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Good points! I didn't get into 'How do you really calculate the net-societal utility outcome of your actions, including second+ order effects?' since I think even the 1st order immediate consequence calculation is intractable.
In practice you shouldn't ... help people that will do harm with your help. I think this is one of the limits of pacifism(with Kaladin's dad being an example of that, incidentally) at some point passive obedience to an unjust opressor has the same consequences for the other people they harm as active cooperation. It is a moral duty to actually do something to harm or at least minimally help a person or institution or government from doing bad things. Just saying I don't like what this Hitler guy is doing with my tax money isn't really acceptable once the harm he's causing becomes really monstrous. So if I'm really calculating paying 2 personal utility to generate 4 utility for Bob, I should take into account what Bob's actually gonna do with his 4 utility. But again that becomes computationally impossible almost immediately, hence we use heuristics(aka moral principles) to dictate how we should behave.
By politics I mean governance, collective action via voluntary organisations and state action.
The connection seems clear to me: I want to pool resources with others in a way that makes all of us better off. Increasingly elaborate and large scale systems of social coordination is how we do that and that's what modern states are. (for better or for worse and as hijacked by niche, elite special interests as they can seem to be and/or actually are)
As ... disappointing as contemporary western governments are, I still think most 'charity' or utility redistribution in modern societies is done by government via schools, healthcare, pensions, police and other security systems and relatively cheap/free infrastructure. These are all things that were privileges or luxuries in the past that are now baseline and we all pay for them together.
The modern idea is that politics is dirty and gross. And pretty much any politician I can think of off the top of my head is at best disappointing, at worst vile. However, developed societies went from feudal serfdom or slavery or highly unequal large underclass early industrial society to modern social democratic welfare states with a historically relatively high standard of living even for the worst off(or at least for the almost worst off, the really lumpenproletariat among us aren't doing that great, but the people at the bottom 15% threshold are, relatively speaking).
This transformation happened because people, not necessarily professional politicians but some were that as well, pushed for change in an intentional, organised and persistent way. And they got it.
The grossness of modern politicians is a problem that will either be solved by better politicians emerging or will destroy our societies. Crap elites kill civilizations.
Without organised, collective action towards the goal of improving our lives in specific ways, with specific policies ... we won't get the things we want. Society doesn't get better randomly, it gets better because groups of people agitate in a direction they think will make it better and sometimes they get what they want and sometimes what they wanted actually was a good idea.
1. Omega predictors are impossible
They are unstable/impossible not just in practice but in theory as well. It's theoretically not possible for Omega to exist because the decision of 1-2 box is recursive. You're essentially invoking a magical agent that somehow isn't affected by infinite recursion.
"Omega can 'snap' through the infinite recursive loop." No it can't. And if you claim it can you're essentially dropping a nuke inside your logical system that can probably produce all sorts of irrational true=false theorems.
2. Writing on whiteboards, acausal control is just superdeterminism
Brain in a box perfect duplication just implies determinism is true. We are all pure functions of our inputs, if you can perfectly duplicate the context and the function then the outputs will be the same(barring quantum randomness, but I'm assuming we claim that quantum randomness is also not actually random so superdeterministic physics or smth).
It indicates that the experience of choice is illusory. Neither of 'you' are deciding to do anything. You are just running the same computation in multiple duplicated physical locations. See
3. Determinism has 0 informational content. It is meaningless and you shouldn't care about it
Let's say you are faced with a choice: eat a burger or stick to your diet. Well the universe is pre-determined so you might as well eat the burger. Well the universe is pre-determined so you might as well not eat the burger.
There is no informational content in determinism. It's illusory that we make choices... But so what? We can't get an outside perspective over the 4D crystal of the universe we are a part of.
If it helps the wave function of your self to exist happier then just assume that it's predetermined you'll make all the correct, virtuous choices and then obviously you'll make them and that's that.
Didn't seem to work for me. It still seems to get confused trying to match similar words together even when they shouldn't be. Again quite, dumb/young human.
WW3 is a suicide pact. The #1 thing that defines modern Russia is cynical self-interest. Putin won't die for his professed ideals(which he does not believe in anyway). If he gives the order the people around him won't be willing to die and they'll just kill him. I view this all as extreme brinksmanship that will ultimately lead nowhere.
Russia's oligarch billionaires aren't incinerating their Swiss mansions over some dead proles on the Ukrainian front.
Fundamentally wrong mental model, in my opinion. (but upvoted for presenting a well structured one!)
As if saying: "We shouldn't put people in prison because it raises the cost of murder and increases demand to murder."
Violence is a wildfire, not an auction market. Quantity of violence is zero absent a catalyst, once the catalyst is provided it goes up exponentially until it reaches some saturation point at which point it runs out of fuel and collapses again to zero.
Supply and Demand for violence form a positive feedback loop. (+ an activation barrier to get started and a cliff back to nothing at the end, dunno what proper terms would be here)
The measures that can be taken are to raise the cost of starting a war(make the catalyst more expensive) or end the war FAST(overwhelming force on one side).
Half the reason Putin is doing this is because he wasn't slapped hard the first time he went invading Georgia(cheaper catalyst in the future). Arguably, the main reason he felt safe invading Georgia is because the US trampled over international law when they invaded Iraq and lost the moral bully pulpit needed to mobilize the EU for sanctions.
The other half of the reason is he thought Ukraine would fold immediately(he thought he had overwhelming force).
The murder example is actually perfect. A lot of murder is revenge killing. A lot of it is essentially feuding going back decades(you killed my uncle, I'll kill your son etc). Same goes for war. France and Germany had a tit for tat war every few decades relationship for centuries.
The way to break that cycle is by monopolizing violence.
And it actually does break the cycle in that it removes the immediate popular causes for revenge killing or revanchist war. (Not to say that new causes cannot lead to war again, but the relationship between France and Germany is qualitatively different than it was in the last 80 year span of peace between their countries.)
To take this straight to the nuclear winter dark side.
I've been reading a bit about MAD 101 and I hate it. I'm slowly embracing the idea that the most safe thing to do is to be as explicit and precommitted as possible to massive retaliation if red lines are crossed. Emotionally that sounds nuts and I'd like everyone on every side to just spam we're not using the nukes, calm down.
But.
IF people say that and red lines keep getting crossed, at some point Side A thinks they can push one more boundary and get away with it, but Side B decides this is the limit and they press the button.
As such I think, but don't believe if that makes sense, bellicose rhetoric about nukes reduces the risk of nuclear escalation. Implicitly people clamoring for the West to precommit to not using nukes if the Ukrainian war spills out of Ukraine are actually fuzzying Putin's calculus in a very dangerous way.
On a lighter shade of dark note, I definitely think Putin getting away with all of his little salami tactics measures against the West in the past 10 years was why he thought he could get away with Ukraine. If massive sanctions had been issued at any point in the past, it would have never gotten to this point in Ukraine. But then again, the West would have had less justification for the sanctions...
That doesn't seem rational to me, or if it's somehow not irrational on an individual level, makes it a bad idea to model Russia as a rational actor as a whole.
Absent honest, safe, free speech, leadership's map diverges more and more from the territory and then comes crashing back to reality when they drive off a cliff they thought was a highway.
A group of individuals behaving in their own rational self-interest can make very irrational, self-destructive group-level decisions, if the incentives the members have are perverse enough. I guess the idea itself is as old as the book(Moloch style religious arguments have existed since forever) but I somehow never thought about it from the lens of predictability, of being a part of the same consensus reality.
Everyone around Putin was shocked that he went to full war, because they all knew they were lying to him and it would be a disaster. He alone lived in a hall of mirrors. I assume he's smashing a bunch of them as we speak.
These numbers are absurd, in my opinion. 10s of thousands of military dead is massive numbers in a modern context. You cannot compare 1800s warfare to modern war, people literally lined up in a square and shot at each other until half of them were dead/injured back then. And due to crap med tech tons of injured didn't survive. Modern conflicts have MUCH MUCH lower death ratios.
America finished the conquest of Iraq with like 150 dead(granted Iraqi army folded). Over the course of the whole occupation(2003-2011) America lost around 4500 soldiers. If Russia loses like 1000 soldiers before taking over Ukraine that's absolutely brutal resistance.
Iraqi force's losses were much higher, but still not over 20k during the invasion. Keep in mind there WAS a lot of resistance. The invasion took like a month or something, so wasn't just a trivial walk through the country. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War
Yemeni civil war isn't even at 20k yet after 8 years, as far as I can tell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemeni_Civil_War_(2014%E2%80%93present)
I think 20k combined military civilian deaths in the next 2 weeks would be absolutely massive resistance and probably the bloodiest war in decades.
The real question to me is if the Ukrainians are holding all major cities by the end of this week. At that point substantial military aid from the EU will be steadily flowing in through the west and it becomes a lot less clear how Russia makes progress. Mass bombardment of cities... doesn't do anything if people are angry and stubborn enough to keep fighting.
A lot of people keep saying that Putin feels afraid of NATO. I really dislike this meme. Russia has been an imperial aggressor in Eastern Europe(and beyond) for centuries. The belt of countries from the Baltic to the black sea have been the Russian Empire's victims again and again since the 1700s through to the fall of the USSR.
Now that Eastern European countries are joining a defensive alliance suddenly Putin feels threatened?
Why? He has nukes. The end. No one is ever invading Russia. It is just impossible. NATO is not going to invade Russia.
All NATO membership does is make Eastern European countries expensive or impossible to bully. This is what really bothers Putin.
There is nothing an abuser hates more than when their victims can protect themselves. He is not afraid of NATO invading Russia, an absurd idea that again would NEVER happen, because it takes more than the whims of one crazy dictator to trigger a NATO attack.
Putin is afraid that the people he views as his rightful prey and subjects are now able to defend themselves. That's it. He's a predator and he wants his subjects vulnerable.
Don't give him the benefit of the doubt by taking the BS rhetoric about NATO encroachment seriously. As if NATO was bribing and invading countries one by one to get them to join the way he does geopolitics. Pure projection by a psychopath.
I sort of get it and I want to believe it. But it makes no actual sense and that's terrifying. The west would barely care if Putin was doing this in the *stans or Georgia. The only other target to go to after Ukraine is Moldova and then the Baltics.
If he goes in the Baltics that's war with NATO. Nothing about the reaction to Ukraine makes a difference there. It's black and white NATO vs not NATO.
I feel like the most parsimonious explanation is he's not being very rational, rumors about him having terminal cancer are also pushing me towards that belief. It really doesn't seem like anyone on the Russian side saw this coming either, which is extra scary.
I think the EU will have to impose heavy sanctions and deal with a refugee crisis. Given German dependence on Russian gas this could lead to a local/global recession. Hopefully, that's the extent of it.
Disclaimer, am Romanian so biased against Russia's geopolitical agenda(which possibly runs through my country in the long run).
I think short term Ukrainian army folds(how much of it is russophile former soviet officers anyway? arguably same as in a lot of former Eastern bloc countries).
Short term questions
- How big and serious will the insurgency be? I assume civilians are not heavily armed. I assume some organised groups will get some military gear. I assume some western weapons will get smuggled in.
- Who will actually fight it? My very limited knowledge of Ukrainian irregular groups is that they're all neo-nazis(this is partly Russian propaganda, but I don't think it's far off the mark). Presumably some grass-roots upheaval will happen as well, but will all the organizations be run by ultra-nationalists?
- Will the EU bite the bullet and really embargo Russia? Probably not, but also maybe? 10% odds?
- Can Russia actually pacify the huge mountainous region in Western Ukraine, that borders Poland and Romania?
Long term musing
I don't see this stopping with Ukraine. There's a Russian army in Moldova's breakaway, Transnistria. Putin has basically annexed Belarus. It seems like the time for creating enclaves is over and the time for re-consolidating the Russian empire has begun. If Ukraine gets eaten up with little fuss, I have no doubt Georgia is next. After all, why stop?
This can plausibly escalate into annexing Moldova as well. The Baltic states are the first obvious NATO member target.
I don't understand Putin's goal here. He can't absorb Ukraine. A puppet regime installed there would be facing civil war for years. Maybe he just wants a really serious distraction for local purposes? I just can't accept that he has a genuine pseudo-religious belief in shit like http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181 or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics because if he does, we're all in for it.
I guess long-time lurkers/new posters like me are part of the problem(though obviously I assume most online only LW members didn't engage with a California drama post). I still think LW is a great place for discussion and just being exposed to new ideas and good feedback, but I'm probably dragging down the sanity level.
Re fear: I think the SSC situation made it clear that LW and rationalist adjacent spaces are more public than users might think, maybe people are hesitant because they don't want to get twitter blasted or show up as a snap in an NYTimes article two years down the line.
Re concentration of force: I would imagine raw censorship would be really hard and contentious to enforce. Probably attempting to aristocratize/oligarchize the site might work better. Maybe increase the visibility of old-time users and posters, tweak the karma needed to post/vote, highlight high karma account comments over low karma comments.
There must be some blog post somewhere documenting every attempted antidote to Eternal September syndrome to pick and choose from. Disclaimer, norm and law changes have chaotically unpredictable effects on communities, so who knows what the outcome would be.
A democratic version of this is people being more meta in comments and replies, addressing structural concerns with what people are commenting, as you mention in the post rewriting the original comment in a more rigorous/ironman form. Upside, this is a way to acculturate people into the community in an emotionally positive manner, rather than just by punishment. It's also much more legible and learnable than a comment deletion, which might have all sorts of reasons. Downside, this can make actual discussion really difficult and encourages pedantry which can also be taken too far. It also requires some degree of critical mass of users willing to engage in it.
The utopian version of this to me would be people looking at a post or comment they disagree with, suspending their own opinion on it, and attempting to help the commenter improve their argument in the direction the OP was going.
Is the close relation actively killing people? I don't think it's an unreasonable standard to say you should attempt to kill your own child if they're about to go on a spree killing and you definitely have exhausted all other options. I might fail it, but I'd definitely think I was a bad person for it(granted raising a spree killer in the first place is the bigger fault here).
How else are their lives trading so favourably? Organ transfers are pretty 1-1, tho maybe a more general policy encouraging people to donate spare kidneys wouldn't be terrible. Also certainly people have encouraged their kids to go to war and so on, that's a probabilistic sacrifice for the greater good.
Also killing/death tends to be a bit of a utility singularity so even the clumsy math of regular mode utilitarianism breaks down. How much utility do I lose by killing my child? Possibly infinite? Like I'm probably going to kill myself afterwards, surely that counts as a singularity.
Would I encourage myself or a relative to donate a kidney to save a life? Eh. Maybe, again there's potential of death when donating an organ, so singularity type stuff slips in maybe.
Just because singularities exist in certain conditions of a theory doesn't mean it's unusable in finite number cases.
No because of the things I say in Claim 3. Like. If I were to do it alone, that would sort of be fine. But if everyone were to live that way, everyone would be miserable(something something Kant's categorical imperative, what if everyone adopted this behaviour, would that work?).
I guess, there's a difference between what is utility maximising for an individual to do in a given society, and what is a utility maximising way for individuals to behave in an ideal society.
Like society should be such that Claim 3 is all you need, localized responsibility + government redistribution.
The internal Ideal Observer is the amalgamated averaged out result of interactions with the world and other people alive and dead. Human beings don't come from the orangutan branch of the primate tree, we are fundamentally biologically not solitary creatures.
Our ecological niche depends on our ability to coordinate at a scale comparable to ants, but while maintaining the individual decision making autonomy of mammals.
We're not a hive mind and we're not atomized individuals. We do and should constantly be balancing ourselves based on the feedback we get from physical reality and the social reality we live in.
Is the Ideal Observer the thing doing that balancing? Sure. But then it becomes a very reduced sort of entity, kinda like science keeps reducing the space where the god of the gaps can hide.
There's an inner utility function spitting out pleasure and pain based on stimuli, but I wouldn't call that me, there's a bit more flesh around me than just that nugget of calculation.
I agree, sort of. I'd argue that in the military example there is already a plan that includes consultation phases on purpose. The rules of engagement explicitly require a slow step. I don't know if this applies in genuinely surprising situations. A sort of known unknown vs unknown unknown distinction. I guess you can have a meta policy of always pausing ANY time something unexpected happens, but I feel like that's... hard to live(or even survive) with? Speeding car coming towards me or a kid in the road. Just act, no time to think. In fairness, this is why you prepare and preplan for likely emergency events you might encounter in life.
Regarding the direct example
I feel like it's self-subverting. There's an old canard about https://www.watersafetymagazine.com/drowning-doesnt-look-like-drowning/ Given how staggeringly disproportionate the utility losses are in this scenario I think even a 1% chance of my assumption that 'I have 15 seconds to undress' would lead to death means I should act immediately.
In general when thinking about superfast reflex decisions vs thought out decisions: Obey the reflex unless your ability to estimate the probabilities involved has really low margins of error. My gut says X but my slow, super weak priors-that-have-never-been-adjusted-by-real-world-experience-about-this-first-time-in-my-life-situation say Y... Yeah just go with X. Reflect on the outcome later and maybe come up with a Z that should have been the gut/reflex response.
There's an old video game Starcraft 2 advice from Day9 that's surprisingly applicable in life: Plan your game before the game, in game follow the plan even if it seems like it's failing, after the game review and adjust your plan. Never plan during the game, speed is of the essence and the loss of micro and macro speed will cost you more than a bad plan executed well.
Don't plan during a crisis moment where you have seconds to react correctly. Do. Then later on train yourself to have better reflexes. Applicable when socializing, doing anything physical, in week 1 of a software development 2 week sprint etc.
Regarding the more general point of people having ... self-consistent utility functions/preferences
I fundamentally disagree that you shouldn't criticize someone for their utility function. An individual's utility function should include reasonably low-discount approximations of the utility functions of people around them. This is what morality tries to approximate. People that seem to not integrate my preferences into their own signal danger to me. How irrelevant is my welfare in their calculations? How much of my utility would they destroy for how small a gain in their own utility?
People strongly committed to non-violence and so on are an edge case, but I'd feel much more comfortable with someone not in control over their own utility function than someone that is in control, based on the people I have encountered in life so far.
How intrusively should people integrate each other's preferences? How much should we police other individual's exchange rate from personal utils to other people utils? No good answer, it varies over time and societies.
Society is an iron maiden, shaped around the general opinion about what the right action is in a given scenario. Shame is when we decide something that we know others will judge us badly for. Guilt is when we've internalized that shame.
The art of a good society is designing an iron maiden that most people don't even notice.
It seems irrational to me to not internalize the social moral code to some extent into my individual utility function. (It happens anyway, might as well do it consciously so I can at least reject some of the rules) If the social order is not to my taste, try and leave or change it. But just ignoring it makes no sense.
I'd also argue that the vast majority of preferences in our, so-called, 'personal' utility function are just bits and bobs picked up from the societal example palette we observed as we grew up.
People's utility functions also include components for the type of iron maiden they want their society to build around other members. I want to be able to make assumptions about the likely outcomes of meeting a random other person. Will they try to rob me? If I'm in trouble will they help me? If my kid is playing outside unsupervised by me, but there's always random people walking by, can I trust that any of them will take reasonably care of the child if the kid ends up in trouble?
I strongly do not want to live in a society that doesn't match my preferred answers on those and other critical questions.
I absolutely do not want to live in a society that has no iron maiden built at all. That is just mad max world. I can make no reasonable assumption about what might happen when I cross paths with another person. When people are faced with situations of moral anarchy, they spontaneously band together, bang out some rules and carve out an area of the wilderness where they enforce their rules.
Of course :D
There's a strain of thought that would say price allocation of society's production itself is only ethical when everyone has the same amount of money, but that's a whole other can of worms.
To treacherously switch sides to the pro-price gouging side:
The obvious solution is for shops to jack up prices as soon as an emergency situation occurs, thereby taking the wind out of speculators' sails. Now businesses are not going to want to do this, since it'll ruin their reputation with customers for minor short term gain.
So the actual solution is for the government to mandate price-gouging in emergency situations, this way businesses can do it, without having to bear the public opinion penalty.
If an area is declared a public disaster area, all shops are obligated to immediately implement scarcity prices. Scarcity prices work like this: as the stock of an item goes down, the price goes up by 100% of base cost for every 1% of missing stock. So by the time you only have 90% of toilet paper left in store, you're already paying 10 * base cost for it.
Of course private citizens are also allowed to come in and sell whatever they want.
I'm not sure what incentive this creates for shop owners, like maybe they want to not bring stocks back up to normal, but whatever, I'm sure it'll work out.
Modern society gives people too much incentive to live in floodable/hurricanable/earthquakable areas anyway, a bit more spice in their lives would shift populations to more reasonable regions to live in so it's all good either way.
Triple prices or empty shelves is a false dichotomy.
Everyone gets the supply and demand curve. That's not the point. Society exists to counter-balance natural bad luck not to amplify it. Social policies that make a disaster even more disastrous for an individual are going to produce rage. Your house got flooded, you have no heat or electricity, you really need some oil for your generator and now that oil is 10 times more expensive.
I get that price signals are a good way to coordinate everyone in a community consuming less of a good, but people will fundamentally dislike it because it makes a bad situation worse for an individual.
Also the actual reasons economists are against price gouging are hilariously theoretical universe of frictionless spheres type arguments. Supply chains can take ages to react to price changes even in situations where there is no government boogie man tweaking things. Just look at the microchip supply crisis.
The actual solution to these issues is having effective emergency supply delivery handled by the government. The whole price gouging conversation is societal bike shedding. Modern governments can and do provide emergency aid almost in real time as disasters happen. If X developed world government lacks that capability, smack'em at the ballot box and tell the next crew to copy whatever the other dozens of countries are successfully doing in that department.
Given that they said we'll spend the money on the NHS instead of on EU, I don't see how that was what Cummings campaign implied.
http://www.voteleavetakecontrol.org/leave_ministers_commit_to_maintain_eu_funding.html
Thirteen Government ministers and senior Conservatives have today committed that every region, group and recipient of EU funding will continue to get that money after a ‘Leave’ vote in the EU referendum. In an open letter, the signatories - who include Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Priti Patel - assure those people and organisations who currently receive money from the European Union that their funding is safe if we Vote Leave.
In the letter they say:
‘There is more than enough money to ensure that those who now get funding from the EU - including universities, scientists, family farmers, regional funds, cultural organisations and others - will continue to do so while also ensuring that we save money that can be spent on our priorities.
‘If the public votes to leave on 23 June, we will continue to fund EU programmes in the UK until 2020, or up to the date when the EU is due to conclude individual programmes if that is earlier than 2020.
‘We will also be able to spend the money much more effectively. For example, some of the bureaucracy around payments to farmers is very damaging and can be scrapped once we take back control.’
The cynic in me finds turkeys voting for christmas endlessly entertaining, but this sort of blatant lying is why western societies' trust in government is evaporating.
There's no point to have farming subsidies for pig farmers. In a society where people on average eat too much meat, pork should cost at the supermarket the economic price it costs to produce pork and not less because of government subsidies. Brexit allowed to get rid of bad policy like that.
"Farm subsidies are bad" is literally the type of elitist white collar values attitude that vote leave campaigned against. They tricked tons of working class people to vote for them under the assumption that the tory party would then take care of them. And of course because labour and the lib dems haven't represented the working class since the Blair era.
Oh but they said 'we can' not 'we will'. This isn't a court of law. What was implied is very clear.
Rhetoric about Project Fear was meant to explicitly make all warnings about brexit downsides seem ridiculous and overblown. And tons of people actually believed that they would kinda sorta trundle along and be ok. Well, most of us are gonna be ok, but some turkeys definitely got plucked hard.
Cummings' accomplishments are kinda pathetic, actually? He was associated with the successful Brexit effort. OK. So were lots of other people. Cameron was lukewarm on remain and Labour was basically pro-brexit but couldn't talk about it. In retrospect it's not that shocking Remain lost when neither major party was fully campaigning for it. Also this is literally his only meaningful accomplishment.
Then he later gets into government as Johnson's fixer, which given that Johnson is averse to actual work means he can basically do whatever he wants. He then fails to dark arts manipulate anyone at a high level and leaves government having done basically nothing.
Now he's back to being a blogger, nerdsniping rationalists. He's basically mental viral noise and the #1 source of my self-confidence lowering updates.
I read his stuff and it sounds good. Then his results are atrocious. Maybe my instincts suck.
Also "Oh the Brexit campaign didn't lie to people as much as Remain", this is delusional. Voting for brexit is polling at 36%(https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/daily-mail-buries-poll-showing-voters-have-turned-against-brexit-295935/) at this point. Tons of examples of business sectors/voting groups who believed the promises that they wouldn't get shafted that did get shafted
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/brexiteer-farmer-vote-leave-eu-uk-patriotic-295861/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-leave-british-fisherman-eu-b1834389.html
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-49742567
People thought the tory government would replace the EU development funds to poor regions. Yeah, about that, not they didn't https://www.ft.com/content/56b8c767-0b79-4221-8c33-a10a4705224e
He was part of a campaign that lied to people. People then got financially hurt as a result.
Whatever the long term impacts of brexit(and I'm open to the possibility that it'll turn out well), it was sold actively and intentionally by lying to the people it would most severely impact about the cost of the policy.
I really liked the post, but I couldn't help ironmanning the so-called fabricated options at every step. Documented below, read at your own peril(or most likely skip the wall of text).
Example 1
Every time price gouging is brought up online, I see it strawmanned. The proper ironman is something like anti-bank run measures.
Price gouging measures are meant to ... solve a coordination problem. Supply is ... not necessarily as limited as people might think, if everyone just kept consuming at the same rate or even slightly reduced consumption but not to a self-harming degree, we'd make due.
But in a tragedy of the commons/prisoners dilemma style we expect everyone to defect so we all defect. Withdrawal limits and various other mechanisms exist to prevent bank runs, because these sorts of things can be positive feedback loops otherwise. Everyone thinks toilet roll is gonna run out and so they wanna stock up for the whole year today ... well yeah, the supply chain is unchanged but it's expecting smooth consumption not mass psychosis.
Then you have the clowns that are buying up sanitizer or toilet roll anticipating that they'll be able to resell it on ebay later.
I think a lot of people hate ... price changing because of the investment value of a good rather than it's use value, ie. people buying houses to hold and resell, rather than to live in them. It's a potentially endless positive feedback loop making the underlying good unusable for practical purposes. See also the cost of using gold or diamond for industrial purposes.
But the market will just make more of house/gold/diamonds! Well, like, the whole reason why these goods are investments in the first place is because it is not market feasible to endlessly boost supply. It's shocking that housing bubble apologists(talk about straw manning my opponents :D) ignore the rationality of the people purchasing houses as investments. You'd think they'd worry about the supply getting flooded and ruining them! Oh...
Price gouging done by actual corporates(ie. all supermarkets in an area agree to triple prices during a supply disruption) ends up looking like monopoly / oligopoly / market capture pricing. Look at the telecom situation in the US, where most people have access to one provider. Eh, it's complicated.
Also you get unlucky and an earthquake destroys your house. Now we'll double up that bad luck by making everything super expensive for you. Society is about the opposite of that. But then the government is the only entity that can do disaster response. Well. Yeah.
Example 2
There's a cynical joke about pro-life people really loving unborn babies, but not being so hot on social policies for actual born babies. But realistically, I'd expect a lot of pro-life people to also be opposed to free healthcare for expecting mothers, so really they just hate the idea of fetuses dying on purpose, as opposed to due to societal neglect and poverty.
Stepping back from politi-tribal jokes. The real debate for most people is probably about what stage should elective abortion be banned and what should be done in edge cases where the life of the mother is at risk and a medical late-term abortion is needed to protect her(which again, is pretty rare). Vast majority won't oppose first month abortion and won't support randomly for no medical reason deciding to abort a baby in the 8th month of pregnancy.
Example 3
I mean, how do you know? If there is a clear cyclical pattern, maybe you expect it to last forever... But people age and change naturally anyway. I've seen myself and my people in my friend group pretty ruthlessly cut out crap parts of our behaviours/personalities as we entered our 30s and started feeling what it would mean to carry those anchors around our necks for the long haul. Growing up is a real thing, lots of people do it, surely?
But it's a mental health thing, not just growing up, etc. Eh? Not enough details, but it could just be shitty mood management. Is it something that requires chemical treatment? Is it something that can be controlled by will power? That being said, it's probably something a professional psychiatrist should advise on, rather than random friends or even(and perhaps especially) the person in the relationship.
Example 4
It's 100% true that not having block lists is not acceptable, but block lists taken to an extreme are also unacceptable in a much more insidious difficult to explain way.
People who are trapped in cultish group think always think they are persecuted and perfectly legitimate to be cultish. Mainstream society's social bubble thinks some cults are legitimate and some are not.
The real victims, usually, are the cult members. Being in a cult-bubble is harmful to the members because they become more and more isolated from the common memespace and thus are increasingly harmed on the rare occasions when some normie meme penetrates their bubble.
Self-isolation continually increases fragility and vulnerability. Once you start self-isolating, there is no clear point at which it becomes easy to rejoin the common environment.
Conversely, I don't want to spend every day being exposed to abuse or people coughing in my face. And beyond some level of stress, your mental or physical immune systems aren't actually getting stronger due to exposure, they're being ground down.
I think block lists are necessary, but every time I mute/block someone I feel a bit worried that I'm building a wall of mirrors around my mind.
The actual healthy alternative is spending time in the real world with people that care about you more or less regardless of what dumb opinions you have and realizing that it doesn't matter if you dislike X-people in the abstract as long as you are decent with X-people that you actually know. Also everyone spend less time thinking about (and virtually arguing with) straw Bad people and just interact with regular meat people.
Our only hope is irrational empathy and cognitive dissonance.
Example 5
Kids are ephemeral idiots. Who cares what 5-year old me wanted. That dumbass was dead by the time I hit 7. Parents think their kid would thank them later for X, because the parent would have thanked their own parent for X. I would have thanked my parents for a whole bunch of Xs that at the time I would have hated(god, why didn't they force me to exercise more and take those dance lessons when I was like 8-10... I didn't even whine that much about it and it would've made my teens so much better).
Really young kids are not actually the people you should care about. The person you should care about is their twenty something incarnation, since that's probably around when their personality stabilizes. At least that's what it was like for me. 16 year old me was a moron. 25 year old me was sort of figuring things out. I'd hope 40 year old me looks at present me with some measure of tolerance and perhaps even gratitude.
Under no circumstance should a parent favor their 10-year old, who won't meaningfully exist in 3 years time, over their 20-year old, whose gonna be around for decades as a reasonably stable entity. Of course, the real problem is that predicting the future is hard and you can think that you're setting the kid up for success but aren't actually.
Also it's true that the child shouldn't form a continuous and stable over time impression of the parent as an enemy. Like, throw them some bones and as they enter their teenage and especially late teenage years give them increasing autonomy, since they'll need to practice that with the parental safety net before entering adulthood. That being said, lots of parents are super future focused with their kids and lots of those kids turn out well and drag their family up the class structure of their society. I'm emotionally predisposed to suggest a happy medium is the place to be, but I don't know if rationally that's even true. Certainly don't push the kid to a mental breakdown, though.
(Disclaimer, I mostly agree with your perspective on the world, though I do think ... public perception is pulling the fabric of (some) developed societies apart at an alarming rate. Part of the core cause: reforms to the system don't mean collapse into socialism or anarchy, nor are massive upheavals needed to address lots of present day complaints people have. But reformism is so unfashionable these days :/ )
I see 'debates' like this and they really trigger my solipsism. Every modern society is a mixed system of some capitalist competition with various social safety nets and regulations.
"Capitalism" isn't good or bad, it's a tool in the societal design kit. Every country on earth tweaks it to their needs, nobody's doing like anarcho-capitalism or any sort of purist implementation(at least not anymore, though I'd argue, not in the past either).
Yes, tweaking the innate game-theoretic flows of the capitalist economy has some amount of unintended, or at least surprising side-effects. But it's not like, oh we banned heroin and child labour and now everyone in our society is growing an extra head due to a hilarious Rube Goldberg series of events. Woe is us, Our Lord and Saviour Capitalism is such a fickle beast sometimes! Time to toss more children into the coal mine pyres to appease it.
Answering, for instance, "Let's ban gambling elements in video games!" with "But capitalism" makes no sense, when all sorts of other substances and activities are successfully regulated. The complexity is not actually infinite, and as various countries experiment with regulations, lessons can be learned about which slippery slopes are dangerous and which are not.
Government officials claiming "oh that's far beyond our ability to do" when asked to help with some societal ill also reeks of "x-party member believe the government is incompetent and then get elected and prove it". I don't understand why Americans put up with, "Government can't help with Y-thing-that-dozens-of-other-countries'-governments-do-without-much-fuss"-rhetoric from PEOPLE WHO ARE THE GOVERNMENT. Like, do your jobs, you jerks!
On the other side absurdist anarchist thinking at the level of, "we can't get paid parental leave without violent overthrow of the capitalist economy" are also insane.
These threads are so soothing to me these days. A reminder that most of the world is basically out of the literal mass death phase and just back into the politicians are long-term harmful, short-term irrelevant phase of life.
America's not spicy enough, but don't worry I've got Romania and Bulgaria taking another swing at unintentional herd immunity:
Look at that gorgeous vertical. "But it's OK, like everyone there is vaccinated by now, right?"
"But it's OK the governments are gonna lockdown and take control." Yeah, no nobody cares. Restaurants are as packed as the morgues.
There's a ritual in Romania where old people go and kiss a chest containing the bones of a saint. They queue up in big disorganised nose to nose crowds for it. Fortunately this year only a third of the usual number seems to be showing up. So like 15k+ instead of 50k+.
Yeah.
On the plus side literally anyone can get any vaccine and all my elderly family/friends have their boosters done. If you want a 3rd, 4th, 100th dose, just pop over, there's a vaccination centre at the airport, non-citizens welcome. Not really any queues. Everyone already knows the PLANdemic is a Bill Gates plot to sterilise bat populations around the world.
Please send help, someone shut down facebook for good this time.
"But it's not really facebook that's the problem, right?" Here's a flyer being handed out at a protest against lockdowns in a major city like a few days ago:
Some people can't handle the internet.
I think this still undersells the mutative capacity of an institution. You're worried about a fairly obvious abstraction that puts you in their target group. But institutions are living organisms, not evolving logical rulesets and can mutate much more radically.
The organisation is basically training hammers and those hammers will keep looking for nails. This is why means vs ends debates are so central to morality. Humans and organisations are 99% defined by what they do, not why they do it. You might do a terrible what for a good why, but once you achieve your initial goal you'll be looking for other reasons to keep doing the terrible what that you're now an efficient professional at doing.
I'm still so confused(through no fault of your own, I think you're right, it just doesn't fit in my head). Let me try to walk through my thought process.
I assume heritability of SAT score is probably different if you sample across USA, or just upper-mid class suburbs or just South Side Chicago, or just rural Eastern Europe, or just Malawi during a famine. Right? Given that environments are pretty radically different.
What heritability score are we using to determine if policy interventions matter or not? Is the first step to make sure that the region we want to improve has an environment that mimics 'successful' regions? Heritability would be very high in a homogenous environment(since that's the only variation), but it goes down as more varied environments are added to the sample. Heritability is very high if we just look at rich area USA schools, lower if you sample all USA and even lower if we sample the whole world?
Also how is this linked to amplitude of effect? Super high heritability of SAT/IQ in say homogenous Denmark, but presumably the actual variation in scores is lower than in a global sample. Is there a way to say genetics account for +/- 5 points of IQ? So if you're measuring IQs of 95-105 in your area that's probably all genetic effects and policy interventions can't do much?
Edit. I realize now that this is mostly Insub's point below, but less coherent.
But isn't this exactly the mainstream intuition that the OP dissolves? My understanding:
a) Heritability measures don't seem to make sense for really complex traits like intelligence.
b) Heritability measures are not stable outside the environmental conditions in which they were measured.
For instance, some people have sickle cell anemia, which helps them better survive malaria(but otherwise is slightly harmful). If you measure heritability of infant mortality in environment with malaria and then in environment without malaria you get opposite effects. You get a lighter case of malaria with it, so sickle cell probably positively correlates with intelligence if there's malaria in the environment.
There's also weird epigenetic multigenerational effects: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07617-9 (quote is about a reference in this study)
The findings from the Överkalix cohorts imply that grandparental access to food during their slow growth period can modify diabetes and all-cause mortality in grandchildren. Cardiovascular mortality on the other hand was associated with parental, but not grandparental, nutritional experience. The authors interpret their results11 as “proof-of-principle that a sex-specific male-line transgenerational effect exists in humans”, which they consider likely to be epigenetic rather than genetic, cultural or social. A summary of the Överkalix findings is available in19. Their findings have been discussed in renowned peer-reviewed journals20,21,22,23,24 and are cited over 2,000 times (October 2018).
I have this vague memory about reading an article claiming that grandparents' access to food influenced their grandchildren's height, moreso than their immediate childrens', but I can't seem to find it. Perhaps nonsense.
Re free speech: Social media is an existential problem to our civilization. The chinese solution of mass censorship, that the west seems to be outsourcing to private corporations' dumb algorithms, is not my preferred solution, but I honestly don't know if it's worse than the status quo.
The amount of misinformation I see forwarded even on my family whatsapp group is awful. Not even the older members of the family really buy it, but it definitely contributes to cynicism. Then there's the Q horror stories, crazy conspiracy crap and so on. This is not sustainable, society can't function with constant disruptive weaponized propaganda being thrown at us.
Maybe the Taiwan strategy of having an official government meme police that doesn't ban fake news, but sends out official responses to it very quickly can work. Maybe not. I feel like the US government, for instance, doesn't have the popular trust that the Taiwanese government has to pull something like this off.
I'm terrified by the idea of serious mass censorship, but misinformation is tearing apart western democracy. Maybe I'm being overly dramatic, maybe us younger people are more resilient. Then again, zoomer/milennial online mobs for dubious causes spring up all the time as well. I think it's wishful thinking for younger folk to say fake news is just a boomer problem.
Something needs to happen. The truth is not beating falsehood by a wide enough margin(or sometimes at all!). Dismissing this as just 1984 ministry of truth memes is silly. Anti-vaxx shit alone has probably killed tens of thousands of people. Stupid Q conspiracies led people to storm the capitol in the US. This is only going to get more severe as time goes on.
If we don't want the world to adopt China's model, we need to be very serious about creating an alternative.
Ooh, this is a fun theory. Possibly causality reversed? Adam Smith's old doozy is "the degree of specialization is limited by the extent of the market" or something like that. If the empire is collapsing and trade becoming more difficult practices switch to more local economies. Some products require a certain scale of market to be viable. Feudal Western Europe was quite fragmented, 100 different toll gates as you went down the Rhine and whatnot, so trade was very reduced, extent of market low and so specialization low and so capital requirements for production had to be low.
Stone quarries could be abandoned because there was tons of stone available for reuse and the current owners didn't care about civic pride the way the old ones did(can't afford to care about it when you're fighting for your life). Feudal/medieval monumental construction meant castles and cathedrals, not bath houses.
Roof tiles as compared to straw roofs, ceramic amphorae compared to wooden barrels, cremation compared to burial, the use of glass, even the toga seems to have required extensively boiled wool
These are Mediterranean things, as the Western Empire is taken over by Germanic people's why would Gaul preserve these building styles.
For amphorae: what is the dominant mode of transport? Barrels will survive land transport in a more localized economy a lot better. How much capital does barrel production vs amphorae production require. If the economy is more village centered maybe clay-related production becomes uneconomical.
My opinion: chain mail is better than Lorica segmentata, but more expensive to make(require more iron actually, is heavier, better protection, better maintenance since a segmentata you just have to scrap if it cracks, way more manual labour to produce). It's not really clear why the segmentata was used in the ~50BC-300AD period. Maybe it was just cheaper to mass produce. By the time lorica hamata(the chain) production caught up they abandoned the segmentata.
Also related to market size: if you had to buy armour for yourself you'd buy hamata, since it'd be way more maintainable, and generally better protection and mobility. Well oiled and maintained you could probably pass it on to your son or resell it. The segmentata is much more of an industrial army's armour, it needs to be fit much better to the individual and any puncture requires a professional to replace the segment.
I agree, but keep in mind just the city itself was like twice the size in the later period. Population wise 2nd Punic war Rome was around 3-500k, 410 Rome was around 8-900k. Presumably the greater southern Italian region was also way more populous, tho also less able/interested in coming to the city's aid.
Different comparison: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7v15js/why_was_roman_military_so_small_during_the/ Late Roman armies were crippled by a loss of 75k men, despite similar losses being overcome by just Rome's Southern Italian coalition centuries earlier.
Synthetic 'civilization' scores are unavoidably subjective
Just to be clear, the Ian Morris graph is Western Eurasia vs Eastern Eurasia(since it can't be Western Europe vs colloquial East, as Western Europe was a backwater pre-Rome)? I'm very skeptical of these historical score approaches, they obscure more than they enlighten and depending on how actual data is weighted the author can come up with any conclusion they want.
For instance, why wouldn't population density be the defining characteristic of a successful society(higher energy density, more efficient use of space, all sorts of engineering style arguments favour that)? China would utterly dominate Western Eurasia in that model. I don't necessarily prefer that metric, I'm just pointing out synthesized metrics are very subjective though of course they have pop-history appeal.
Pet theory: Rome collapsed because all the greedy farmer soldiers became serfs
The fall of (Western) Rome has been the subject of 15 centuries of scholarship, so I'll just toss my personal favourite single cause to rule them all(it wasn't just one cause, it was multifactor but whatever): the collapse of the small-scale citizen farmers and the rise of the latifundia and the general demilitarization of roman citizens.
Disclaimer: the Romans were the historical villains of the region, in my opinion, I'm not glorifying them or their society.
The key contrast: Hannibal killed >100,000(?) roman soldiers while in Italy, yet never felt able to besiege the city. His army was maybe 100,000 strong. In 410 Alaric takes Rome with ~40,000 soldiers, despite the city being larger than the one that faced Hannibal, with no resistance worth mentioning.
The problem is the composition of Roman society had changed.
Growing Rome was a society where most fighting age males knew a bit of how to fight and could be drafted and would answer the draft out of patriotism/religious/civic devotion or greed. Late Rome was a society where a lot of people were coloni(proto-serfs) or fully slaves. They were purposefully not allowed to fight since their owners were afraid those skills might be turned against them. Late Roman society also wasn't expanding => the wars being fought wouldn't result in plunder => the incentive for citizens to join the army was greatly reduced.
Early Roman soldiers had arguably unlimited upside, conquer some rich city or tribe and your share of the loot leaves you set for life. Late Roman soldiers just had a salary and much more competent enemies.
There were tons of rich land owners in the Italian peninsula, tons of people? How could the city fall to a mere 40,000 soldiers? No one really cared to defend it. The latifundiaries made their own deals with the 'barbarians', not caring about the fact that their families would slowly lose control of the land over the coming centuries. The religious(?) obsession with long-term legacy of the Republic and early empire were gone, the men of the Late west were short term focused. Early Rome elites cared about their prestige in Roman society, they saw themselves as part of the population of one city, at the end of the day they'd fight together against external societies. Late Roman elites had their wealth and power in the provinces and didn't see other latifundiaries as part of their in-group and worth fighting along with.
Plot twist: the latifundia grew because the farmer soldiers were too successful and wouldn't stop
The reason the latifundia grew and the old Roman system collapsed was the very success of the old Roman system flooding Italy with slaves and money and allowing elites to buy out small landholders. Furthermore a good reason for the Roman state to allow this process to happen was that the old get rich quick Roman war strategy ended up being used against Rome itself as Imperial pretenders persuaded our heroic yeomen farmer soldiers to turn arms against the state(since there wasn't much worth conquering outside the borders). Damned if you do damned if you don't.
Just for fun: modern democracies fuse roman legalese, revived roman civic religion, dying christian feudal ideas of obedience to authority and feudal cultural practices for peacefully transferring power
Epistemic status, wild fun speculation.
I'd argue that Western Europe continued evolving culturally and politically after Western Rome collapsed. The key technology that developed in Western Europe was the (comparatively) peaceful transfer of power from one monarch to another upon death, without lobotomizing the monarch and replacing him with a weaselly bureaucracy the way the Ottomans/Chinese harem systems solved the endless succession civil war problem.
The ability to ACTUALLY transfer power, as opposed to sidestepping the succession by having real power embodied in a constantly regenerating collection of people is the enabling cultural technology for modern republican democracies. Better put: both elite and popular culture expects a peaceful, legally codified transfer of power. It's this ingrained instinct that's valuable and is essential(and can be lost, as Republican Rome lost it and Imperial Rome never acquired it in the West), rather than the formal rules for how you transfer power.
That and Europe's weird obsession with separating the person of the king from the institution of the monarch(see Britain's linguistic weirdness around King/Queen-in-parliament, possibly related to Christian weirdness around the Trinity, maybe the religious mental calisthenics got applied to political ideas as well) creates a neat interface where you can cleanly replace a monarchy with an elected government and it sort of all just works the same in the minds of everyone involved.
I have a shallow read a few posts about it overview of the post-rationality vs rationality debate, but to me it just seems like a semantic debate.
Camp "post-rationalism isn't a thing" argues that rationality is the art of winning. Therefore any methods that camp "post-rationalism" uses that work better than a similar method used by people in camp "post-rationalism isn't a thing" is the correct method for all rationalists to use.
The rationalist definition is sort of recursive. If you live the ideology correctly than you should replace worse methods with better ones. If it turns out that bayesian thinking doesn't produce good(or better than some alternative) results, rationalist dogma says to ditch bayesianism for the new hotness.
Taken to an extreme: in a brute survival context a lot of the current ... aesthetics or surface level features of rationalism might have to be abandoned in favour of violence, since that is what survival/winning demands.
But it can't be that simple or there wouldn't be a debate so what am I missing?
I need to read that Huemer book, it sounds very interesting from what you've quoted in this and the other thread here.
You're right, I am being unfair to the actual philosophy. I have a negative emotional reaction to the political movement that uses the name. I have quite a lot of ... sympathy(?) for the actual philosophical movements' conclusions, however I still think it collapses to being a bunch of heuristics on top of utilitarian arguments in the end. Also I think objectivism(libertarianisms' radical grandkid(?)) is ... evil? Not utilitarian compatible, at least.
I feel like you side stepped the core issue in the party analogy: if I/we/the state can't restrict access to our property because someone might die without it ... that kinda means we can't restrict access to our property almost at all. Is anyone dying in the world of a preventable disease? Clearly the state isn't providing enough healthcare access or private healthcare providers are immorally restricting access to care.
The actual criticism then goes back to: States do not have legitimate claims for their property. I realize you address this in:
Second, it is perfectly consistent to argue for property rights in the abstract while holding that most actual claims to property in the real world are illegitimate.
But there's no legitimate property if analyzed on a long enough time horizon. At some point some primitive human bashed some other human in the head and every one of us is the infinitesimal beneficiary of that crime. Hence Christian redemption and baptism, actual legal code statutes of limitations, moral principles that only active purposeful harm is morally bad and all sorts of other coping mechanisms civilizations have developed over the ages. The alternative is literally eternal blood feuds or wars that can only end in complete annihilation of one of the factions.
The question then becomes why don't these coping mechanisms apply to states, but apply to every other human organisation? What makes state ownership illegitimate, but corporate ownership built on top of government contracts legitimate? At what degree of indirection does the sin wash off? What about children of employees of companies that sold goods to slavers?
Yes, it's consistent to argue for property rights while recognizing the illegitimacy of current property allocation... but the only moral remedy for that(if taken as a serious axiomatic moral principle) is some sort of tabula rasa society, which would obviously be crazy utility destroying and nobody supports. Ok, Bakunin et al, but come on.
I don't think libertarian principles have something unique and practical to say about where to draw the line when it comes to 'tainted' ownership rights. Even in that Nozick quote: why are we stopping with the USA? What about even more ancient history in Europe, or indeed North America. Obviously an absurd rabbit hole. We stop when there are still living descendants that are angry about this issue... well if you start providing a monetary incentive for grievance you're going to find a lot of historical grievance. Hell, looking outside the US bubble there's plenty of historical grievance globally right now everywhere.
Hopeless attempt at clarity
Trying to clarify my criticism for myself as well: libertarianism seems to present axiomatic moral principles, commandments that if unbroken will produce a just society. In practice, even philosophers treat the axioms more like heuristics layered on top of utilitarianism: "You mustn't violate private property rights ... unless you have good reason for it. Property should be justly acquired but if enough time has passed we gotta move on and get things done." Well, ok, so what does this actually produce for us?
Government should do useful things with tax money. Unironically revolutionary idea in Locke's time, but this stuff is in the water like flouride in the modern era. And going full circle, actual political movements that use the label seem built around objectivists, in that they're willing to say: the principle is more important than the utilitarian outcome of its application. Taxation is bad even if it helps people. Except, of course, modern political movements are awful and don't say that in public, that's just for the inner circle. In public they just lie(in my opinion) and claim that all government activity is net utility desroying.
Before I go off on a rant about "taxation is theft", I want to respond to the actual theme of the post: the fallacy depends on your metric(?) function(not sure what the term is). How do you graph types of events, how do you determine proximity?
For instance, are micro-aggressions just as bad as physical violence? Or at least should we attempt to prevent them with similar amounts of force and regulation?
If your metric is physical damage done then probably not. If the metric is self-reported emotional or physical suffering, then maybe. But the category becomes very different if you change the metric. For instance, people inflicting pain in ways that don't leave a mark is a failure case for metric 1, but not metric 2. People lying about their inner state is a problem for metric 2 but not 1.
This then breaks down into an argument over what the 'true' metric should be. If someone calls this fallacy against someone, presumably they're flagging a disagreement about the metric being used.
Rant about taxation is theft
I hate the taxation is theft argument(in general, it's a good one to bring up in this post). States are associations of citizens with particular rules, that own the land of their territory(and various other assets), if you don't like their rules leave. But all the land belongs to some association... so what? Tough cookies?
Disclaimer: not a libertarian, but trying to take the ideology more seriously than its advocates seem to, at least what I've encountered so far.
By remaining resident/citizen of a country you are implicitly consenting to the laws of that country, including taxation. Just like using a website implies you tacitly accept its Terms of Service(legal interpretation of how enforceable this is varies for private company ToS, of course).
The only countries where this argument is at least emotionally persuasive are those that don't have exit rights, ie. you can't leave and renounce citizenship. Even there, in a geopolitical anarcho-capitalist sense, you don't have the right to just be resident for free. The state owns the land you are on, you owe it money. The only real moral wrong here, in my interpretation of natural rights libertarianism, is that you are being denied exit rights.
Granted even if you leave one country you'd still have to be accepted by some other country where you end up paying some taxes.... buuuut and this is why I hate this argument so much.... that's because citizens have 'collective' private property ownership over the sovereign nation they are a part of. The libertarian argument against taxation reduces to abolition of private property!
Also obviously, taxation is explicitly consented to if you are an immigrant.
As strawman libertarians might say, you don't have a right to healthcare. Well you don't have a right to standing on dirt owned by the United Commonwealth of SomewhereLandia either. But every piece of dirt is owned. Tough luck. So is every piece of diamond. Build a rocket and sail off west young fellow.
I feel like the herd immunity section is overly simplistic given how much IFR varies based on age group.
Using https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v7
The estimated age-specific IFR is very low for children and younger adults (e.g., 0.002% at age 10 and 0.01% at age 25) but increases progressively to 0.4% at age 55, 1.4% at age 65, 4.6% at age 75, and 15% at age 85.
65+ is like 45,000,000 in the US. Half of them get infected, generously let's say 3% die that's 600,000 dead. A big part of the IFR in the spring for NYC and Sweden(and probably lots of other places) was determined by the virus getting into care homes or not.
This being said I am leaning towards herd immunity being a decent solution with 2 major caveats:
1. You really need the 65+ demographic to stay reasonably locked down while you're burning through the rest of the population. And for countries where multiple generations are living together that's not possible. And for countries where a ton of older people don't worry about the virus that's also not possible.
2. You can't variolate(?) too quickly, otherwise you just blow out your hospital system and suddenly those nice 0.4% death rates blow up into ?? who knows.
Briefly looking for estimates of hospitalization rates I found https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7493765/
I'm super worried about Europe, because I think several countries are going to get pushed to medical system collapse and beyond. Assuming the study above is reasonably representative, let's say 4% of 40-59 year olds are admitted to hospital, based on the graph above(a group with an IFR of like 0.2%). If the hospital is full what percentage of people that needed to be admitted dies? Does he IFR go up x3? x5?
Was hoping to visit my family in Romania for the holidays, but at this stage I'm probably hunkering down in good old blighty til spring :(
EDIT. Basically I think the situation for herd immunity is both better and worse than what I derive from your post: The IFR for the groups of people we want to get the disease is well below 0.4% on average. But we REALLY want at risk groups to be in close to lockdown mode while variolating.
As an extra wrinkle, viral load seems to have a significant effect on disease severity. If a country is purposefully going for herd immunity, at the peak of the process viral load in closed spaces will be a lot higher than it is these days. That may or may not shift IFR higher for a while.
Authorities seem to think the masses are stupid, but then fail to do the bare minimum to educate them on the metrics that matter.
The sad thing is people are definitely smart enough to realize that just raw case numbers don't matter. But then they don't take the additional, and granted fairly tedious step, of figuring out which numbers do matter(hospitalization rates, positive test rates, death numbers, ICU usage rate in their area).
Or maybe it's pure red tribe blue tribe on a global scale(or rather with variations in different countries) and I'm being naive and hopeful.
I think he just meant the curves would match, ie. referring to the peak from the previous wave: https://twitter.com/jeuasommenulle/status/1320682552257089538
Oh actually, I think he just means they'd get back to that peak level in 25 days, not that it would get better after that. I misunderstood what he was saying. I'll correct my post above.
As a follow up to my previous comment, here's a really amazing Twitter thread breaking down the situation in France: https://twitter.com/jeuasommenulle/status/1320682084973858816 (threadreader version: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1320682084973858816.html)
The poster also tries to estimate R0 using hospital data(which should be more reliable than case data, since the Spring wave was so undertested). He finds a R0 of 1.2, which means a doubling every 20 days.
He estimates ICU usage levels will be as high as the spring peak in France within 25 days, if the trends stay correlated with the spring outbreak.
Lots more nice graphs in the thread too.
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&country=ROU~AUT~BEL~HRV~CYP~CZE~DNK~EST~FIN~FRA~DEU~GRC~HUN~IRL~ITA~LVA~LTU~MKD~MDA~NLD~NOR~POL~PRT~RUS~SRB~SVK~SVN~ESP~SWE~CHE~GBR~MCO~TUR®ion=World&casesMetric=true&interval=smoothed&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=location&pickerSort=asc is the best site for COVID European COVID graphs as far as I know. The UK has excellent breakdowns(including by age group): https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/coronaviruscovid19roundup/2020-03-26
What really matters is people's actual behaviour, as you pointed out. In the US people are cautious because they don't trust their government to have it under control. In the Nordic countries and Germany people are cautious because they treat government advice more seriously than us Eastern Europeans treat actual legislation. The lack of a federal fiscal response also hurt. The poor states in the East can't afford generous furlough schemes(not that the furlough scheme seems to have helped the UK, France and Spain that much); France, Spain and Italy are dealing with significant debt burdens. Various pushes were made to get people back out and working and off furglough during late summer early autumn. It worked(another finger curls on the monkeys paw)!
The European story is complicated and regional, similar to the US. You got Germany, the Nordics and the Baltics doing very well in terms of case counts and (as far as I know) without insane restrictions. Then you have Eastern bloc places doing increasingly poorly, but still ok for now. Then you have the Czechs(positive rate >25%!, adding the same number of cases per day as Italy(10 million Czechs vs 60 million Italians)) in 2-weeks-til-zombie-apocalypse mode. Then you have whatever is happening in France and Spain.
Czech Republic issues, at least, seem to come from the governing party downplaying the virus a lot before their October elections. They promised they wouldn't reinstate a lockdown no matter what. 2 weeks later they're in lockdown. They're numbers went nuts right around when the campaign was picking up too. People maybe actually believed their politicians' promises that things would be OK if they relaxed. Rookie mistake, czechs, rookie mistake.
Belgium has been in political anarchy for years, the government has very little authority over the population and is indecisive and weak to boot(for an overview https://www.politico.eu/article/how-belgium-failed-its-second-corona-test/). They flip flopped on restrictions, people weren't given clear instructions from government or non-governmental experts. Netherlands aren't as governmentally incompetent but their country literally overlaps Belgium and their government wasn't super restrictive either. In fairness to both countries, they are the political(Brussels) and trade(Rotterdam and Antwerp) centers of Europe. They had travel bans in place, but there still would have been a huge amount of commercial traffic that was exempt.
Also on September 23rd Belgium eased Coronavirus restrictions(https://www.garda.com/crisis24/news-alerts/382596/belgium-authorities-ease-covid-19-restrictions-september-23-update-23), literally the next day their exponential spike begins(https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&country=~BEL®ion=World&casesMetric=true&interval=smoothed&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=location&pickerSort=asc). The easing seems to have had a gigantic impact on people's behaviour: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/changes-visitors-covid?tab=chart&stackMode=absolute&time=earliest..latest&country=~BEL®ion=World Before the easing park and outdoors visits were 70% over baseline. 1(!) week later they were 10% over baseline. To be fair I'm not 100% sure that I understand the mobility numbers, so maybe it's just a weird data quirk, tho the drop in park time and the jump in cases overlap almost perfectly.
Greece is doing great but Cyprus is doing bad. A bit of a mystery as to why. Cyprus was maybe more aggressive in courting tourists? They famously had a COVID insurance scheme. Looking at mobility data, the Greeks just seem to have gone outside and never gone back inside :D probably a good idea, maybe hard to replicate for those of us not living in Elysium, sadly https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/changes-visitors-covid?tab=chart&stackMode=absolute&time=earliest..latest&country=~GRC®ion=World
Other places in Eastern Europe are still quite poor and can't cushion shutdowns with generous leave, so the population kinda had to be let back to work, bars and restaurants and tourism had to be opened up. I'm not sure how big the conspiracy aspect is. In Romania(where I'm from) my parents' group of friends(all in their late 50s early 60s) are averagely open to conspiratorial stuff(I think almost all adults that grew up under communism are like that) and they take the virus very seriously. But again, they're all still working, not really doing WFH, but they are masking, isolating from vulnerable relatives and each other.
Is the CFR going down because the virus is less deadly in general, or because the virus is infecting younger people? I haven't been able to find a decent study on this.
In the UK(https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/demographic-data-for-coronavirus-testing-england-28-may-to-26-august/demographic-data-for-coronavirus-covid-19-testing-england-28-may-to-26-august#age-and-gender) the median age of people testing positive has gone down from 52 to 31:
Annex table 7: median age of people newly tested and newly testing positive for COVID-19 under pillars 1 and 2, England
| Week | People tested | People testing positive |
|---|---|---|
| 28/05/20 to 03/06/20 | 48 | 52 |
| 04/06/20 to 10/06/20 | 45 | 48 |
| 11/06/20 to 17/06/20 | 44 | 44 |
| 18/06/20 to 24/06/20 | 43 | 43 |
| 25/06/20 to 01/07/20 | 42 | 41 |
| 02/07/20 to 08/07/20 | 42 | 40 |
| 09/07/20 to 15/07/20 | 41 | 38 |
| 16/07/20 to 22/07/20 | 40 | 37 |
| 23/07/20 to 29/07/20 | 39 | 37 |
| 30/07/20 to 05/08/20 | 39 | 37 |
| 06/08/20 to 12/08/20 | 39 | 35 |
| 13/08/20 to 19/08/20 | 39 | 33 |
| 20/08/20 to 26/08/20 | 38 | 31 |
I think death rates are still down despite younger demographics, but how much? Is it still a 10%+ risk for a 60+ person with 1 comorbidity? What about if ICU's are overflowing and people end up in temporary care units? Romania, where I'm from, has a very poor healthcare system and seems to be heading into an ICU overflow situation sadly, but not sure how concerned I should be for my parents and other older relatives(they're all taking it quite seriously of course).
Is the space of possible minds really that huge(or maybe really that alien?), though? I agree about humans having ... an instinctive ability to intuit the mental state of other humans. But isn't that partly learnable as well? We port this simulation ability relatively well to animals once we get used to their tells. Would we really struggle to learn the tells of other minds, as long as they were somewhat consistent over time and didn't have the ability to perfectly lie?
Like what's a truly alien mind? At the end of the day we're Turing complete, we can simulate any computational process, albeit inefficiently.
I agree with the simulation aspect, sort of. I don't know if similarity to myself is necessary, though. For instance throughout history people have been able to model and interact with traders from neighbouring or distant civilizations, even though they might think very differently.
I'd say predictability or simulationability is what makes us comfortable with an 'other'. To me the scary aspect about an AI is the possibility that it's behaviour can change radically and unpredictably(it gets an override update, some manchurian candidate type trigger). Humans can also deceive, but usually we are leaky deceivers. True psychopaths trigger a sort of innate, possibly violent, loathing in the people that discover them. AI's, assuming they are easily modified(which is not a guarantee, ML neural nets are hard to modify in a ... surgical manner), would basically be viewed as psychopaths, with the attendant constant stress.
Regarding anthropomorphism: I think the cause of it is that part of our brain is sort of hardcoded to simulate agents. And it seems to be the most computationally powerful part of our brain(or maybe not a part but a network a set of systems whatever).
The hardest problem facing our minds is the problem of other minds, so when confronted with a truly hard problem we attack it with our most powerful cognitive weapon: the agent simulation mechanisms in our brains.
As we understand natural processes we no longer need to simulate them as agents and we shift to weaker mental subsystems and start thinking about them mechanically.
Basically, humans behaviour is chaotic and no true rules exist, only heuristics. As we find true mechanistic rules for phenomena we no longer need to simulate them as we would humans(or other agents/hyper-chaotic systems).
How are you actually doing this in AI Dungeon? I have Dragon mode enabled, everything else default.
I start a new Single player game. Choose Custom mode(6). Then at the prompt I just paste (using Say mode)
Q: Say I want to sum the items in a list. How would I do this recursively? The answer involves two steps.
and I get
Q: Say I want to sum the items in a list. How would I do this recursively? The answer involves two steps. First, I need to know how many items there are in total. Second, I need to find out which item is at the top of that list. A: You could use recursive_sum() .
Similarly when I tried to reproduce stuff from https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hrx2id/a_collection_of_amazing_things_gpt3_has_done/ I didn't get anything near as impressive. Also the responses get increasingly confused. Like if I ask it to translate something to French or Romanian it will randomly translate later prompts as well.
Is there some basic tutorial for how you seed these AI Dungeon interactions?
It would help to add past 5 year averages to make it clear just how unusual the R0-R99 death numbers are. See https://episphere.github.io/mortalitytracker/#cause=symptoms_signs_and_abnormal&state=All%20States from my comment on the previous post. These numbers have been at a constant <500/week every week of 2015-2019. They're now at 2800 and seemingly rising.
It's gone from one of the lowest ranked causes of death to like #4 cause of death.
As to hypotheses why... who determines how deaths are classified? Is it state level? Do states need to send samples to the CDC to get them classified? It's clearly too simple to just assume that it's a pure hospital level process.
This website seems to do the trick and have charts: https://episphere.github.io/mortalitytracker/#cause=symptoms_signs_and_abnormal&state=Florida
The spike in Unclassified... is huge. They're fudging the data, ffs.
It seems like as of today deaths are still not spiking. Good news? Do we have stats on hospitalization rates by age group? If it's something like 0.1% of <30 yo infected need ICU care, that suggests everyone(without comorbidities) under 30 could get infected more or less at the same time and we'd still be fine, assuming higher risk groups stay isolated.
Of course this plan is not helped by propaganda being eaten up by old people that the virus is over, masks are evil and other info hazards.
somewhat shackled by trying to fit them all into conflict vs mistake theory
:D Yeah, fair point, I just realised I don't link this at all with my earlier post/comment in which I frame conflict theories as strategies for 0-sum games vs mistake theories as strategies for positive-sum games.
My historical trajectory is a story about ehhh... entities playing ever larger(in dimensions of spacetime, energy used, information contained whatever, number of entities involved, diversity of the entities involved) positive sum games. While not becoming a single clonal thing. I wonder if that statement holds up if I try to formalize it. I think that's a thought that's been bounced around my head ever since I read https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/
I didn't even think about power and persuasion actually, which now seems very odd. I guess I was thinking in terms of utility outcomes, not the means by which you get to those outcomes.
I still haven't read a good steelman of conflict theory(and I doubt I can offer one, though I'll try), but I think it's a bit deeper than just misguided mistake theory.
First of all, conflict theory seems a better fit for 0-sum games:
- slaves want to be free, slaveholders want to keep their property
- mongols want territory, current inhabitants don't want to become skull pyramids
- privileged group wants disadvantaged group policed ruthlessly, since they are not affected by the police brutality but do benefit from the police catching more criminals on the margin. In other words police false positives don't affect the privileged group, but false negatives do.
It's a sort of unstated rationalist dogma that all 0-sum games can sort of be twisted into positive-sum games. I don't think that's true in principle, but it's certainly not true given practical constraints(people are fallible, defect from agreements etc).
Conflict theory might also function better in practice, even though it has worse theoretical upside. For instance, worker unions are not an optimal solution to managers abusing employees, lack of profit sharing, lack of workplace safety rules, they do solve a coordination problem(in particular an imbalance in workers' ability to coordinate vs managers). In an ideal world managers understand that unions are net bad and take measures to alleviate worker concerns so that they don't unionise, thus creating a somewhat redundant and sometimes adversarial parallel management structure.
But a simple, comprehensible conflict theory based solution might be stable, whereas the ideal mistake theory solution might be plagued by defection risks or just super hard to implement.
A lot of mistake theory also seems to suffer from conceptual explosion. Like there are no real sides, every person has their own interests, we need to maximise utility for individuals that actually exist not statistical average individuals. Which is true, but also incredibly hard to turn into a workable social contract vs here's 5 categories, their votes create an average statistical avatar, please those 5 avatars.
Finally, when people run on different axioms, you can't really use mistake theory, you're essentially in an ideological 0-sum game. If I believe in Biblical literalism, young earth creationism, there's no meaningful compromise to have with Darwinist evolution. I can surrender my axioms, and essentially become a new person, or not. The mistake theory answer to this is probably something like... people don't really care about axioms that much they care about the myriad outcomes(like you're a YEC because you like the community of church or you don't want to argue with your parents). But I just don't think that's true. People seem to care a lot more about their axioms and core theories than about end-outcomes and often do weird causal origami to help maintain their axioms in the face of apparently undesirable consequences.
Sorry, seemed to have gone on the tangent and not actually addressed the post enough. Here's a short comment directly on the post:
I don't think socialists are merely misguided social democrats. I think they fundamentally make different predictions than social democrats. They don't think a socialist state will devolve into soviet or Chinese style horrors, therefore they see milque-toast socialism as unnecessarily compromising with capitalist exploitation. There's a, somewhat, plausible defence of that position: Soviet Russia and communist china weren't radically different from their pre-communist forms, just moreso. You wouldn't expect socialist USA or UK to suddenly open up gulags and have the secret police hunting people down. You'd probably expect it to be a local homeowners association or tedious government bureaucracy writ large. Statist socialism doesn't really transform society as much as it would like to believe, just look at how Russia has reverted to a tsarist/aristocrat system and how China is reverting to a pseudo-imperial bureaucracy.