original in vitro experiments didn't prove that ivermectin can't work as an antiviral, only that it can't work in some cells. If you took high enough doses for long enough, you could maybe get some anti-viral effect in some cells.
And even if ivermectin was proven to have no antiviral effect, that wouldn't mean it's impossible that it works. It could still coincidentally work against covid through some other pathway, like as an anti-inflammatory or immunomodulator.
Others insisted that it's impossible that ivermectin could work as a covid prophylactic if taken once a week, since the half-life of the drug is only 18 hours.
Well, that's not entirely true. Some amount of ivermectin reaches lung tissue, and it stays constant there for about 8 days.
https://twitter.com/tgof137/status/1464110158749917189
So it's not impossible that weekly ivermectin prevents covid, it's just implausible that the small amount in the lungs works because that small weekly dose shouldn't even exceed the lowest experimental IC50 value. And you'd have to assume that a similar dose remains in your upper respiratory tract, or other tissues, and stops infection there.
Most of the claims in favor of ivermectin are merely absurd, but not impossible.
The FLCCC originally said that you need only take ivermectin once a month to prevent covid, before they gradually changed the dosage regimen to a higher frequency:
https://medium.com/@tgof137/great-piece-6713985e876
Is it impossible that once a month dosing of ivermectin would work? I'd say it's absurd, and the FLCCC was wrong.
But, of course, it's not impossible. Some amount of the drug was present in lung tissue one month later, though it was about 100 times less than the initial dose.
The weekly dose is already too low to reach the IC50, so 100 times less should definitely not be enough. But I can't 100% disprove that homeopathic ivermectin works, it's still technically possible that some tiny lingering portion of the drug prevents infection both in the lungs and throughout the body. Or it's possible the drug causes lasting changes to cells where it somehow prevents infection even after the drug is gone.
It's absurdly unlikely, but it's still possible.
It is possible to disprove some of the most absurd claims about ivermectin. It's not a 100% effective prophylactic against covid. It did not end covid in Uttar Pradesh, or Mexico, or Zimbabwe, or Eastern Europe. It could not stop the whole pandemic in a month, as Weinstein claimed. It's not a general purpose cure for long covid, as Kory claims.
After hearing all those absurd claims made with confidence, I'm inclined to just disagree with everything the drug's supporters say. It seems like a good heuristic is just to assume that it doesn't work, unless better evidence comes in.
But it would still be better to keep an open mind, and not assume it's impossible that it works. There could still be some dose of ivermectin and duration of treatment that reduces viral load or ameliorates covid symptoms.
The largest RCT's have been disappointing, but maybe a longer course or higher dose will ultimately prove to work better. I'd be happy to see new or better experiments.
The heuristic you cite is itself absurd. If we follow it we would conclude that since the covid vaccines were promoted as virtually 100% protective against infection and transmission, which there was never strong evidence for, we should discard them.
That said, thanks for the old screenshots of the FLCCC protocol, those are interesting, though their sources are clearly quoting them out of date.
Any idea when the "once a month" protocol is from?
To answer your dosing question broadly, my sense is that newer variants replicate more quickly, and thus need higher dosing.
I guessed you might make the comparison between ivermectin and vaccines. I don't think it really holds up, given much examination.
I would agree that the vaccines were oversold and that has been one thing that's undermined confidence in the public health establishment. I'd add that the establishment has repeatedly discredited itself throughout the pandemic, for instance by:
Claiming that covid was less dangerous than the flu and then quickly changing that take.
Claiming that masks don't work and then making them mandatory.
Giving inconsistent timelines on how long lockdowns would last.
Giving inconsistent rules on what would be locked down.
First claiming that everyone needed to quarantine and then suddenly changing that view to say that everyone needs to get out and protest racism.
I understand why many people have stopped believing mainstream news or believing the CDC, and I can understand why some even take the approach of reversing everything the government says. I.e. if the government says that vaccines work and ivermectin doesn't, they assume that vaccines are dangerous and ivermectin works.
Though, to be clear, I haven't personally met anyone that's vaccine hesitant because Joe Biden oversold the vaccine. And it took about a year, and the arrival of Omicron, before it was really clear the vaccine had been oversold, so you can't retroactively explain vaccine hesitancy that happened prior to that.
I have met people that are vaccine hesitant because they don't think covid is a real virus or a serious one. I've met others that think the vaccines are toxic or highly dangerous or often lethal. And I've met others who think they have immunity without vaccination (some of them may be correct).
If I had to blame someone for vaccine hesitancy, I would much sooner go with covid deniers or anti-vaxxers who spread those claims, or people like Tucker Carlson who boosted those voices, not the people that oversold vaccine efficacy.
I'd also note that vaccines were 90%+ effective, in the initial RCT's, and highly effective in 2021's real world case data. They were effective against both infection and severe disease, and even somewhat effective with transmission. With new variants, they remain effective against severe disease, but do little to stop infection and pretty much nothing to stop transmission.
The issue isn't so much that the government lied about the efficacy as that covid mutates and we don't have a reasonable process for updating the vaccines.
I also don't think it's true that health authorities all said that immunity would last forever. We did get simple messages from Biden telling people they wouldn't get sick if they got vaccinated. But we also had people like Francis Collins talking openly about short lived immunity to coronaviruses, based on published research:
https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2020/09/29/study-finds-people-have-short-lived-immunity-to-seasonal-coronaviruses/
I don't think your "both ivermectin and vaccines were oversold" equivalency holds up because ivermectin never had the same overwhelming evidence in its favor.
Ivermectin was sold on Youtube and Substack as 100% effective and capable of ending the pandemic at any time. If it had actually been 90% effective and capable of ending only the early strains of covid, but had been defeated by viral mutations, I would consider that a fair amount of overselling.
In reality, I think ivermectin was sold as 100% effective when it was actually < 20% effective, perhaps even 0% effective. I.e. in ACTIV-6, ivermectin was about 7% effective and maybe reduced the duration of illness by half a day. And I think that was likely always the case, I don't think it's because covid mutated.
As I said, the vaccine example I used is absurd, to demonstrate the absurdity of the argument.
Either we're looking at what people are saying, or we're looking at the underlying evidence. On the first, we can debate who said what when and why forever.
I'd rather focus on the evidence itself.
Indeed, evidence is the only thing that can ultimately settle these arguments.
But, at some point, it's a waste of time paying attention to people who have been consistently wrong, again and again.
We had Dr Kory saying things like, "they literally eradicated COVID using ivermectin in Zimbabwe". And then making similar claims for Mexico. And India. And Slovakia. And proving to be wrong, every single time.
We also have Kory claiming that covid vaccines killed 200,000 Americans, which is trivially easy to disprove from excess death statistics.
We have Weinstein credulously citing papers that covid vaccines would kill 2 people for every 3 they saved. Or saying that "Ivermectin is a near-perfect COVID prophylactic."
At some point, you have to admit that most ivermectin proponents are utterly incapable of parsing the truth from available evidence and probably aren't worth listening to.
My apologies if your blog or track record happens to be better, I've haven't taken much time to read it.
Read it and see.
> show you that the argument about the trains needing multiple stations was wrong, by using the example of the boring company: https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1554888465870794753?s=20&t=XQ8iGM2nkdh6cWeF2D_s0Q
Answering one physics-defying vaporware project with another is not convincing. Is there anything you can point to that actually exists?
The question is "how could it work". And the video I posted is the answer.
Does anyone know the post where Scott argues that the multiverse is a good scientific theory?
Back in 1969, I saw Paolo Soleri's exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC showing plans and models for what he called arcologies. These were immense buildings, as tall as skyscrapers and running across the land for miles and miles. They were an an update of Corbusier's Radiant City or Buckminster Fuller's urban structures with an attempt to think of a city in ecological terms, as forming its own world and lessening its impact on the natural world. I think the name came from architecture and ecology. The idea was that such a linear city could provide housing, controlled environment agriculture and recreation, a transportation system and all the infrastructure needed for urban life with a minimal ecological footprint.
There were a lot of big thinkers in the 1960s and a lot of fascinating new ideas, many of which we take for granted today. Arcologies are not one of them, though I noticed a reference in Neuromancer. Neom, for all its grandiosity, offers the same appeal. Saudi Arabia is not noted for its pleasant climate, abundant fresh water supplies, or agricultural production. An arcology could offer better climate control, more efficient water use and possibly a platform for urban farming. Neom is not absurd or inconceivable by that standard.
I think the main flaw is that the design does not seem to provide a pathway for organic urban growth. What is the minimum unit that could be built as a useful prototype, something more than Habitat '67? How would it work as a test bed? How would it fit with the nation's traditional urban life? How would it deal with the large number of foreign workers who are major part of Saudi Arabia's workforce? Then there's the matter of the variability of oil income, but I'm not a Saudi staff economist, so that isn't my problem.
It helps to remember that absurd comes from the mathematical term surd or irrational number. These were a real problem in mathematics for a long time, but nowadays we work with surds all the time and barely notice their absurdity.
(*) Soleri's work informed a lot of the model design for Star Wars. Compare some of his arcologies with some Star Wars battle cruisers and the like.
*Epistemic status: Stating an opinion*
I think Alexandros Marinos is actually right in the case of the Neom post. I believe it's usually most productive to approach a disagreement as such:
1. State the opposing side's view, as far up in the Graham hierarchy [1] as possible
2. State your point of view, as well as possible
3. Rebut your opponent
4. Optionally make fun of your opponent
As far as I can see, 1 was done minimally, 2. was part of the post, 3. was only minimally present (absurdity heuristic), but it was *heavily* entangled with 4 (which is probably the worst kind of entaglement possible in a disagreement: Even singling out the the sentences "I disagree with this because of the absurdity heuristic. I will now proceed to make fun of Neom." would have been more productive.
Unfortunately, it seems like entangling 3 & 4 is psychologically easy to fall into (I've too often fallen into that trap, and imagine that'd continue if I garnered more status), and gives you the most clicks, so avoiding it is *hard*. I've seen some comments suggest that the ACX posts lean more into this than the SSC posts did, this feels true to me, and I want to *gently* point to CONSTANT VIGILANCE [2].
[1]: https://external-preview.redd.it/Jk8lfGW2JnNpYGWqRRwRLEiPJyXXPOdwKlW8LYhL7ag.jpg?auto=webp&s=2b817ec0fbbc58bdb49eb429797d3ace40111462
[2]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/09/constant-vigilance/
That's right. Corbusier, not Fuller. I haven't really been following that stuff since maybe 1975. It's no wonder I'm getting things mixed up.
That kind of big systems thinking got a lot less popular in the 1980s. It's interesting that it has been making something of a comeback since then.
I hadn't heard of Neom before this post, I agree it sounds absurd.
But I think there may also be some absurd construction goals in the west.
I've been reading about green energy, and I get a similar feel for some of the zero carbon goals.
I made an estimate of how large a national wind farm would be, the size struck me as absurd. I don't think we'll build that much wind power.
I think we could build enough solar power, but the batteries to store it will be a huge challenge:
https://medium.com/@tgof137/heres-what-it-would-cost-for-the-united-states-to-go-100-solar-1b7c34e6fcef
I made an estimate of how much lead we'd need for a national lead-acid battery. It's more lead than is known to exist in the world.
I made an estimate for how much a national lithium ion battery would cost. It's over 100 trillion dollars, and it would take a large fraction of known lithium reserves.
I made an estimate of how much pumped hydro storage we'd need, instead of batteries. It's absurdly large, the national reservoir size would be equal to draining Lake Tahoe just to store 3 days of power for the country.
So far, the most common response has been:
"You're just knocking down strawman arguments, of course we wouldn't solve the problem with 1 thing".
When my point has been more like:
"Solving green energy and intermittency looks really hard and every solution looks expensive. We need new solutions, or maybe we need nuclear"
Nuclear requires constant operation to amortize the massive capital costs, and thus doesn't solve the problem of shifting energy over time to match supply and demand.
I think nuclear is over-regulated for terrible reasons from the 1970s and 1980s (the anti-nuclear movement, unwarranted panic over Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, etc.).
If we can standardize nuclear reactor designs and remove much of the unnecessary regulation, we should be able to transition to a nuclear-powered electricity grid the way France did in the 1970s.
Since nuclear is baseload power, you are right that it does not solve the problem of shifting energy over time to match supply and demand. Other energy sources that can work as peaker plants can do that instead (in addition to batteries, grid interconnections, and demand response).
You are not knocking down strawman arguments, but you are still wrong about green energy.
We don't need a national battery. Wind and solar cover for each other part of the time (ie, the wind blows stronger at night, the sun shines more brightly in the middle of the day), and we can build a national grid infrastructure so that areas that are momentarily sunny and/or windy can supply electricity to areas that are momentarily cloudy with low amounts of wind. Also, there is something called "demand response" that incentivizes people to turn on their appliances when electricity is most plentiful. Combine all of that with hydroelectricity and a large nuclear energy baseload, the grid's energy storage requirements would be lower than you project.
Also, we can use battery chemistries besides lead-acid and lithium-ion. There are metal-air batteries in development (iron-air, aluminum-air, zinc-air, etc.). Since we are talking about the grid rather than electric vehicles, weight is not nearly as much of a concern, so we can use heavier batteries like flow batteries.
As for the scale of wind power, I think we can build it. There is plenty of windy land on the plains and mountain tops (as well as offshore), and IIRC, cost declines and better turbines have made wind energy the cheapest form of energy available right now (you can google it to make sure, I also recommend reading Ramez Naam's blog).
In summary, I think we can go zero-carbon with technology we have and with technology currently in the pipeline; we don't need radically new solutions.
Speaking as someone with a keen appreciation for wind, and a whole lot of wind turbines in my vicinity, wind does not in fact blow stronger at night than during the day, but vice versa. Particularly at low altitudes in areas where wind turbines are usually situated. A bit of googling suggests that this is true across North America and Australia at least; I suspect Europe as well but haven't been able to quickly confirm that.
And unless your "nation" is the whole of the British Empire, and you're running giant undersea power cables to the Pitcairn solar farms, you can't have a "national grid" that shifts power from the sunny+windy areas to the dark+quiet ones. Because for many hours a day, the *entire nation* will be devoid of sunlight and the winds will be at their lowest.
Either you need a national battery, or a whole lot of local batteries, or you need to tell your people that they're going to have to shut everything down and go to bed not long after sunset. Or, possibly, you could accept that you're going to have to get a huge chunk of your energy from things that aren't solar or wind.
From a UK perspective wind and solar have the problem that the highest electricity demand is on a December evening around 6pm. Solar will obviously contribute zero to the grid at that time, it being dark. Winter is also the time of the year where there can be high pressure systems sat over the country leading to almost no wind for a week at a time. Therefore the entirety of supply at a time of the highest demand needs to be provided with something other than wind or solar. It really is an intractable problem.
I'm not knocking wind and solar gratuitously - there are places where some combination of the two make a lot of sense. Somewhere like Arizona where peak demand is in the middle of the day is ideal for quite a big chuck of solar in the mix. And Canada can make much better use of its wind potential because of its hydro resources.
Sources saying that wind blows more at night (ctrl-f for the word "night"): https://www.apexcleanenergy.com/insight/reducing-cost-energy-day-night-throughout-year/, https://www.llnl.gov/news/power-generation-blowing-wind, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wind-power-turbine-storage-electricity-appliances/, https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/articles/top-10-things-you-didnt-know-about-offshore-wind-energy (land-based wind).
You are right that a national grid that shifts energy from high-production to low-production areas is not enough to compensate for night and for periods of low wind throughout the nation. However, my point was that this was one of several ways to mitigate the need for batteries, not the only solution. I mentioned the need for demand response and a baseload of nuclear and hydro power, and that all of my solutions put together mean that you need a smaller national battery (which can also be the sum of many smaller batteries).
I think it would actually be nice to try and build a global power grid, but just the costs of laying down transatlantic power cables will probably be significantly higher than the costs of laying down the original transatlantic telegraph cables in the mid-1800s. Some articles about the idea: https://www.google.com/search?q=global+energy+grid.
I found some real-world data from Germany to evaluate my assumption of a 3 day national battery:
https://medium.com/@tgof137/france-and-germany-real-world-comparison-of-nuclear-vs-solar-and-wind-1a32b40788a4?sk=2853b51e6139f28f0ae82571d93c49c6
For German weather, I think 3 days would actually be on the low side. Solar power in Germany varies by a factor of 30 between the worst winter days and the best summer days, it's likely not possible to overbuild enough panels there to rely on solar in the winter.
Windstorms in Germany do happen throughout the winter, but the interval between them is often in the range of 7-10 days.
For Germany to go 100% wind+solar, I'd estimate they would want 10 days of battery storage.
I'm not sure how much better it would be with an interconnected grid -- could Europe do better if Spain dramatically overbuilt solar and Scandinavia overbuilt wind and all countries shared electricity? Could the US do better with a massive solar farm in the southwest and wind in the great plains?
My guess is that you're not going to get down to zero storage with that approach, but you might avoid needing 10 days of storage to handle worst case weather.
I have heard some positive things about iron flow batteries, with some researchers claiming they can reduce the price to maybe 10-20X lower than lithium ion. I would agree that might solve the problem if that can be done at scale.
I agree with your general point. But I think you have made a couple of errors.
You say that a national lead acid battery would use more lead than is known to exist in the world. Just the earths crust alone contains about 2 quadrillion tonnes of lead, so I think you mean something other than 'known to exist'.
To suggest that a national lithium ion battery would use a large fraction of known lithium reserves misunderstands how the concept of mineral reserves is used. It doesn't have anything (at all) to do with how much of a substance exists or is left in the ground. It varies depending upon demand. So if demand for Lithium increased by a factor of ten, so would reserves. As an example, over the 20th century the demand for copper increased by 40 times. As a consequence, reserves also increased 40 fold. The ratio is obviously not exact, but as a first approximation it works very well.
I'm nit-picking a little, because your estimate of the cost of the Lithium ion battery is the important thing -and of course you are right. It's ridiculously and prohibitively expensive.
However, the availability of Lithium will never be the problem - at current rates of extraction (with no recycling at all) there is enough Lithium in the earths crust for 70 billion years.
Yes, sorry, when I say "known to exist", I'm referring to world reserve estimates from the USGS.
It is true that world reserves increase over time as new discoveries are made and as demand increases. But I don't think that's a simple process where the price just goes up and new reserves show up.
Take, for instance, the Hubbert peak of oil in America. The 1970's oil crisis provided a huge incentive for drillers to find more oil in the US, but oil production still peaked and declined for the next 30 years. It wasn't until the invention of fracking, decades later, before lower 48 oil production started to go back up to the 1970's peak and above.
Technological innovation is not a straightforward or predictable process that responds quickly to pricing pressure. It's still quite possible for us to have long lasting resource crunches any time we over-consume a limited substance.
"their king is a megalomaniac"
MBS is the crown prince, not the king.
He is for most intents and purposes Saudi Arabia's dictator, though.
My favourite absurdity is how my job involves making a special type of rock do my bidding by feeding it patterns of lightning. Lots of my time and effort is spent making sure that the lightning is just so, otherwise the rock misbehaves.
Quite a few people are preoccupied by worrying that the machines with these rocks at their heart might one day go out of our control and kill us all.
I think that the virtuous rationalist path is most likely to do a large amount of research on Neom down to the construction physics level, then write a Much More Than You Wanted To Know post, then get feedback from others, add corrections as needed, and then rinse and repeat because you can never be sure that you didn't miss something.
The problem with that is that we are human, we don't have the time, energy, nor inclination to do deep dives, and reality has a surprising amount of detail (http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail). So, we rely on heuristics based on our priors. This includes the absurdity heuristic, even though that heuristic's poor track record is a major theme of the rationalist canon (ie, how heliocentrism, evolution, special relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. seem so absurd).
I think the idea is that there is usually never a royal road or even a muddy goat path, but there is always a compass. That compass always points in the same direction, labeled "Do more research, and listen to more criticism and feedback to make sure you are not going astray". When looking at the direction the compass is going, we see difficult terrain, lots of skulls (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/), terrible weather, and it goes uphill both ways.
I don't actually think we should be on the most virtuous rationalist path all of the time. After all, we have a limited budget of time, energy, money, etc. However, even following it a little bit of the way is probably good.
For instance, instead of "Neom is so absurd! Ha ha ha!", it would be better to say "I think Neom is absurd because of A, B, C inefficiencies, which if we look at ordinary construction costs would cost $X, and make it hard for residents to get around because of Y. Even if the Saudis have super-secret extra-efficient construction technology (unlikely because of Z), constructing a more ordinarily-shaped city with walkability and transit in mind would still cost Alpha % less and increase mobility by a factor of Beta for reasons Gamma." At least for me, sometimes the absurdity becomes more apparent when the critic lays out the facts than when the critic points and laughs.
As for how far we should follow the compass of Rationalist Virtue given our time/energy/money/inclination constraints, maybe here there is really not only no royal road nor goat path, but also no compass. I suppose it depends on things whether we are trying to persuade or get to the bottom of things, how important is it personally to know the truth (ie, getting Neom wrong costs nothing to anyone here in the West, at least for now), and how certain we already are (this last one can still go wrong, since closed-minded bigots are very certain of their beliefs).
The point is that we should always see absurdity as a cop-out. Maybe we can agree that it is the best we can do for now given a large multitude of constraints, but we should never accept it as a good argument in and of itself. If we stop at a certain region when making a Map of Knowledge, we should never mark that region as "Here Be Absurdity". Rather, we should mark it as "Here we gave up", or maybe include a pointer to a cache of arguments someone else made. In the latter case, we would let the reader/future mapmakers decide if the pointer points in the correct direction.
Also, I specifically disagree with "in order to dismiss it as absurd, I need to explain why the Saudi government would waste $500 billion on an obviously absurd idea. This is easy: their king is a megalomaniac, plus people are afraid to voice dissent."
Yes, MBS really is a megalomaniac, and yes people really are afraid to voice dissent, and yes, all of those are good reasons why the Saudi government would waste such a sum on an absurd idea. However, these are not by themselves reasons to dismiss Neom, and Scott himself noticed the red flags of Bulverism and bias arguments. To properly dismiss Neom, it would be better to discuss urban planning, economics, and construction physics.
Neom seems more like a concept with some strong statements, but we've seen similar grand scale plans fail before or simply never come to fruition. Does anyone remember those artificial land palm trees? They're...not doing so well and were never finished. So until ground is broken or a highly detailed multi thousand page report is issued, then we can dismiss any concept car or concept arcology building out of hand based on priors that such things never come to market or look very different if they do.
It seems like we might match our level of effort in dealing with a specific claim to some dgree with the amount of specificity being offered.
Do they have a detailed list of supplies, purchase prices, and hours of effort by various categories of builders to construct their price estimate with comparison rates of real projects? Or is it just a number pulled out of thin air? If there are some 'high level' graphs then that's pretty low specificity and lacks data to support it from prior building costs in the area, as Scott mentioned.
Now you don't want to get sucked into a rabbit hole by some crazy person who writes endlessly long lists of things and infer that somehow makes what they're saying any more or less likely.
But it is easy enough to make some guess as to how seriously you choose to take any pile of estimates and if it is too complex, to rely on experts to analyse such a complex argument. If you see a brochure with 30 pages of pretty pictures and pie charts....you can push back to say it is absurd relying on your superficial priors...but if you have a 3,000 page plan then a bit more effort will be required to analyse it for overly rosy or pessimistic projections. This is how political think tanks generally work to promote highly biased and often false ideas using detailed reports to support the foregone conclusions their sponsors wanted to promote.
Given the relative levels of technology, is Neom more or less absurd than the Great Wall of China?
I'm going to offer an anecdote that might be slightly relevant, but I sincerely hope is not. Mostly I just want to tell this story....
Sometime around 2007-2008, a friend of mine was hired as a contract welder and fabricator in (I think) UAE. He was working on the enormous stage for the wedding of the Princess. Six months. Enormous.
He had several trenchant observations about the culture there, but the semi-relevant one in this case is about "labor conditions". 'Berto was working steadily, but saw there was no way all this work could get done, so he asked up the chain for some help.
A few days later, he got some help. A hundred (100) Sri Lankan laborers showed up, and were put at his service. These guys had only the clothes on their backs, and no skills at all. They were put to work sometimes pounding in screws with hammers. They worked frantically hard. 'Berto was deeply troubled by the implications of this. After six days of this, there was the collective day off. Then on [Monday? after the day off anyway], a hundred COMPLETELY DIFFERENT Sri Lankans took their place. This went on for almost two months.
My friend prayed the whole time that each hundred laborers were not just fed to the sharks after six days.
The fact that he considered that might be possible, well it might have a bearing on construction economics in the Arab World.
"Marginal spending on medicine has zero net effect" is only absurd if you don't know what "marginal" or "net" means, right? It means "we're spending roughly the correct amount of money on medicine" (whereas marginal spending having negative net effect would mean we're spending too much, and positive that we should spend more). Or am I missing something?
I think the main thing this discussion tells us is that there are many ways to analyze a project, and people are EXTREMELY convinced that their "rational" way is the single canonical rational way...
- One dimension of this is the Saudi government and its various out-group properties. The all-consuming issue to about 90% of the commenters, regardless of specifics about the project.
- A second dimension is the cost. The all-consuming issue to about 9% of the commenters.
- What very people appear to be interested in is the city qua city aspect of this; yet to me that's the part that obvious renders it "absurd" regardless of bias or otherwise.
Consider the pictures as drawn. Not how you you want save the project by redefining, the project as described.
What you are living in is a TUNNEL 170km long. You are living in a skyscraper/shopping mall that you can never leave. Is that what people want, especially the kind of people who rhapsodize about this sort of city?
How are things delivered in this city if there are no cars? How are buildings repaired if there are no open spaces (eg roads) that act as emergency locations for cranes and building equipment? How is air pumped into the city and heat removed? (All this stuff can be done for skyscrapers because they have huge open spaces on the sides where the equipment lives and can vent, but according the video two of the sides of each "skyscraper unit" don't exist, and the other two are mirrored glass with no ugly chillers or pumps.
What are the fire escape plans?
Do animals and birds live in this space along with the trees? How does that play out in terms of animal waste and falling leaves?
etc etc etc
This stuff is considered absurd because there are no intermediate proofs of concept. Yes, you can grow one tree in a skyscraper, but no-one is growing forests in skyscrapers. Every real-world image I see of this sort of thing ACTUALLY has the trees on the outside of the building, so the problem is moot.
It's not quite the same, but the logic here is somewhat like "we know how to build gardens, therefor how hard can it be to build Biosphere 2?" And we know how that turned out.
Now if you want to say that the images in the video are all nonsense, well sure. Then we can have a different sort of argument. But the argument at least some of us (1%) are having is with the concept as presented by the video. And we call absurdity because of these eminently practical things: air, heat, life forms, repair, logistics, building evolution, ...