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THANK YOU! In personal development circles, I hear a lot about the benefits of spirituality, with vague assurances that you don't have to be a theist to be spiritual, but with no pointers in non-woo directions, except possibly meditation. You have unblurred a large area of my mental map.
(Upvoted!)
(Epistemic status: shitpost)
You‘re a kitty!
How does knowing about Ukraine’s draft affect an NYT reader’s opinion of the war? I mean it’s not going to be like
- Reader: “Ukraine’s justified in defending itself from Russia!”
- NYT-whistleblower: ”But Ukraine drafted soldiers to do it, and the NYT didn’t tell you!”
- Reader: ”Oh, well, screw those guys, Ukraine should lose!”
… so what is it like?
Some ways a reader could respond include:
- More instinctive patriotic fervour (Glory to Ukraine’s presumably-voluntary heroes!) (… and this seems like the likely propaganda angle in question)
- Increased salience of hellishness of the war, therefore Russia should win asap to minimise bloodshed
- Increased salience of hellishness of the war, therefore arm Ukraine to punish Russia for starting it
If you turn up the prior belief of collusion between the NYT and a military-industrial-political complex, you can imagine a “pragmatic” situation where the West arms Ukraine enough to keep Russia embroiled in a war of attrition, thereby pouring Russia’s armed forces into a meatgrinder for, from Western accountings, pennies on the dollar, and this might be pragmatic, or even hard to improve on (because arming Ukraine too much could provoke nuclear response from Russia), but, damn it all, it doesn’t feel very heroic. So, NYT is left waving the banners and playing the trumpets?
downvoted for the "affiliate link" rickroll.
(Epistemic status: shitpost)
You know the rules, and so do I
I am confused. None of these are particularly social-status-improving, or, for that matter, social-status-worsening, because none of them are conspicuous. If you buy a tailored suit or an expensive car or an expensive house, people can see that you own it, and the extravagance signals wealth (or can be interpreted as materialism or lack of prudence); none of the things on the list seem to qualify. What am I missing?
Hm. Now I thought I’d heard of gender dysphoria/transgender/etc showing up in brain imaging (eg. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26766406/) and while “develop like female brains” would be bounding happily ahead of the evidence, that seems at least like sporadic snorting noises from the garage in the night time
(Epistemic status: shitpost)
Plan to uplift Royal Corgi may cause constitutional crisis
If Epstein’s thesis is, broadly, “cheap energy from fossil fuels is awesome and climate change isn’t that bad”, weaknesses would be likely to fall somewhere under these, classified in increasing controversy:
- Climate change might be worse than he’s positing. Particularly, climate is a global system we only partly understand, and our error bars for the effects of inadvertently perturbing it may be quite large
- Cheap energy may be obtainable from non-fossil sources. Epstein is keen on nuclear energy (why?), but, as AnthonyC points out, solar & wind are getting surprisingly cheap (for example https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-23/building-new-renewables-cheaper-than-running-fossil-fuel-plants). Obviously that only gives you a bonanza of cheap energy when the wind blows and the sun shines, but “the sometimes-free-energy bonanza will destabilise the grid!” feels a long way from common-sense
- GDP may be possible to decouple from energy use by purely technical means: compare the computation-per-watt-hour of a Pentium with that of an iPad. Compare a Passive-House-standard building with an average building. How far are we from the optimal frontier? There will be, at some point, a limit, because we’re operating with optimal designs and can’t get any better, but we might be quite far from that point - countries with more energy-tight housing often have codes that require that, rather than the market doing it spontaneously? Why is that? Principal-agent problems? “Market for lemons” informational issues?
- GDP may be possible to decouple even further from emissions use via selective lifestyle changes (higher-density cities, more bicycles, fewer automobiles)
- GDP may be argued to be decouple-able from human welfare. Broadly, this is the “degrowth” argument. Critique here, for example (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/people-are-realizing-that-degrowth)
… climate change is not an existential risk… Earth isn't going to become Venus, or anything like that
Last I heard, the big question was what positive-feedback “tipping points” exist, and at what CO2-level they become triggered. This would give quite wide error bars on what average heating is caused by a given quantity of cumulative emissions. If we can burn all the fossil fuels, turn the rainforests to desert, and vaporise all the methane clathrates, and still not end up like Venus, that’s… reassuring, I guess
A town in Norway did it: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170314-the-town-that-built-a-mirror-to-catch-the-sun
(Epistemic status: lyrics)
I’m not too clear about what you just spoke. Is that a parable, or a very subtle joke?
Or to take a stronger example, someone you deeply care about must be alive because you deeply love them, and at the same time you also know for certain that they are dead.
Isn’t this the “denial” psychological defense mechanism, famous for its role in Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief? In the reality the unfortunate thing is true; the impossibility is in the mind of the observer tripping circuit breakers.
(Epistemic status: shitpost)
Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment, but with a large number of trained sheep
Story prompt: overengineered boiler bootstraps self to sentience, discovers climate change, goes on strike
“Pareto efficiency“ - Pareto efficiency, or Pareto optimality, is an economic state where resources cannot be reallocated to make one individual better off without making at least one individual worse off (from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pareto-efficiency.asp)
and “arms race”, if that counts as a nicer way, or some allusion to the Red Queen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race)
Epistemic status: shitpost
Second-Order selection against My Immortal
If you think we‘ve got too much Culture War, vote for people/policies/things that in your opinion will diminish the Culture War (give or take other values, obviously).
(This is a consequentialist argument)
(Epistemic status: earworm)
No-one will have the endurance to claim on his insurance / Lloyd’s of London will be loaded when they go! - Tom Lehrer, “We will all go together when we go”
I’ve yet to delve into it, but RethinkX - a think tank, doubtless with an axe to grind - take similar ingredients and produce a result pointing in the opposite direction: RE is cheap, storage is relatively expensive, so the optimal solution is RE overcapacity with storage filling the gap that remains, and volatile energy prices, often very low, sometimes quite high. A large gas- or coal-fired power plant is not at all optimised for this market, and they don’t advise you to own one. See, for example: https://www.rethinkx.com/energy-lcoe.
I think there are very many moving parts here when dealing with RE intermittency. Grid-scale storage is the obvious one, but there’s also vehicle-to-grid, and all kinds of thermal storage at the point of use (since providing heat and cooling is a major use of electricity, and thermal storage can be cheaper than storing electricity as electricity). Add to that all the principal-agent problems (the landlord owns the HVAC, and the tenant has to grit their teeth and pay for it) and time lags (how long does it take to build a 2GW power plant?)…
The need for backup dispatchable power means that even if RE were free, it would still not be cheaper, because you still have to have the backup dispatchable power stations
This is somewhat true for the capital cost of the backup/dispatchable plant, but not the operating cost, which includes fuel, and any notion of the cost of the emissions (whether via carbon tax, cap and trade, or notional non–financial cost) (and, as far as AGW is concerned, the emissions are the important factor here).
See also: “Preachers who are not believers“ (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470491000800113)
GDP is more of a measure of economic activity than value
Upvoting for this insight.
(Epistemic status: quoting 80s action movie, metaphor)
”Welcome to the party, pal!”
Whales, to use the metaphor used by casinos.
Another aspect: if you built software intended to deliberate on people’s needs and problems and then formulate plans and collect volunteers, the result would look fairly thoroughly not like Facebook. Any system for collating, corralling and organising different opinions and evidence would, also, look not at all like Facebook. You might end up with an argument map[1], or some “garden and the stream”[2] mix of dialogue and accumulated wisdom.
TL;DR: social software intended to avoid or ameliorate the problems we see with Facebook might function very little like Facebook does.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_map
[2] https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/
The way echo chambers work seems to be popularly mis-explained.
How’s it’s explained: everyone you encounter agrees with you
How it actually works: everyone you encounter who you disagree with appears to be insane or evil. Next time you encounter someone who disagrees with you, you expect them to be insane or evil, causing you to act in a way that seems to them to be insane or evil. Iterate.
(Epistemic status: guesswork)
Hypothesis: more addictive may well not actually be more profitable. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if social media engagement was Pareto-distributed, with the most active people quite possibly not the most lucrative customers for advertisers to advertise to. This is immaterial if effectiveness-of-advertising is Goodharted into ”page impressions”, but a pile of Nash Equilibria which only works because multiple parties are Goodharting against noisy proxies can collapse abruptly.
Whether or not this case has merit, the systematic censorship thing seems real to me... when the antivaxxers have a point, the mainstream isn't allowed to admit it
”Social media trying to tackle disinformation with blunt instruments and causing collateral damage” seems to me very much true. Censorship of information about side-effects…? Well, it seems like “the covid vaccine makes you feel terrible 24-48 hours afterwards for some people” seems like common knowledge; I’m sure I’ve been advised after the flu vaccine to stay still & nearby for ten minutes to check I don’t react badly to it. More pointedly, the low-but-detectable-risk-of-blood-clots problems with the adenovirus vaccines resulted in rollout of those vaccines being paused/delayed by some countries for certain demographic groups, and while there was controversy about what was justified (pause vaccine rollout? Only give those vaccines to older people at less risk of blood clots?), “systematic censorship” is not an accurate description of what was happening.
I can't say he just "grew out of it" because a lot of evil people remain evil as adults
”They grew out of it” isn’t invalidated as a phenomenon because it’s success rate is less than 100%!
“They grew out of it” does appear to be what happens to a lot of high-school bullies, from conventional wisdom & personal experience. I believe many petty criminals, also, grow out of it - opportunistic crimes are primarily a young man’s game.
Nominate “statisticians’ duck hunt”, after this joke
Three statisticians go duck hunting. They see a duck and the first statistician shoots, hitting two feet to the left of the duck. The second statistician shoots, hitting two feet to the right of the duck. The third statistician leaps up in joy, yelling, "We got it!"
Guess: people are craving normalcy, and aren’t doing the math.
(Epistemic status: lame pun)
I don't believe 1970 had significant deployment of ... EDM, or probably a bunch of other process I'm forgetting about
It was called “disco” in the 70s
Hm.
What if you read the story as if you were in the 1920s, and less accustomed to short stories peopled by irredeemable spherical bastards than we now are? (Especially in Real Literature, as opposed to, say, sci-fi or MLP fan fiction)
What if you read it using some sort of Christian ethics (souls, redemption) rather than modern consequentialist philosophy (harm to sentient beings)?
What if you read it as if you were a spectacular chauvinist and view the female characters‘ plight as unworthy of consideration?
Highly addictive smartphone game, playable only when the phone detects (gps, accelerometer, Bluetooth beacons) that the player is on a train/bus/tram (Working title: Pokémon Shut The **** Up). Bonus: game becomes unplayable if phone can hear that people are talking. Bonus bonus: synergistic use of conversation detection alongside Bluetooth “exposure notification“.
This is not the bidet I was expecting.
Thank you for the comprehensive answer!
Last Thursday, I realized that none of the people who ever hurt me did it because there was anything fundamentally wrong with me. I don’t mean that as in “realized intellectually”...
Huh.
Ok, maybe this is like reversing advice, but that seems like quite a thing to realise. Even on an intellectual level. Unless “fundamentally” is doing a lot of work. I mean, suppose I got into an argument with a family member where I said something abrasive which they took personally then said something hurtful to me. Is this not about me being abrasive? Is being abrasive not something (fundamentally?) wrong with me?
I think the easiest strategy is to look at those people and groups that are defamed and censored. If you know that establishment gatekeeping doesn't want you looking a particular way then there's bound to be something worth looking at there
That... doesn’t feel super-valuable. For a start, sampling the political opinions of people who regard “the establishment“ as the outgroup is going to disagree very strongly with such ideas as ”We live safe and comfortable lives in a world of great privilege and things are only getting better by the day”.
Other shunned things: alternative medicine? (Vitamin D supplementation is an obvious outlier here, may be very valuable, and is at least cheap and safe).
So if it isn’t ethical to allow the virus to spread, nor is it ethical to lock down your population to stop it, then it’s…
(epistemic status: assuming good faith)
... “test, trace, treat and isolate”?
I’m surprised at these EROI figures: that solar PV is producing energy at very low levalised cost but utterly pathetic EROEI fails the sniff test. A quick scoot through Wikipedia finds a methodological argument (comments on https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544213000492?via%3Dihub).
If you impose a large carbon tax, or other effective global policy of austerity that reduces fossil fuel use without replacing that energy somehow, you're just making the whole world poor
For the case that our civilisation’s energy efficiency is substantially below optimal, see [Factor 4](https://sustainabilitydictionary.com/2006/02/17/factor-4/) (Lovins & Lovins, 1988)
Wearing a mask is vital to preventing Covid-19 infection
I’m wearing a mask because I think they are a reasonable intervention and in the hope that me wearing one encourages other people to wear one. (It sounds like they’re more effective at protecting everyone else than protecting the wearer). I‘m not sure which simulacra level this is (1.1, game theoretic axis?)
estimate the chance of being infected by an infected household member as 30%
Given how contagious this disease seems to be, why is this not higher? Am I misunderstanding what this is measuring? Given you are uninfected, and someone in your household is infected, you have a 1 in 3 chance of contracting Covid?
This may not be entry-level, but Axelrod’s The Evolution of Co-operation might be an enlightening deep/broad dive.
Not sure how relevant this is, but I think it was Lindsay Doe, of Sexplanations, who pointed out how desperately few role models/examples there are of being assertive in negotiating your sexual needs. In fiction it generally happens by authorial fiat. She praised Two Night Stand as a rare exception. You’d think the poly community would have something to say on this. I don’t recall The Ethical Slut having much to say about this.
Fantasy isn’t reality. I’ll happily watch Hugh Laurie playing House, M.D, but I’d like my actual doctor to be a better human (or at least to convincingly pretend to be one)
According to Harvard //www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/if-youve-been-exposed-to-the-coronavirus
We also don't yet know at what point during the course of illness a test becomes positive... you will get a false negative test result [on a swab test] 100% of the time on the day you are exposed to the virus. (There are so few viral particles in your nose or saliva so soon after infection that the test cannot detect them.)... About 40% of the time if you are tested four days after exposure to the virus
So this sounds like, with a smear or swab or saliva test, you’d want to wait up to 4 days after potential exposure, and a false negative remains possible.
I believe I’ve seen elsewhere that the saliva test is comparable to a swab in accuracy, but is more foolproof (because you don’t have to take a sample from your throat).
I think he calls them ”Mediocristan” and “Extremistan” respectively
Verifying that the thing scrubs CO2 at the expected rate is definitely a good idea. Verifying the behavioural effects is much harder - you’d need to avoid unblinding, and ideally have several different people with varying levels of age, fitness etc, and then you’d get affected by weather, unless your house is very well sealed...
How portable can this scrubber be? If you’re somewhere cold and not getting enough air at night and it’s your house, you could install a heat recovery ventilator. There is evidently a big market for portable air conditioners, despite their inefficiency; the description of this thing (water, air, pumps out sludge) sounds a lot like a washing machine.
It's possible that autonomy changes everything, but things somewhat like this have existed or been talked about:
- "Modular cars" have been attempted
- There have been various attempts at swapping the *battery* of an electric vehicle, including by Tesla. (As I understand it, obstacles include: the design advantages of making the battery a structural part of the car chassis; sophisticated battery management that involves "plumbing" the battery into the car's HVAC system). Swapping the battery seems a major move in this direction because the battery is a large amount of the *value* of an electric vehicle. (Conversely: while the vehicle is parked, connect the battery to the electrical grid, and the battery can earn money by arbitraging Watt-hours over time)
- Obviously, such things as RVs and Winnebagos and caravans exist
- Cargo containers (and truck/tractors/semitrailers) are something a bit like this, but for cargo
In my view, one big disadvantage of a privately-owned car is that that car's shape has to work for journeys in town, long road trips, vacations, etc, where actually you might prefer something small or shared in town (like a microcar, bicycle, or transit bus) and something roomier for a long journey (or bigger still if you're travelling with friends & family).