This is the biweek-ly visible open thread (there are also hidden open threads twice a week you can reach through the Open Thread tab on the top of the page). Post about anything you want, but please try to avoid hot-button political and social topics. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit – and also check out the SSC Podcast. Also:
1. There’s another virtual SSC meetup planned for June 7, special guest Steve Hsu, see here for details.
2. Comment of the week is this very long thread on the history of cracked.com, with good contributions from a former Cracked writer, and some insights relevant to online media in general.
3. But also, the thread starting here about medieval perspectives on cynocephaly – that is, supposing there was a tribe of people with dog-heads somewhere in India, should they be baptized into the church or not? “It’s good to know that if we ever do encounter aliens, the theological spadework has already been done.”
4. And also, Aftagley reports from the DC protests.
5. You may notice the blogroll has changed – less Borgesian, more actually useful. Hopefully it will help people discover new writers worth reading – and let me know if I’ve made any mistakes.
I’m having another virtual meetup on Mozilla Hubs this Saturday, starting at 1 P.M. Pacific time. For links to information on hubs and to the meetup site, go here.
Re: the blogroll, srconstantin.github.io might be a better link than Sarah’s WordPress blog. It’s where she’s been posting new stuff. She also said she’d aggregate her old posts from various other sites on Github. I don’t see most of it at the moment, but at least that post contains links to the old blogs.
Thanks, fixed.
I find that working part time is dramatically better for my mental health and general well being. Being unemployed leaves me rudderless and adrift, days blur into each other as meals and media consumption fill the desperate need to pass time. Working full time though, takes so much energy, so many spoons, that ever free moment is similarly devoted to mindless pleasures. Part time employment, shines through like a beacon of hope. A consistent pillar around which my life might be tethered, the routine and structure giving each day distinction, and the obligation keeps me moving. At the same time, I am left with the energy to pursue my hobbies, to fill my free time with more productive activities.
So, my question SSC, what are the best long term options for part time employment?
I have a bachelors degree in general studies(my life is a comedy of errors), a very cheap lifestyle in general, but I am not sure if I can live cheaply enough on the kinds of part time jobs that I am aware of to afford housing.
I have the same opinions about ideal employment. I’m currently working a full time engineering job. It’s an extremely good fit as full time jobs go (they allow flexible schedules and have provided disability accommodations on more than one occasion) but the fact that it’s 40 hours per week is still super draining. My ideal would be more like 30-35.
As for part time work…
I had a lot of fun in my 5 years of working in public libraries. The public itself can be a crapshoot depending on location, but the coworkers and environment make up for it. I’ve never met a librarian who wasn’t interesting. Unfortunately, the pay is not great. And, at least in my region, opportunities for advancement without a masters degree started drying up about 3-5 years ago, which is a big factor in why I switched careers.
I’m curious to see what other people will suggest. My biggest issue with part time jobs was the lack of Healthcare. YMMV if you live in a state that expanded Medicaid coverage.
Freelance work of various types is good for that, though you need to spend some time on getting work on top of the work itself. I’ve found tutoring or private teaching a good option, you can arrange a couple of sessions, each of an hour or two, at regular times a week with different clients. Lot of people doing them online right now as well as you’d imagine, so possible too work from home. Freelance writing is another option, but there’s a lot of competition and its harder to get regular gigs. Things like art and design, or progamming, also work that way, but i have less personal experience with them
Seems like most freelance workers practically end up doing more than 40 hours a week, though. Hustle/gig economy and all that. It ends up borking your chances at a stable socializing schedule, too. You can’t commit to any non-work commitments because a gig opportunity could come up.
And most all of the professional book writers have strong financial support from someone else like a spouse or a patron.
You are asking about employment. What skills do you have? What skills could you imagine acquiring?
The only notable skill I have beyond basic office (the software suite, and the work environment) competence is a mild aptitude for the visual arts, although that is an option that I am considering. I guess to be more clear though, I am looking for the best low skill/low credential options. Although if you are aware of something with a high ROI that would support part time employment long term, assume a person would could reasonable complete any undergraduate major at a state school.
Since you’re in China, tutoring English might be the way to go.
I’ve been able to find part time work pretty consistently on a remote contract basis.
But personally, if I were you, I’d start from the goal and work backward. You say you have a pretty cheap lifestyle. The average household has (post-tax) $50k a year, so let’s say your lifestyle plus savings etc costs you $3k a month. That means about $3.6k in earnings due to taxes. You want to work 1,000 hours a year (50 weeks at twenty hours, plus two vacation weeks). This works out to a job that pays about $44 an hour, more if you want to factor in benefits (which you almost certainly won’t receive).
Okay, what do you like to do that you can earn $44/hour at? Well, there’s a bunch of web professions if that interests you. But there’s also plenty of other jobs. Google $40/hour or $45/hour jobs and you’ll find lists. Then you just need to build a career in one of those spaces and you’re golden. (I could give more advice in that direction but only once you’ve decided on a path.)
That seems like a reasonable framing, I will look at those lists.
Consider nomadic lifestyle to reduce costs even further. Rent in resorts is usually very cheap off-season since there’s a lot of empty housing. Check out the cost of living map.
Example: chilly summers in the mountain resort Bansko (also: Bansko Nomad Fest for socialization), warm winters on the coast of Montenegro, springs and autumns in Budapest in apartments rented for 9 months (might be cheaper and easier than to rent for 3 months twice); Serbia for extra days necessary to make visas work.
This is good advice, I am currently in China (working full time BLEH) but the cost of living is outrageously cheap, assuming wherever I go has better internet than I can get here, I am pretty comfortable in other cultures, or at least have been so far with this one.
Are you willing to work full time for a while with part time as an goal, or are you looking for something part time immediately? I have a bunch of brainstormed ideas below, mostly unconnected to each other, except most of them need some up front work to get going.
The way I’ve seen people get decent part time jobs in the corporate world is by working full time long enough to prove their skills and earn trust, then negotiate reduction to half time. It ends up being somewhat more precarious than a full time role since if the employer can get by without you half the time, they probably can get by without you all the time, but it can work.
If you find a full time job with the right benefits package, you can convert it into a hybrid. I have a coworker who uses his generous vacation allowance to take off every Friday, rather than the traditional approach.
Similarly, if you aim for an independent contracting type job like Alkatyn suggests. Building up a client base and your own processes/accounting/etc will likely be full time at first, but once you have loyal customers you’re keeping happy, you can likely back down. Anything where a customer would typically expect to be non-exclusive: landscaping, house cleaning, a trade, book keeping, tutoring. Then you control your own hours by controlling the number of clients you accept.
Connected with this idea: enough of a nest egg to cover housing is rather less than you need to cover all expenses. Maybe you can buy and pay off a house or build investments that cover rent in the first few years of full time work, then back off. If you go for something entrepreneurial, you’ll likely be happier to have money in the bank anyway to smooth disruptions.
If it’s mostly about energy/spoons, maybe you could consider something full time but only sporadically your full attention: security guard, receptionist, hotel clerk, or something routine like factory work where your body will be busy but you can let your mind wander while you work? There are a lot of jobs routine enough that they become low stress once you know what you’re doing, where the employer is mostly paying for you to cover a shift rather than produce X amount. Some jobs even let you work on hobbies from your desk, as long as it’s something you can drop the instant a customer walks through the door.
Are any of your hobbies marketable? Can you mentally bucket 10-20 hours a week in ‘business stuff’ as your job, turning your hobby products into money, or would they bleed together in your mind and prevent the hobby from being fun?
Not entirely under your control, but there’s often the “MRS degree” option. Many people are happy to have a partner who keeps up the home, works a bit but isn’t the primary breadwinner. This one is contingent on finding that relationship, of course.
There are also employers who offer alternative schedule full time, whether that be 4 days of 10 hour days for 3 day weekends, or 4 days of 9 hour days and Fridays half off.
I thought of a couple more:
You could aim for a teaching role, in a subject like PE or music, where you’re not expected to assign or grade very much. Or substitute teaching, or teacher’s aide, librarian, admin: something where you actually work only during school hours. Even school janitor might fit.
Depending on your personality, maybe something in sales? Realtor, insurance, cars – sometimes you’ll find an employer who puts a lot of pressure on, but I think it ought to be possible to find someone who pays only commission, which ought to scale pretty well up or down with the amount of time you’re willing to put in.
I found this list on US News and World reports that has a couple more possibles, plus some of those already mentioned.
It seems to me that teaching is probably your best bet. Schools have a hard time filling part time positions, so it would probably be fairly easy to find work, and you could probably teach middle school with your degree.
Is general studies an actual college major? Where?
Is it the equivalent of the D&D bard class?
My university had a “liberal studies” major. I’d guess that’s basically what he has.
A lot of colleges will let you “design your own major” and ultimately call it “general studies.” I know someone who did this at Texas Tech but I think it’s relatively commonly available at most large state schools?
If you do it at a fancy enough school they call it a “liberal arts degree” and it is taken for granted that you are taking it as a prerequisite for a professional graduate degree (law, medicine, business…)
At my school (definitely not fancy) it was mostly made up of people planning on being teachers. They even had a track (which seemed to be the main one people took) where you would come out of your degree with a credential.
My friend told me about Newcomb’s problem a few months ago. We were both struck by how strong our initial judgments were: I immediately thought that two-boxing was the way to go, and she thought that one-boxing was obviously right. So it seems like my instinctive way of thinking is along the lines of causal decision theory, while hers is evidential. (I’ve been reading a bit about timeless decision theory, but I don’t grok it yet.) And it made us wonder whether one- or two-boxing correlates with anything else in terms of personality, etc. (Which reminds me of optical illusions, a bit: a lot of illusions are experienced similarly by everyone, but there are some that people differ on according to other characteristics, like how whether you saw “the dress” as blue/black or white/gold was apparently affected by whether you expected it to be in light or in shadow from the ambiguous cues in the picture, which in turn had to do with whether you were a night owl.)
I never quite understood the two-boxers. To me it seems obvious that reflection on the newcomb problem will cause me to be a one-boxer which in turn will cause both the predictor to put the higher reward as well as me choosing to one-box. This seems to me like a perfect causal desicion.
In order to two-box you must somehow believe that while everything else is part of a purely causal chain of events your own choice somehow is not? So maybe two-boxers at least subconsciously just have some believe in some notion of “free will”?
I’m a one-boxer too, but to put a word for the other side…
Is this reflection done before or after the predictor sets up the boxes? If after, this reflection cannot “cause the predictor to put the higher reward” because it happens after the rewards are set. If before, well, yes, if you can credibly precommit to one-box then of course you should, but this is not the interesting question. The interesting question is, what should someone do if put in front of the two boxes and explained the situation without ever having heard of the Newcomb problem beforehand?
That changes nothing as the reflection is also a causal event. My point is that a causal decision agent will choose to one-box as long as they don’t take their choice as an independent root cause but merely as a point in a causal chain of events that can both cause the prediction and the concious choice.
If you remove that causal part from the prediction you are no longer posing an interesting problem since the real world is always causal and that’s the only way we can reason about it. Only of course if we don’t know the involved causation we have to think probabilistical. In that case there is some cut off where two-boxing becomes the correct choice but that’s no longer the original newcomb problem.
@cathray:
Does your reflection include a term for “the predictor is lying to me”?
One-boxing offers the superior payoff if there is, in fact, money in the opaque box. This pre-condition may fail to be met if:
a. Omega incorrectly predicts you to be a
onetwo-boxer (IOW pegs you as a two-boxer when you would have picked the one), orb. Omega lied to you and had no intention of putting money in the box in the first place.
One-boxing is only obvious if you assume that Omega is both honest and a perfect predictor. Neither of these assumptions is demonstrated inductively in the real world, nor does there exist a deductive line of reasoning that allows us to arrive at that conclusion.
ETA:
Absent the perfect prediction/perfect honesty assumptions, two-boxing offers the option of the greatest possible payoff (if Omega got the prediction wrong) and in the worst case you still get $1000.
If the predictor can err or lie there is a probabilistic component to the desicion and you should choose the higher expected value which depends on the rewards offered and the probability of error/lie.
This however is not the original newcomb problem and it is also a combined problem that will still involve the causal reasoning that leads to one-boxing if the probability of a correct prediction and/or reward are high enough.
Agreed that Newcomb’s original formulation doesn’t include a probabilistic component, but that just makes it a not very interesting problem.
The EV cutoff point, if I did my sums right, is at P(money in opaque box) = 0.5, so one-boxing means that you assume it’s more likely than not that there will be money in the box (consistent with a naive interpretation).
The interesting question is therefore: why would you believe there’s money in the box?
I’m pretty sure some of the early Less Wrong readership surveys (possibly also some early SSC surveys) asked about the Newcomb problem, so there should be data to be found to investigate correlations with one’s answer.
The only way a predictor can reliably predict the future is to faithfully simulate it. The simulated copy of you it’s simulating will feel just like you. Thus, when you come upon the two boxes, there is no way to know if it’s inside a simulation or not. Your choice inside the simulation is what causes the boxes to be what they are outside the simulation. The correct decision is to one-box.
How does the predictor have access to all of my memories? How does it know my brain structure? How does it have the resources to simulate me and enough of my immediate environment for me to not notice I’m in a simulation?
Most importantly, won’t the simulation be terminated once I make a choice? If this is the case, then it seems like the best option is to walk away without choosing.
I lean towards the two box mainly because I reject the premise of the scenario. I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to perfectly simulate you, or if it was possible, it would mean reality is weird enough that the problem is basically meaningless anyway.
It’s sort of like thought experiments that involve infinite computational power.
There’s no good reason not to think you’re being simulated right now.
What testable predictions do you offer in order to justify worrying about whether we are being “simulated” or not?
I imagine your intuitions might change if we start calling the simulator “God” and ask whether there’s a good reason to not believe in God, even if the actual arguments are unchanged.
If we start listing everything there’s no good reason not to think, we’re going to be here a very long time.
I just mean that us being in a simulation is not a falsifiable hypothesis, so “for me to not notice I’m in a simulation” is the default and should not be taken as evidence either way.
The assumption of the problem is that the predictor never mispredicts, and if you’re not going to accept that, then you may as well not engage with the thought experiment.
Isn’t it the other way around?
If you accept the predictor never mispredicts, we can simplify the thought experiment to “would you rather have a million or a thousand dollars?” which isn’t much of a question.
If the predictor never mispredicts, the scenario is equivalent to the predictor saying “if you choose one box I will put $1,000,000 it and if you choose two, I will put no money in the second box”. You can achieve exactly the same result with postdiction (hindsight is always 20-20) as with (assumed) perfect prediction, so I fail to see what assuming prediction brings to the table here.
I think the fundamental issue is that Newcomb’s paradox can’t be formalized in the usual language of mathematics and game theory. It’s a bit like trolleyology, where the entire argument rests in people debating their imagined views of various scenarios that resemble the problem statement, and thus there is considerable disagreement.
I can reliably predict the future without doing any sort of detailed simulation. You don’t need anything more than about 55% reliability in order to make one-boxers do better than two-boxers, and many people can get 55% reliability. (I think I heard that Dave Chalmers did this at his 42nd birthday party – he was well above 60% accuracy on the friends he invited to the party. I don’t think the payouts were in thousands or millions of dollars though.)
For Newcombs Paradox, you aren’t predicting some generic event. You’re predicting the behavior of someone who is making different decisions based on their prediction of what you predict. It’s a bit like Vin’s attitum trick in the second Mistborn book.
Even a very low level of fallibility makes the entire paradox fall apart.
So many two-box schemes seem built around “I am going to lie about being one-box and outsmart the other party” which gives you a 0.1% extra payout in exchange for risking 100% of your initial prize.
Being a reliable one-boxer and then moving on with your life gets you a million bucks. Who risks that?
The problem is that it’s not enough to be a reliable one-boxer. You also have to be able to rely on the opponent thinking you are a reliable one-boxer. Like I said, even a small amount of fallibility makes the paradox break down.
It’s a bit like a variation of the prisoner’s dilemma where the opponent commits to cooperate if you cooperate. Sure the “obvious” strategy is to always cooperate, but if you can’t be sure they’re actually telling the truth, the “obvious” strategy is no longer quite so obvious.
When I first heard Newcomb’s problem I was an instinctive one-boxer and couldn’t understand the two-box position. Causes usually come before effects, but I’m being asked for the sake of the thought experiment to assume that this one effect comes before its cause. Anyone two-boxing seemed to me to be rejecting the premise.
Later I read EY’s paper on timeless decision theory and while I do not understand TDT at all the paper did give me a much better grasp on the Newcomb problem. Presenting the problem in a statistical way alongside the counter-example of chewing gum and tobacco helped me see the flaws in one-box logic and understand why it’s such an interesting thought experiment. I often find that I fail to learn the main thesis or central argument of things I read, but incidentally get a much better understanding of the more fundamental or background issues they’re trying to address.
Omega is probably predicting based on our comments on weird kinda philosophical blogs so the answer is to always say you’d one-box then actually two-box.
So of course i’d one-box.
As most of you living in the US have probably noticed, this past week has been a particularly bad one in terms of overall social cohesion/national well-being.
I think it would be a mistake to overreact to this. The US has been through many ups and downs in its history, and so far we have always pulled through. And yet, it does feel like there is an overall trend towards increasing social and political dysfunction which has been present for at least the past five years.
In light of this trend, and the fact that I have not yet started a family/committed heavily to a particular geographical region, I’ve been considering what my other options would for establishing a permanent place of residence.
I would love to hear from other SSC readers based elsewhere around the world about how you view the long-term outlook of your own countries. I’m particularly interested in places where English is widely spoken; Canada, England, and Australia/New Zealand are my current shortlist of alternatives for this reason. But people from anywhere should feel free to weigh in.
Any thoughts you want to share are welcome, but I’d be particularly interested in 1) how politically competent/functional you feel your government is (independent of partisan affiliation), 2) what the educational system and job market are like, and 3) whether you feel that the culture of your country would be easy for an outsider to integrate into.
In other words, is the place you live somewhere you think other people should consider immigrating to? Is it an acceptable place to call home, but not anything that stands out on an international level? Or would you be thinking about leaving, were it not for the inertia of currently living there?
I live in Berlin, Germany. Been here for 8 years. English is widely spoken, there are plenty of well-paid jobs for skilled professionals, the government is well-run & stable, and the quality of life is high-middle. It’s also a 1 – 4 hour flight away from Paris, London, Munich, Amsterdam, Athens, Barcelona, etc, so holidays to very different, interesting places are cheap & easy. As far as the educational system goes I don’t have a lot of experience having been schooled elsewhere, but afaik the standard is very high, and also students don’t graduate with debilitating debt.
I can recommend at least adding it into the mix if you’re considering a sea change.
For the purpose of living in political stability, I would advice against Berlin. East Berlin still votes for commies, West Berlin votes CDU/SPD like most of Germany, but the party that got the most seats from Berlin is far-right AfD (4 of 16). That doesn’t look stable. I think anywhere in Western Germany would be better.
Berlin has a pretty high percentage of left wing radicals, right wing radicals and foreigners. It seems to me the city in Germany that is most likely to have riots like the US right now. Which still doesn’t mean that it’s likely.
Munich is more prosperous and more conservative – probably more stable. It also has the Oktoberfest and the Alpes close by if you care for skiing or hiking. It’s getting ever more expensive to buy property though.
Having been to both and also knowing people who repatriated there – both Denmark and Switzerland would be top choices for emigration. Salaries are much higher than in Germany. Both basically top all the rankings. Switzerland would be my vote for the Western European country least likely to go up in flames in the next decades.
This might be a good time to mention that we will be holding our Zürich, Switzerland meetup virtually this Saturday. International visitors welcome!
Not sure if I should post a public link, so please just write to ssczurich@gmx.ch if you’re interested and we’ll forward you the invite.
During a global crisis one might not be able to avoid social and political dysfunction by moving to a new place and just staying in it. I have obtained EU citizenship and hope to use it to move between EU countries in case SHTF. Another option similar to EU is Mercosur but I can’t tell you much about it. If I had to bet everything on the stability of just one country, I’d pick Switzerland.
About English: look at this. But you’re likely to do well with just English in any sea or mountain resort. If you want to move out when SHTF, Australia and New Zealand are way too far in the drink, but maybe that’s just me.
If you want to migrate to EU, your number one problem is that it usually takes 5 years to long-term residence permit (compared to, say, 1 year in Chile). If you’re fired before those 5 years are over, you’re kicked out. If you can get a Blue Card, you can collect those 5 years in different EU countries, plus you get some grace period to find a new job (3 months, I believe). If you want to optimize for getting the BC, you’ll probably land in Germany… but maybe not, depends on your profession. A good path is German BC to German long-term residence which takes 21 months if you pass a German exam on B1 level.
Also interesting: Portugal is the only country in EU where you can apply for a visa inside the country and not in your current place of residence. Sweden doesn’t require a language exam to get the citizenship.
In long term Poland will go through a catastrophic demographic collapse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Poland#/media/File:Polandpop.svg
Mentioned recovery is too weak to change anything (1.36 is still hilariously low).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate#Lowest-low_fertility
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate – Poland is at the bottom, far below population replacement levels – 179th of 200 countries listed.
I’m still not entirely certain what’s so bad about “demographic collapse.” So a nation winds up going back to the population they had 20-30 years ago. Why is this an atypically bad thing?
First, all of your infrastructure is sized for the old population, and all of its maintenance costs are thus sized to its old population. Not all of this will fail gracefully as you cut back on the maintenance work. “Hey, it’s wicked cool that there’s no more traffic and I can commute at 120 kph!”, turns into “where did that pothole come from and how can it cost so much to repair my car when all I did was hit a pothole (at 120 kph)?”
Second, during the transitional period (and if you’re reading this, you won’t live long enough to see anything but the transitional period) you may have the same number of people that you did 20-30 years ago but the age structure will be skewed heavily towards retirees and away from workers. So, significantly lower per-capita GDP coupled with significantly higher per-capita demand for e.g. health care and assisted living. Exactly who that screws over and how is somewhat negotiable, but probably not safe to assume that every other demographic group will take the hit so that you don’t have to.
And the easiest people to offload the costs to and grab the benefits from are going to be immigrants, if you were thinking of being one.
The age structure will be skewed towards retirees and away from children, assuming that the current trend continues. The worker:dependent ratio won’t be as low as much as if you only considered the workers and the retirees but not the children.
That’s compared to the situation where the population is stable. Compared to the current situation, the worker:dependent ratio will indeed significantly decline, as the worker:child ratio is already high, and it probably won’t grow much further.
Looking at Poland’s population pyramid for 2020, compared to that expected in 2050, I get a worker:dependent ratio decreasing from 1.60 today to 1.06 thirty years from now. That seems to me quite substantial.
And that’s assuming we treat children and retirees equally, which is not really right. Children are almost certainly cheaper to care for than the elderly – they are smaller, eat less, can sleep two to a bedroom in their parents’s homes, have much smaller health-care requirements, and the teacher:student ratio in primary and secondary schools is I think quite a bit smaller than the caregiver:resident ratio in retirement and nursing homes.
If I simplistically assume that the average child costs half as much to care for as the average adult, the effective worker:dependant ratio now shifts from 2.15 today to 1.29 in 2050 – a 40% reduction.
Demographic collapse is a bad thing because you get an inverted population pyramid, with lots of old folks who have to be supported by a relatively small number of working young people. That’s a crappy deal for the young. (Or it’s a crappy deal for the old, if you decide you’d rather leave them without support.)
More controversially, if you try to counter the demographic collapse of the population pyramid by immigration, you are going to see substantial cultural changes. If you have just a few immigrants, they’ll generally assimilate, because there isn’t any real choice. But the more you have of them, to more they’ll retain their original culture, shifting the culture of their new country. Many people are ok with some of this; not a lot of people are ok with lots of this.
One of several problems is that Western countries created big social safety nets that depend on a certain level of population growth. The worse the ratio of young to old, the harder it is to maintain said net.
ETA: Super ninja’d.
I’m with you, it hearkens back to 20th Century thinking where manpower was everything in war and economic growth was all about the hands you had to work. Neither have been true for decades and even if it was relevant few countries these days have a peer competitor which isn’t also facing a similar slump in the birth rate.
It still just seems like a really weird problem of “oh no, we have too much stuff sitting around.” Food production is already a minuscule part of the labor force. Infrastructure maintenance doesn’t take that many people. I’m not saying there are no challenges, but it seems like a much easier problem to solve than, say, overpopulation.
The biggest challenge is healthcare, which ultimately ends up being hands-on. In some hypothetical future a doctor might be able to completely diagnose and treat you remotely. But the CNAs changing your diaper won’t.
Its not an issue of ‘we have to much stuff sitting around’ its a ‘we have a bunch of stuff declining in value and a bunch of new needs for this segment of the population who cannot provide them for themselves’. When agriculture was still manual it took 10 people working in agriculture to earn enough surplus to feed one person not working in agriculture so that they could specialize in something else, and this set up makes technological progress very slow (even in agriculture!). Aging populations are going to bring that type of problem back to the forefront, if 1/3rd of your population is retired and the rest of society is paying for them at a 5:1 ratio (ie one worker is supporting 5 retired people) you still have almost 40% of your population accounted for, add in say 15% of the population under productive age, plus supporting them and you are almost at 60% of your population accounted for (which you can probably round to above 60 with some level of disabilities/incarceration) before you get into the ‘supporting ourselves plus maintaining all the old capital plus making progress moving forward’ section of society.
And 5:1 is way to generous of a ratio, that is more along the lines of what you can do raising kids not caring for people in declining health. Keyenes pretty much summed it up when he said (paraphrasing) ‘In the long run we are all dead, who cares if our great grand-kids suddenly find themselves heavily indebted with no route toward growth.’
Another factor is that in a democracy the massive number of senior citizens will be calling the shots. Pensions can’t be cut. Young people will be burdened more and more. You end up with politicians catering to people living in the world from twenty to fourty years ago.
That is not a problem. Problem is with an aging population.
Median age of population reaching 51 by 2050 will collapse social benefits – healthcare, pensions and everything else.
To repeat: with current trends over half of population will be over 51.
What worse things will not decline but rather collapse – Poland already delayed retirement age, next government rolled it back under the pressure. And as population gets older retires will be a bigger and bigger voting block ensuring that nothing can be rolled back. And sooner or later things will collapse.
So I expect things slowly getting worse and exploding dramatically around my own retirement age.
Not sure what I should do with that knowledge.
It reduces problem and is an ongoing trend, but I am skeptical about process being fast enough to avoid explosion/collapse. In the best case it will be probably something along lines of “at least retires have enough money to avoid starvation and there is a limited healthcare”.
But I expect that by 2050 economy will not be completely independent from number of workers – and technology will remain a growing multiplier of number of employees.
“20% of population is working” will remain worse case than “50% of population is working”, like it is today – despite that technology is an enormous multiplier.
It is no longer necessary for 75% of population to work as farmers, just to keep as from starving. But a single working employee is unable to keep entire USA population alive in case where noone else works.
Not sure about the exact % of workers is necessary for a comfortable life, and what it will be in 2050 – but I expect that in 2050 Poland will be below it.
Oversized infrastructure mentioned in one comment seems to not be a major problem, just stop maintaining part of it.
—
Disclaimer: maybe something will save us like ridiculous technology progress, or Ukraine will emigrate into Poland without massive cultural issues or something else.
Or we will have bigger problem like getting invaded by Russia again (or Germany)/global warming and environment decline will turn out to be actually catastrophic/AI will eat us/nuclear war will happen/plague on Black Death levels/other less likely x-risk like catastrophic solar storm or major impact event will happen.
But overall – either hilariously fast technology progress or something even worse or successful immigration or Poland will have extremely aged population with major issues coming from that.
Poland’s going to look like Niger compared to South Korea.
I live in the Netherlands. English is very widely spoken (as a second language, but 95% of people are fluent). I’m writing this from the perspective of an expat/immigrant/so-called ‘kennismigrant’ (knowledge migrant), but one who lives outside the Randstad conurbation where most such people live. I know there are other posters who are native to the Netherlands, so it might be interesting to hear their point of view.
The government seems broadly competent and functional, certainly by the standards of anywhere else I’m familiar with. People talk about the ”polder model” of consensus-based decision making, and politics does seem much less aggressively partisan than in the US or UK- the electoral system is designed to produce multi-party coalition governments. If I could vote here I wouldn’t vote for the party that the current PM belongs to, or for any of his coalition partners (except maybe one of them), but I think they are generally doing a good job.
The education system, again, seems to perform fairly well- it’s more similar to the German system than to the US one. Unlike Germany student debt is a thing, but much lower than in the US- for locals, tuition fees are around €2000 a year. The top universities compare favourably to those in the US- TU Delft is between Carnegie-Mellon and Brown in the world rankings.
The job market seems pretty good (I’m a scientist so in a weird separate market), and if you’re working in the Randstad or in tech or academia language isn’t necessarily an issue. I would advise learning some Dutch as it makes things a bit easier (and is more polite), but expect people to hear your halting Dutch and immediately switch to English.
Integration is a tricky one. Many expats have complained that the Dutch are friendly but that it’s difficult to properly become part of a group of friends, so it’s common to end up in a ”bubble” of other non-Dutch people. The best way to avoid this is to find a club for some kind of sport, hobby or interest.
As with Berlin, it’s very close (by air or high-speed train) to many other interesting places- a weekend in Paris, London or Vienna is trivial.
In general, I really like living here- there is a general sense that things ‘just work’ in a way they don’t in the UK where I grew up or in the US where I’ve spent a lot of time. I would recommend seriously considering it as a place to move.
(Another note for Americans- if you are the sort to set up your own business, the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty might make getting a visa easier.)
If you’re from the US, moving to Canada would pose virtually no cultural hurdle at all, and particularly so if you are from the northern US. If there’s a cultural difference between Seattle and Vancouver, I just don’t see it. You might notice some differences if you’re from the US Bible Belt.
One thing to note is that Canada is a smaller, somewhat poorer, and less economically competitive place. And it shows in the high-end jobs that are available, and how much they pay. If you’re used to high-flying New York or San Francisco pay scales, you’re going to find Toronto quite a step down.
Finally, think carefully before committing to Toronto or Vancouver. Both cities are among the most unaffordable in the world.
+1
I always found Victoria to be one of the best Neighborhoods of Seattle… probably right behind Ballard but slightly ahead of Bellevue.
On the negative side, if your fears are justified and things really go off the rails, you might want to be further away than in a smaller weaker neighbor that the US has invaded before.
This makes sense and is consistent with my current thinking about Canada (though I didn’t realize that salaries were such a step down from the major US economic hubs).
Do you have any recommendations for specific cities/regions in Canada to consider? Toronto and Vancouver are the first two that come to mind for me, so if we are excluding those on the basis of cost-of-living, what would be your next choice? Is it better to just work down the list in order of population (so look at Calgary/Edmonton), or are there other areas that might strike a sweet spot between the conveniences of being population centers and the affordability of being in the countryside?
What do you do for a living? Do you need to work locally in person, or is some sort of remote work a possibility?
I personally work in tech, and was actually already working remotely before the pandemic started. So I’m not really worried at all about the difficulty of finding a job for myself.
My main concern is finding a place that seems like it will afford convenience and opportunity to my future family. So even though I would be perfectly fine working from a mountain town as long as it had reasonably fast internet, I would prefer to raise a family in a city large enough that it has good schools for my children and a reasonable breadth of job opportunities for them if they don’t end up in an industry as geographically flexible as tech. That being said, it also seems plausible that remote work will be much more common in all industries thirty years from now, so perhaps this is a moot point.
Also, on the topic of the big Canadian cities – how far outside of Vancouver does the housing bubble extend? Would suburbs 40 minutes from the city center still be quite expensive? And does Vancouver suffer from high cost-of-living generally, or is it really just housing that is abnormally expensive?
Let me suggest you consider Kitchener-Waterloo. It’s a smaller center, with a metro population of about half a million. It’s a bit more than an hour from Toronto, which is convenient when you need stuff only a truly big city provides, but much cheaper. The University of Waterloo, a major Canadian technical university is local. There are two high-performing local high schools: Sir John A. Macdonald and Waterloo C.I.. The main Canadian lab of Google is there, as are Open Text and what’s left of RIM. There are quite a few other local high-tech companies, too.
I’m a bit biased, since I grew up there.
Ottawa should also be on the list of reasonable Canadian cities for techies, IMO, but I may be biased because it’s the last place lived before moving to the US, and the top of my list of Canadian cities to move to if I decide not to retire in place after all.
Salaries are not the be all, end all, you have to also consider the cost of living.
Generally speaking, southern Germany has a very strong combination of good wages and low unavoidable expenses. You will pay more taxes, but much less in health insurance, rent is low and cars are affordable, however, also not a very English-speaking only friendly place at all, so if you do not think you can pick up German in fairly short order, no. Berlin is far better about the language, but rents are quite atrocious by German standards.
Any of the nordic countries will see you paid well, but not outrageously, health costs are just.. not a thing, and taxes sting. Quite a bit. Finland is very strongly recommended if you want to start a family on grounds of having the best educational system in the world. All are quite navigable in English.
Southern europe is very cheap if you can secure a job there that pays international rates, and the food and climate are fantastic. If you expect to earn an average-for-a-local-professional wage, uhm. No.
Norway? Low crime, high trust. Some racial tension in Oslo, but I can’t really see anybody looting and pillaging.
Quite competent and functional, with a very narrow spectrum of opinion – basically a cluster of centrist parties with a set of special interest parties (agriculture, the greens, the social liberals, christian democrats) trying to pull in different directions. The far left party can’t quite decide if they are communist or not, and has a single delegate, the far right is bigger, but want to have less road tolls and more restrictive immigration.
Education is all right, I think. I mean, everybody complains about how their nation is doing, we’re also like that. Schools are public and – like everything else – fairly egalitarian. Universities and the large majority of other higher education have free tuition.
Job market is okay (depends on your skills, I would think), with good job protection, holidays, and other benefits, but salary levels will likely be much lower for skilled specialists than elsewhere – especially urban US. Few people will collect more than $100K in wages.
Moderately? Practically everybody speaks English (maybe a bit less so than the Dutch, but better than Germans), people can seem a bit unfriendly to strangers, especially to people from more socially forward cultures (southern Europe, say).
One possibility to consider is the US, but outside the major cities. There were massive riots in Richmond VA and Boston MA; there were not in Harrisonburg VA or Springfield MA. In general, the US seems saner outside the big cities and the fast-growing cities.
Yes, absolutely nothing is going on in my town, it’s all business as usual. About a third of my coworkers are black, and I wonder what they’re all thinking about this, but obviously we don’t talk about politics at work, so I have no way of knowing.
Further evidence.
So right now, there are two large-scale civic crises taking place at the same time: COVID-19 and the protests against police violence. That strikes me as unusual. How far back do we have to go to find something similar?
1968-1969 has already been mentioned as the last time this particular plot sequence has been instanced by the simulation.
Are you sure they’re unrelated? Isn’t it a little like saying we’ve got a drought and a lot of bushfires…. at the same time! ?
OK, I’ll bite. What’s the connection between a a pandemic and responses to it, on the one hand, and violent protests against police violence, on the other?
1. There’s an existing background level of anger and resentment at the government for perceived poor handling of the crisis. Especially to the extent where it has disproportionately harmed already disadvantaged groups.
2. Lots of people are either unemployed or furloughed and so more willing and able to protest than they would be normally when it would mean taking time off work. Or use very limited free time.
3. Lots of people are at home and glued to the internet and tv, so the viral effect of the original video, and footage of protests is going to be greater. Lots of people commenting and engaging in discussion of what’s happening.
Lots of people are either unemployed or furloughed
I think this is really important. People are anxious for something to do and have no need to show up for work in the morning.
I’ve previously fretted that if we had a UBI there would be nothing to stop the people with no jobs from protesting all day for more UBI, and now I’ve got pretty good evidence for that.
Also a lot of people who have been cooped up and cut off from their usual forms of community and recreation.
If you’re right that the protests are solely ‘against police violence’, then I’m probably wrong, except for perhaps the scale and extent of the protests. But isn’t there a palpable build up of frustration, anger, and anti-authority sentiment that has found an outlet? 40 million people suddenly unemployed?
If George Floyd’s death had occurred, say, a year ago, wouldn’t the reaction have been more like the Rodney King riots? I suppose my supposition is that the spread of the protests, and their intensity have a lot to do with lockdown fever, and are not just about police (racial) brutality.
ETA somewhat ninja’d by Alkatyn
I think there is a lot of randomness in what events trigger protests. Basically all the people inclined to protest police brutality, racism, Trump, etc., needed a Schelling point so they could all show up and protest on the same day, and the Floyd murder provided that, but if it hadn’t gotten so much coverage becaues other news pushed it off the headlines, maybe it would have been one more local outrage and protests would only have happened locally in MN.
And yeah, the lockdowns probably provided fuel for the fire. And C19 is still there, spreading despite the fact that most US media and lots of the public have lost interest. It seems likely that we will see a spike in cases in a month or two as a result.
I completely and totally disagree with the notion that the lockdowns contributed to this.
The same people who are protesting today were widely denouncing anti-lockdown protests (even though they were about 1% as big as these) as recently as five days ago.
This is pure, unmitigated tribal warfare, and nothing more.
@Matt M
People aren’t that rational.
For example, while I advocate for lesser lockdowns and am a single-issue voter, I follow all rules and don’t break them. Most people are the opposite; they’ll vote or go to a counter anti-lockdown protest, thus breaking the law while supporting it.
People are angry and frustrated and anxious. Many of the people whose mental health has been affected are still pro-lockdown. But they still feel unsettled. That’s the thing.
This anger and anxiety is manifested in breaking things. And yes, I agree, that doesn’t mean those people will support the end of the lockdown.
I still think that the lockdowns are fucking with people’s brains, even if they support the lockdown.
@Matt M
I think the “lockdowns contributed to the protests/riots” thing is more like, “lots of people who would protest this kind of stuff have been cooped up for months and are unemployed.” They wanted an excuse to get out of the house, and this is it.
And I think this is 100% conjecture that is not supported by any particular evidence and that is highly self-serving to those who are promoting it (by providing a convenient excuse for inexcusable actions).
It’s plausibly true, sure. There might be a connection. But let’s not just insist there is one without evidence…
Sounds like something to save for the .25 thread, then.
@Matt M,
Civil unrest was an entirely predictable result of the lockdowns. Less probable but definitely possible results of lockdowns include war, genocide and famine. These were valid reasons to be concerned about spending trillions of dollars and making everyone unemployed and giving states all over the world carte blanche to lock people in their homes.
As I’ve said repeatedly for months, the worst case scenario of lockdowns is not the hit to the economy (though that is bad enough), it is the set of things that can happen as a result of the hit to the economy.
Also, some evidence for that is included here:
https://reason.com/2020/06/02/did-covid-19-lockdown-orders-help-fuel-riots-nationwide/
Economic fallout from the lockdowns will have terrible effects. Civil unrest is one of those. War between the US and China, authoritarian governments around the world grabbing more power and doing terrible things, those things are possible too.
For example, the Treaty of Versailles had some bad effects on Germany’s economy, which led to all sorts of horrible things happening later. Bad economy is bad news: it increases the risk of the worst sorts of things happening.
Orange guy, but that is why this should be in a CW thread.
Fair point. Perhaps because I’m not American I didn’t have any sense that this might have CW undertones. Apologies if that’s the case.
What is CW?
CW is short for Culture War: issues that are perennial flash-points of conflict between the left and right, and particularly so in the context of the US. Affirmative action is one example.
We aren’t supposed to talk about Culture War issues in the whole-numbered open threads, but we are free to talk about them in the .25, .5, and .75 threads.
What’s the connection between a a pandemic and responses to it, on the one hand, and violent protests against police violence, on the other?
The pandemic [major aspects of it-EDIT] and the violent protests are both alleged to be fabricated by authors featured at OffGuardian and LewRockwell, as well as by individuals such as Gonzalo Lira and Patrick Henningsen. Names both from the Left and the Right.
Fabrication: motives?
We’re in a serious, systemic economic crisis. It is not uncommon for times of such crisis to appear diametrically opposed movements, one of decentralisation / disintegration, and another an attempt of an oligarchy or competing oligarchies to extend their control in a more or less totalitarian fashion.
Both feed on each other.
How can we determine what of the phenomena you asked about is a result of spontaneous disintegration, what a result of a conspiracy? …
For answering that question fairly, I sense I lack the conceptual apparatus. I simply feel more needs to be thought out here.
I don’t really have a clear sense about how big any of these things are, but were both Occupy and the Tea Party in their 2010-2011 peak, as big as the current police violence protests? (Obviously neither was anywhere near as large as covid, but the last thing as big as covid was *maybe* the HIV situation of the ’80s or the end of the cold war, but more likely World War II.)
The part I don’t get about all of this is the demonstrations outside the US. Why demonstrate about police violence against black people in places where there basically are no black people in the first place, like the Netherlands? It’s not like demonstrations in Amsterdam are going to make the tiniest bit of difference to US policy makers.
Some people are just outrage junkies, I guess.
Well, it never stopped Portland…
Dutch person here.
There are definitely black people in the Netherlands. There is definitely racial tension in the Netherlands. There are definitely issues with racial profiling by police (to the point of there being illegal ‘here’s how to do racial profiling’ police manuals).
I think the biggest thing, though, is US-ian cultural infectiousness. We listen to US music, we cheer at the heroes in US blockbusters. We feel like we understand US issues and that US pain is our pain because we drink in US culture every day. People often say ‘Americans always forget that the US is not the whole world’ but it’s definitely also true that non-Americans sometimes forget that the whole world is not the US. So we feel responsible to do something about it if things get out of hand over there.
Which is completely bonkers because the US really doesn’t give a damn about us.
But the media is not the culture and is not the country. I don’t think non-Americans’ feelings of understanding US issues are well founded.
I fully agree. They’re not at all well-founded.
But the US looks relatable enough until something happens that shows the inferential gap to its fullest abyssal glory.
Your Eurovision entries are just straight up country-western music complete with cowboy hats.
Seriously, the first time it happened it was funny. The second time I asked my wife “Are the Dutch okay?”
Ilse DeLange is one of our biggest singers and Warner Music wanted to make her a big American star, having her work with Barry Beckett (in Nashville), who also produced albums with Bob Dylan and Paul Simon. That didn’t work out, but she has a solid following in the low countries.
Calling them outrage junkies is a bit unchariable.
I suspect these people are legitimately outraged and want to do what they can, even if its direct impact is fairly minimal. But at the very least, it makes the US state look bad on an international level, encourages politicians outside the US to condemn the US and shows solidarity with American protestors.
“Outrage junkies” is far down the list of charitable reasons to think someone might want to protest about an issue that doesn’t directly affect them, or that they can directly affect.
To our shame, Canada has some of the same issues with regard to black people as the US, enough so that there’s a Candian branch of Black Lives Matter.
Our treatment of black people is probably not the worst of our systemic racism – that’s reserved for “Indians” (aka indigenous Canadians), but we collectively do an even more thorough job of being unaware of it, and even congratulating ourselves for being better than the US.
@johan_larson
We have (ex-)colonies in the Caribbean to which we brought black slaves to work the plantations. The Kingdom of The Netherlands includes these states that didn’t choose to become independent (and so is distinct from the country of The Netherlands, which is only in Europe).
There has been quite a bit of migration to The Netherlands from these (ex-)colonies, just like is true for most colonial nations.
see also: Bon Bini Holland.
I just posted this on the last open thread, hope it’s okay to repost it here where it might get seen.
Can anyone recommend a psychiatrist in Australia, preferably in Sydney but I may be able to work with someone in Brisbane or Melbourne as well, and preferably with expertise in sleep?
Does anyone have experience with or thoughts about what I call the ‘draft approval problem’? I’m thinking mainly about creative commissions e.g. writing music, copywriting, making art or videos etc.
The problem is this: in many industries, putting the ‘polish’ on a finished, professional piece of work requires many hours of work. This polish is what stops the work seeming amateurish and is a huge part of the finished aesthetic, and has a big impact on the gut-level instantaneous reaction that people have when they see or hear the work.
If you have a client commissioning work from you, you probably want to show the client ‘sketches’, works in progress, proofs of concept, drafts etc., to make sure you’re heading in the right direction before you commit the resources to polishing. They will probably insist on this, and even if they don’t, it’s probably a good idea so you don’t waste lots of time polishing a product they don’t want. In fact you often have to actually pitch these drafts of your creative work competitively on a tight budget and timeframe.
Often clients will dislike these proofs of concept because they just don’t feel the same as all the polished professional works the client is comparing them against. Even something that they would end up loving as a finished project gets rejected in the draft stage because it doesn’t feel right.
Solutions I’ve got so far:
Find a cheap and easy way to imitate this level of polish when sending any kind of draft or pitch.
Show examples of your previous polished work and try to explain how the process works (this rarely gets through.)
Rely on some kind of reputation/prestige so you can effectively say ‘just leave it with me.’
Don’t let clients hold the expectation that they can give prescriptive creative feedback on the work.
Work with people who understand the art form and the process of creating it.
This is a long comment already, but as a concrete example: say I had to compose and produce a five-minute orchestral score for a film scene. The client sends it to me with a ‘reference track’ they’ve been using during editing, which is a gorgeous, professionally-produced orchestral recording with a real orchestra, written by Hans Zimmer or something. They’ve watched the scene with this reference track literally hundreds of times. The client has seen my previous finished work, understands what’s achievable within their budget, and I’ve explained to them how the process works. Now I have to:
1. Write the piece of music (maybe on piano or something, it depends.)
2. Write the parts for all the different instruments and programme them in MIDI.
3. Spend time polishing the MIDI programming to make it sound more human and less robotic.
4. Schedule time in a recording studio and book professional musicians to perform certain key parts.
5. Edit all of this and mix together all the recorded and MIDI parts so they blend nicely.
6. Polish and refine the final combined audio so it’s at the right level, feels rich and full etc.
When and where do you send drafts? If I send them a draft at step 1 and a clear explanation of the above process, they’ll come back with ‘here’s a list of orchestral pieces, I want it more like these, with violins and timpanis and oboes and [Inception noise]…”. If I send a draft at step three with a clear explanation of the process they’ll freak out at the lack of human feel in the solo instruments (it just won’t feel right) and start questioning their decision to hire you. Often they won’t know exactly why they don’t like it, it just doesn’t feel like the Hans Zimmer score, so they’ll start giving prescriptive feedback on unrelated things and it’s back to step one. If you wait until step six to show them the work, there’s the distinct possibility they’ll watch their scene with your new track for the first time, and it won’t be the Hans Zimmer piece they’ve watched it with a hundred times, so it will feel catastrophically wrong to them even if it’s a great piece of work, and you’re back to step one.
Anyone with more experience than me want to share any anecdotes or tips?
This is why creative agencies traditionally had to be at least somewhat deep-pocketed to go into business and creative individuals worked for them rather than for themselves – they could front the costs of polishing a pitch or a draft to make it impressive for the client, if you are a freelancer you need to manage your clients expectations preferably without taking them too deep into the sausage-making process and/or charge them accordingly.
I have no idea whether this would work, but: Suppose you take the nice polished Zimmer score and “un-polish” it. Figure out all the notes and then have it played by a MIDI synthesizer, or transcribe it for piano. And then you say to your client: OK, I’ve got some sketches for you, but they’re only sketches. For comparison’s sake, I’m going to play you how that Zimmer reference track would have sounded at this stage in production, and then I’ll play you mine.
Some reasons why it might not work: Un-polishing is probably quite a lot of work. The client may not trust your un-polishing and may blame its lack of polish on your (nonexistent) incompetence at un-polishing. The client, listening to the un-polished Zimmer, may have enough mental echoes of the original that it sounds better than it “should”.
(Also, for the avoidance of doubt: I am not “someone with more experience”, and in particular I have never tried this.)
Every Frame a painting had a video on this alledging that the music for the MCU was bland and unmemorable because the composers were basically asked to take the temp music and change it up a bit so the
teachercopyright holder doesn’t notice.I was going to reference this exact video.
And I hate that mainstream film music is like this now? It’s so galling when the insert songs are head and shoulders above the score, because the director just doesn’t let the composer to their thing. In contrast, anime composers often don’t get to see the animation at all, and the show ends up editing to the original tracks, which creates better synergy.
Even back in the day, the director for The Magnificent Seven said that he wished he could have had that great Elmer Bernstein theme available to him beforehand, and he would have shot/edited things to be even more spectacular to match the music. The Joker film benefited from having their main theme available on set.
I feel like editing should always be done to the draft track, instead of temp tracks.
Oh wow I had forgotten about this video! Thanks for the link.
If this is actually about music, have you tried checking out the vi-control forum? A lot of the people there work in the film/video game music industry [edit: Hans Zimmer actually occasionally posts there, or used to, anyway], and it’s entirely dedicated to virtual instruments. From what I understand, it’s pretty common for directors to hear midi mockups, although these can be pretty high quality. For no reason other than I like sharing my work, as an amateur, here’s what I was able to do re-creating the Star Trek Picard theme by ear one afternoon: https://soundcloud.com/mpalenik/recreation-of-star-trek-picard-theme-song
That’s awesome, and thanks for the forum suggestion I’ll check it out. I think you might be right, just spending more time on polishing MIDI production for drafts seems important.
I’ve been on the other side of this a few times; I don’t really have any advice other than to try to work for clients who have been in the same position you’re in. On the other hand, I’ve also been in the position of saying to myself “yeah, that’ll look great once he finishes it” and then the contractor comes back three days later with something that looks indistinguishable from the draft.
So far my best theory is that my job as a director is to trust that the guy I’m paying knows what he’s doing and cares about the finished product as much as I do, and not get too caught up in a “vision” to let the artist make his own decisions.
I think the ideal is to make sure it’s possible for the contractor to see his piece in something close to the final context, but that usually isn’t possible when you’ve got a time constraint.
A rundown on murder rules in Minnesota, for some reason. I know a great deal about criminal law, but am not from Minnesota, so this might be wrong in serious ways. This is important because it affects the punishment if the person is convicted. (Note: I have changed my handle to make me more Google-proof; I have posted before on criminal law issues.)
Let’s talk basic murder principles:
Every state has different rules. You’ve got your deliberate murder: Scott likes bananas, and I hate them, so he decides he wants to kill me with lots of bullets. Then he does. Easy.
There’s implied malice murder. In preparation for shooting me, Scott uses his firearm for target practice in his multi-occupant home and it kills either another occupant or someone outside. He knows it’s dangerous, but doesn’t care. That’s also murder.
There’s also felony murder, which is very different in different states, but the basic rule is that when Scott and Scott Aaronson decide to rob David Friedman’s house with David in it, and SSC Scott turns out to be a little more stabby than Scott Aaronson expected, that’s still murder for both of them; maybe check out your co-robbers next time.
If you engage in dangerous behavior that you don’t know is dangerous to human life even if it’s stabbing someone 37 times in the chest, that’s manslaughter in most places due to something called the “merger rule.” If you are assaulting someone, that’s usually not a predicate felony for murder; you have to show some sort of malice.
In Minnesota, the officer was charged with third degree murder..
Third degree murder in Minnesota is implied malice murder. So: Acting without the intent to kill, but with some appreciation of the risks that were ignored.
Second degree murder, as every outlet which has covered this will tell you, requires intent to kill. But, that’s not correct generally as second degree murder in Minnesota includes most felony murders. Is it correct in this case? This case would only be covered by the merger doctrine if Minnesota were located in (say) California; as it is Minnesota has
rejected the merger doctrine and permits felony assaults to be the predicate felony for murder.
So, what’s a felony assault? Well, a third degree felony assault includes one where there is substantial bodily injury occurs. Is that good enough? Do we bootstrap almost every felony assault that ends in death as a murder? Probably.
It gets complicated from here, but a shaken baby case where a late secondary appeal was denied on procedural grounds very strongly implies that it is. This would make an assault causing death using objectively dangerous behavior second-degree murder in Minnesota, even if the person did not appreciate the risk.
Now, again, I’m not an expert on Minnesota law and I haven’t seen this discussed anywhere by anyone, so there’s always the chance I am wrong. It’s also very possible that this has been covered and my Google-fu failed. A third possibility is that I’m right and it’s lonely here. Place your bets.
Maybe Georgia later.
According to this, the three cops who were in the scene but did not prevent the death can be charged with 2nd degree felony murder as well.
A principle that afaik is not codified anywhere but can still be used by the prosecution as an argument to the jury that police officers must be held to a higher standard of restraint in the use of force than say an ordinary citizen defending themselves.
At the end it will all come down to whether the prosecution can be relied upon to pursue this case earnestly without giving in to pressure from police organizations and the politicians aligned with them as well as the choice of jury.
More interestingly, what needs to happen for them to be tried under federal murder statutes rather than a ‘civil right violation’ ?
Even more than that- every officer who contributed to the blue line that caused the murderer to feel empowered to continue his pattern of felony assaults could be considered an accomplice to the assaults, and thus catch heat for the murder.
I don’t really think it’s in the interest of justice to actually prosecute the entire PD for the murder, but having someone credible put the option on the table would go a long way towards stopping police everywhere from being accomplices to felonies committed by other police.
I think the entire chain of command from Derek Chauvin and up to the commissioner or whatever the equivalent in Minneapolis is should see their careers terminated on the spot and possibly face civil liability for not having prevented it but no it does not make sense to criminally prosecute officers outside the command chain who were not involved in this incident even from the same PD, this is just not how criminal responsibility works.
Does that standard apply to other criminal conspiracies?
Suppose that Alan and Bob and Carl go out felonously robbing people together every few days. One day, Carl gets sick and stays home – and that’s the day Alan kills someone. Bob can obviously be charged with felony murder, but would Carl be charged too for helping establish the pattern of felonies?
Not for that killing, if any of them gets charged for running or being members of a criminal organization perhaps then.
Legally, I’m pretty sure Carl isn’t eligible for a felony murder charge in that case. Pragmatically, we want to encourage Carl to walk away from the whole thing as soon as Alan gets too murdery, and we do not want to encourage Carl to stick around so that he can make sure there are no surviving witnesses to whatever Alan does that Carl can never not be punished for.
It depends on:
1. If Carl helped plan the specific robbery, and to what degree; and
2. The state they are in.
In California, Carl’s off the hook either way. It’s very unlikely to be provable, because even if prosecutors make deals with Alan and Bob to testify against Carl (and, prosecutors, don’t do that) they’ll need solid additional evidence because both the law and jurors think that accomplices might lie for their own benefit.
I would reconsider using real people in such examples.
Yeah, this
That’s two votes not to use real people, so it’s time to listen to that. (I do it very commonly in trainings and speeches and it goes over well; I can see how the internet makes this more off-putting.)
Thanks.
It’s a good technique, but combining it with the more serious topic of murder feels a little off.
(I still find the mental image of Scott Aaronson attempting to rob someone’s house absurdly hilarious though.)
Alice and Bob are probably getting pretty sick of this by now; possibly we need a moratorium on applying those names to real people and in the meantime pass the hat to collect hazard pay for everyone stuck with those names.
We need some temporary replacements.
Karen and Chad?
@Randy M: That harms more people!
I used to use Anne and Bill for my econ stories, since that gives me A and B.
Also the names of my wife’s parents.
I have no objection to the use of real people. Now I’ve been warned.
But you might have gone on to describe the legal consequences if I get to the sword sitting on top of the china cabinet before Scott manages to free the gun stuck in his pocket.
Minnesota murder law seems very unique to Minnesota.
In Minnesota state law defines substantial bodily harm to mean “bodily injury which involves a temporary but substantial disfigurement, or which causes a temporary but substantial loss or impairment of the function of any bodily member or organ, or which causes a fracture of any bodily member.”
A lawyers website talking about Minnesota says “Substantial bodily harm is the mid-level category. It is defined as “bodily injury which involves a temporary but substantial disfigurement, or which causes a temporary but substantial loss or impairment of the function of any bodily member or organ, or which causes fracture of any bodily member.” A broken bone or other semi-permanent injury are typical of this level. Also, if someone is left temporarily unconscious (knocked out), this “impairment of the function of a bodily member or organ,” in this case, the brain, will qualify. In several cases, a cut that required stitches also qualified.”
This is more than run of the mill bodily harm(fifth degree assault under normal circumstances) but less than great bodily harm ie a “bodily injury which creates a high probability of death, or which causes serious permanent disfigurement, or which causes a permanent or protracted loss or impairment of the function of any bodily member or organ or other serious bodily harm.”(first degree assault)
So significant bodily harm seems to roughly translate to a trip to the ER.
But Minnesota seems to in practice, contrary to the base reading of the law, define assaults by the injuries the act would normally cause, not the ones they actually cause, in the odd circumstances that they differ. Otherwise the shaken baby would be first degree assault, not third; shaking the baby ended up causing permeant organ damage. I would be interested in seeing more Minnesota jurisprudence on this point. Also if someone shoves a guy at the grocery store two feet in the middle of an aisle and this ends up blinding the other person, is the shover charged with first or fifth degree assault, or compromise absurdly on third degree.
Textually the interpretation where the charge is based on outcomes standard to the type of attack and not what actually resulted is incredibly weak. The laws say “Whoever assaults another and inflicts…. bodily harm” not “Whoever assaults another in a way that would typically inflict” but at the same time most people feel strongly that the type of action done by the criminal matters. So it would not be surprising if the law as intended and lived is more about what kind of injury would result normally result from the action.
If this is the case, if someone engages in some unjustifiable act of violence that would be prosecuted, but would normally not send someone to the ER that would not rise to the level of a third degree assault, even if it resulted in death. Because at base it would be a fifth degree assault not a third degree assault. So in very odd cases where aggressive and repeated shoving someone at the grocery store in a criminal manner that sets off a serious of incredibly unlucky events in the person’s death, it would be an assault ending in death, but it would not be felony murder and so another charge like third degree murder or manslaughter might be used.
In State v. Stay, dealt with by the Minnesota Supreme Court in 2019 does not address this directly, but seems to assume that this is the case. Some one punched someone else once in the jaw and thereby killed him and was charged with fifth degree assault and manslaughter. This was a disagreement about the exact jury instructions for the manslaughter charge and the court ruled first degree manslaughter does not require the State to prove that death or great bodily harm was a reasonably foreseeable result when the underlying crime is fifth-degree assault. This case assume implies a single punch to the jaw from a normal person, that causes death, does not rise to the level of third degree assault.
I didn’t include all this because I’d already ran long – though I alluded to it and one of the links talks about it – but I thoroughly endorse this message and am delighted to see someone doing the work to figure out what the law actually is. The commentariat is awesome.
I’ve decided to follow Scott’s example and post my novel one chapter at a time online. The site is launching today at Mayfear Novel, and will be updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday until the novel is complete.
It’s a psychological horror novel set in the world of tech and media startups.
Blogroll is much improved, thank you! It now has the effect of attracting the reader to a bunch of interesting and organized content, rather than repelling the reader with multiple layers of obscurity and dysfunction.
It now has the effect of attracting the reader to a bunch of interesting and organized content, rather than repelling the reader with multiple layers of obscurity and dysfunction.
Mrs Doyle and the Teamaster 😀
I just posted a newsletter about stuff that happened in forecasting in May 2020. You can sign up here, and find it here. Feedback is welcome.
The annual Little Lytton contest asks contestants to write one-sentence answers, to the prompt: the worst first sentence to a novel. The trick (and challenge) is in writing a sentence that is bad without lacking authenticity; if it sounds like you’re trying to write a bad sentence, it isn’t funny. ‘Intentional unintentional comedy’.
The organiser and judge compiles a shortlist, adding commentary (which is often even funnier than the entries themselves). It’s easy to spot bad writing, but often much harder to explain why it’s so bad, and he does a good and entertaining. I won’t quote any submissions here, as tastes will differ as to what is and isn’t funny. I’ll just urge you to have a look yourself, if you’re not already familiar: http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html
Submissions for 2020 close 15 June.
I didn’t know this was still a going thing. I miss the Bad Hemingway competition, which went defunct a few years ago. One winner was a mashup of Hemingway and A.A. Milne called “Hills Like White Heffalumps.”
I have an email folder where I collect spam that advertises semi-fraudulent bottom of the barrel academic conferences. I affectionately named it “felicitations with certificate”, which was one of the perks offered for accepting the honor of “the position as an Organizing Committee Member for the Computer Science-2018”. I have parodied the contents of this folder extensively, so I am no stranger to “intentional unintentional comedy”. This link made my day and I might just have to submit something.
Let us know if they make the shortlist. (And if they don’t, please post them anyway.)
I for one was intrigued and charmed by the esoteric blog roll. The new one may be more navigable but doesn’t excite me. Also, I feel like thelastpsychiatrist deserves inclusion despite being inactive.
Considering how esoteric some of the blogs are, an exoteric (not to mention terrestrial and, at best, ambivalent) blogroll classification doesn’t seem quite appropriate.
I want to signal-boost this. The Borgesian list of blogs had a lot to do with why I stayed at SSC. That is, it was clear based on content that if I were going to read a blog on the internet, I should read SSC: the Borgesian list of blogs on the front page did a lot to resolve the hypothetical of whether I needed a blog to read in the first place.
+1
I think it depends on what you think the point of the blogroll is. If the point is to actually direct people to some of these blogs, then the new version is better. But if the point is to convey the tone of this blog and make people stay here, then the old one is better. It’s like the difference between a bookstore that has clearly labeled shelves and bright lighting, and one that evokes a literary atmosphere with lots of dark wood and velvet and everything labeled in ornate and unreadable fonts.
The changed blogroll is an example of a set of things that upset me: things that are clearly better, and nearly obligatory due to their advantages, but lack all elegance. Ah well 🙁
the blogroll has changed – less Borgesian, more actually useful
*Grumble, grumble* Kids these days, with their “actually useful” and “accessible” and “clearly understandable”, in our day you had to translate the entirety of the Iliad by a rush light without using a crib and then you were beaten briskly to teach you not to get notions above your station! 🙂
Well, I suppose, if it makes things better!
Round 2 looking for what Tyler Cowen calls “quake reads.”:
Most nonfiction authors like making big statements about little subjects, or small statements about big subjects. I’m looking for those that make big statements about huge topics, and change your whole viewpoint on life.
A few examples to make my point clearer: Rene Girard, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth), Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens), Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan), Robert Greene, Michel Foucault, Matt Ridley, Jared Diamond, Freidrich Nietzsche, David Graeber (Debt: A 5,000 Year History), and Julian Jaynes (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind).
These people have totally flipped my worldview, and I want to be amazed again. Do you have any recommendations for authors that make huge statements about grand topics.
Note that I am posting about this again because I feel that the answers are so open, and that there is always the possibility of discovering a world-shaking read. The amount of books out there is immense, and the more I can learn about the great ones the less I will have to waste time reading the mediocre ones.
Round 1: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/27/open-thread-154-75/#comment-904241
My top 2 are Huemer’s “The Problem of Political Authority” and Robert Trivers’ early papers on kin conflict, reciprocal altruism, and parental investment.
Does this Trivers book look like it covers what most intrigued you?
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/natural-selection-and-social-theory-9780195130621?cc=us&lang=en&#
Yes. I got a paperback, and didn’t pay that much.
As you get older and read more, shouldn’t we expect to encounter such books less often? That is, books that would be “quake reads” for our younger selves wouldn’t be for our older selves. There’s a reason certain books end up being enthralling and exciting to teenagers that aren’t to adults.
I think that is definitely true. One other thing that age adds on is a propensity to not change your thoughts, which could also affect how make ‘quake reads’ you experience. When you’re young you are still moldable, which is ultimately the prime virtue of youth (as Proust says). I wouldn’t necessarily say that you would encounter less quake reads when you are older, just that you may not actually respond to them like a young person would.
You’re missing nothing. That’s NT’s entire oeuvre of books- a good insight that can be succinctly explained in a paragraph, a few good examples that could round out a chapter or two, and two hundred pages of NT self-aggrandizing.
It’s arguably not even true that people underestimate the frequency of rare calamities. e.g. selling stock options makes money on average, prediction markets consistently overestimate the likelihood of rare events, and selling insurance is profitable.
That is not really relevant, insurance is paying overall to avoid a catastrophic loss.
It is not betting that insurance company underestimated risks.
(and neither apply in cases like USA “health insurance” where you are de facto buying a subscription)
People pay for insurance on non-catastrophic items too. The extended warranty on a phone is insurance with strongly negative expected value on a non-catastrophic risk.
@Chalid
That’s not for an economic reason, but an emotional one. People are are insuring against large emotional damage of losing all the stuff on their phone and also having to spend the money for a new one.
OK, I forgot about them – I heard about them but this type of scam remains relatively rare in my country.
People are still not backuping stuff? I thought that it would one of good sides of Google/Apple trying to vacuum all possible data also via storing backuped data in form accessible by them?
Dunno about Apple, but annoyingly for Google/Android, no, there is no supported way of completely backing up the state of your phone in such a way that in the event of data loss you can restore the entire state or portions thereof to your wiped-clean phone or a new phone. About the most you can do is have it set up to automatically sync your photo collection to whatever-it-is Google’s calling their cloud-photo-thing this week, and of course things like email or your Kindle books are stored in the cloud and just cached on your phone anyway. But things like the settings on all your apps, which only represent a few hundred K of data but probably a few hours of your time fiddling everything the way you want it? Nope, that doesn’t get backed up. (There’s a setting on Android that says to back that up to Google. I’m not quite sure how that’s supposed to work, I’ve never seen the settings successfully reappear after a system wipe or a switch to a new phone, or even a deinstall and reinstall of an individual app, so I’m not quite sure where exactly the “restore” part of this backup process comes from.)
About the only software I’ve ever seen for Android that does anything resembling what a Unix admin would call a proper system backup is TWRP, but it’s really fiddly, and unlocking the boot ROM and installing an entire alternate recovery partition goes well beyond anything one could call “officially supported”.
People don’t optimise for expected wealth. They optimise for expected utility. Marginal utility of money diminishes so it’s rational to buy insurance in some cases.
The book is two things. Its first the observation that unexpected events happen too frequently* and the second is that our systems are set up to work only if these unexpected events don’t happen more frequently than we think they will. If you take those two parts as correct then its functionally the most important book of the last X years, where X is an impressive number.
*Not the actual insight, the actual insight is that you cannot predict the rate of future unexpected events from past events, which carries a whole different set of implications and is much more important.
I liked Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. But I can’t really remember anything about what the difference between them is.
Henrich, “The Secret of Our Success” (which I was introduced to by Scott’s review a few months ago) was like this for me. Also Kahneman, “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. Maybe Michael Pollan’s book “The Botany of Desire” (I think I only read one of his later books, but none of the reviews suggested they were as captivating as this one, with its central thesis that plants bred us rather than us breeding the plants).
For what it’s worth, I think of Sapiens, Guns Germs and Steel, and Debt as ones I feel similarly about, from the ones you mention (though Debt is one of the very few books I haven’t been able to bring myself to finish, because of its infuriating attempt to ignore that he’s just refuting just-so stories with his own just-so stories).
This is probably not what you meant at all. For me though, The Art of Negotiating the Best Deal changed my outlook about politics, national defense, competitive advantage and cooperation, what negotiation is actually about and how it brings value to the world. And practically, listening to it 8 years ago increased my net worth, maybe by 50%.
What are the best tactics that it teaches you?
You should check out his book Skin in the Game. That book is much shorter than Antifragile and The Black Swan, and has a great wealth of mental models, especially for ethics. I think that Taleb’s strength lies in telling stories about his concepts, circling around them to make them clear and strong in the mind. I personally think that is writing is funny; his feisty Lebanon background really shows. I remember him saying that Twitter is the natural state of mankind, like arguing with each other in the marketplace.
One thing that I most respect about him is his independence. I always like listening to autodidacts.
The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict by William Cavanaugh is probably a good example. I haven’t read it yet, just watched some author’s lectures on this topic, so I can’t 100% honestly recommend it, but if you look for “big statements on huge topics”, yeah, you will get it. Can you imagine bigger statement than one of the main theses of the book, that “actually no such thing as religion even exists”?
Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve is a classic if you haven’t read it. I also love his Human Accomplishment.
Because CW stuff has been literally enraging me lately, I’ve decided to give up social media (Facebook and Twitter, the ones I use) for a week. I’m also trying to avoid “the news” in general but haven’t made a hard commitment there.
I don’t think it will be too difficult. I don’t actually *like* social media that much, it’s just like, something I do when I get bored, which happens a lot. The biggest problem is that during these brief moments of boredom, grabbing my phone and checking social media has become something of an instinct. It’s just what I do when I have a couple minutes to kill.
So, does anyone have any suggestions of either other things to do on my phone that can kill a couple minutes (it can’t be any serious reading, for serious reading I need 10+ minutes and a distraction-free environment), or something else I can do when I feel the boredom instinct coming on (note that sometimes this happens like, when I’m in an elevator or something)?
If I find a successful replacement and the experiment works, I may give it up longer-term. I’m keeping SSC comments as a place where I can CW in a respectable and dignified manner without getting too angry (and the fact that we’re no-CW for half the week should help!)
Is there a particular subreddit you can bookmark, something like this? Posts seem to be every few hours so may not be fast enough. But you could find one that’s more active or more to your own interests. Or looking at cat pictures or the like on Imgur.
If you do this, you could use an addon like LeechBlock to keep you away from reddit comments, while allowing you to browse it for the top-level links.
There’s a series of mid-tier technical books called “97 Things Every ____ Should Know”. They’re collections of short (1-3 page) essays from professionals organized around a loose theme, with each essay basically being a single distilled point of advice. I find that one section is a really good fit for a 5 minute gap. This specific series will be less useful to you if you don’t work in tech, but there may be similar works in other fields.
Alternatively, Flow Free is a game that supplies a large number of spacial reasoning puzzles that can each generally be completed in a minute or two.
Can confirm, Flow Free is a fun game. Looks to me like it’s 1:1 with circuit board layout. Having done circuit board layout, I didn’t find it challenging for a while, but a couple of the 8×8 boards are giving me pause.
If you enjoy Backgammon, it works well as a ‘play for a couple minutes at a time’ game on your phone. BGNJ is the best app for serious play.
1) Chess puzzles. Plenty of apps out there that just show you endless chess puzzles. Really great way to kill 30 seconds.
2) Have you considered taking up another language? Anki is a general-purpose flashcard program/app. Anything you want to memorize you can find decks for, or you can make your own decks. If you’ve been wanting to brush up on your spanish or something, load up Anki with spanish flashcards. Pull out the phone, do five flashcards while waiting in line.
These are what I use on my phone when I have to kill a few minutes.
Seconding Anki.
It’s how I’ve been learning Korean.
Moderately compelling, short-burst games could be useful here. (Or maximally compelling, if you’re not the type to get addicted or waste money on in-game purchases.) I don’t really play phone games but I’m sure people can give some suggestions?
edit: yep, three people already beat me to it!
There is a game called Word Trip that I am now addicted to (forming words from scrambled letters). Also Alphabetty Saga. Both of these games have carried me through some long lockdown longeurs.
I’ve actually been looking for a game like this—the New York Times has a neat daily game called Spelling Bee, but if you get too many points they lock you out. I’ve set myself the challenge of getting the pangram, since that’s the best scoring word, but it’s disappointing to pass over the dozens of shorter words. So thanks!
Reddit is a good way to kill a couple of minutes.
As far as dumping news and FB and so on, I went through that process last August. A few lessons learned:
1) I went cold turkey on FB and deleted my account. I was tired of the way it made me feel, and I replaced it with actually making a point of calling a friend on the phone when I got the urge to check FB. The key is to replace habitual behaviors with something healthy, rather than just try to dump something habitual all at once. Figure out what you like about facebook and find a way of separating that out from the Panopticon of Anxiety, and keeping it.
2) As far as the news, I wanted to pull myself out of the 24-Hour Outrage Cycle, but I wanted to keep any eye on developments that might be important to my family. What I did was to take all my news web sites and stick them in a bookmark folder called “Sunday”. Once a week, on Sunday, I open everything in the folder and read through it to see if there’s anything going on that will affect me or my family.
3) 10 months later, I’m still keeping both behaviors going. Looking back, the only thing that really surprised me about the process was how much easier it was than expected. I was reading the news two Sundays after starting the system and… it was terrible. I got through it, learned what I needed to, and moved on. Not remotely tempting. I can’t find the real quote but something something Mark Twain: “The cure for reading the news is to read last week’s news”
It can be annoyingly hard to avoid CW stuff on reddit, in my experience. A lot of the default subreddits are fairly steeped in it, and even once you filter them out I find it tends to leak into even unrelated subreddits.
I guess it depends on what you subscribe to. I haven’t seen any significant amount of CW stuff on r/DnDnext, r/woodworking, r/boardgames, or r/CCW.
The stuff reddit’s algorithm recommends to me, on the other hand…
DnD is going through a fairly SJ period, but stuff like Mike Mearls, Adam Koebel, Zak S, racism in Barovia, etc., may not be frequent enough to be significant.
While I probably shouldn’t suggest idle games they do seem to fill that particular niche.
Any specific ones in mind?
Cookie Clicker is always popular, though I’m a fan of Space Plan for actually having an end game.
A Dark Room and Universal Paperclips are both very good.
Anti-Idle appears to be pretty expansive, but isn’t not necessarily available anymore, since it’s a flash game.
I’ve been playing Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms. It’s pretty wholesome D&D-based fun.
Congratulations on your escape.
I’ll second Flow Free. Also the android port of Nethack works pretty well.
You’ll need a PC for this, but I highly recommend playing Endless Sky…though the open source nature means some authors just have to put some social jabs in.
I did the same thing; Twitter was getting pretty insane so I deactivated my account (probably temporarily). In those down minutes either I try to find some interesting article to read (usually via aldaily) or I just sit with my thoughts. I don’t really want an attention-sucking substitute, as I was looking at Twitter way too much.
I play a very simple game on my phone called Red Herring. It is a nice little parallel-thinking style timewaster that is easy to pick up and put down. The game is free, but I have bought every expansion pack they make. I highly recommend it.
Pokemon Go is an app that exists.
More serious answer : I check my email and read SSC comments during times like that, when I’m not catching invisible monsters.
Doesn’t Pokémon Go require you to like walk around a bunch to actually go to where the Pokémon are (hence the name)?
That doesn’t seem like something I can do when I have 1-2 minutes to kill at work… or while sitting on the couch.
They’ve put in a bunch of pandemic adaptions. You can probably do things in your couch for up to maybe 20 minutes a day, including some PvP.
My go-to is online bridge against robots – BridgeBase “Just Play Bridge” for short breaks, “4 Hands” for longer ones. My other go-to is French flashcards on AnkiDroid.
While sugesting reddit as an way to avoid social media feels like suggesting Heroin to avoid Meth, I like /r/AskHistorians/ as a time killer.
Or, /r/HistoriansAnswered which links to each AskHistorians thread that actually contains an not-deleted answer.
True, but a properly curated Reddit homepage can be a lot less rage/despair inducing than Twitter/Facebook, so maybe it’s more like nicotine patches to avoid smoking?
In addition to /r/AskHistorians, I’d also recommend /r/AskScience, /r/AskScienceFiction and /r/ExplainLikeIm5 are also pretty good.
I’ve been getting back into /r/GunPla during the quarantine, and I’ve been using /r/WhatsThisSnake for a few months now as a sort of exposure therapy for my slight phobia of snakes.
I quit all social media in 2012 and started actively avoiding journalism in 2016. I don’t own a smartphone. [ETA: Each of these actions alone vastly improved my quality of life. All three of them together and I’m damn near a constant state of bliss.] If you were planning to go at this for more than a week I’d recommend ditching the smartphone, but since it’s just a week, I recommend you start a challenging creative project and train yourself to think about it in spare moments.
By the way, here’s what I do to train myself in a new habit:
I choose a length of time, usually a week or a month, during which I want to train myself in the new habit. Then I tally (on a spreadsheet I look at each morning, but you can use anything) each day I do that thing. Then at the end of the training period I see how many days out of the training period I did the thing. Then I try to improve on that with another consecutive training period of the same length, and so on until it’s a real habit.
For something that’s multiple times a day, I’ll require myself to do the thing X times before I’m allowed to mark a tally for the day. So if you’re able to notice yourself about to reach for your phone and then stop yourself and do something else, say, twice in a day, you could count that as mission accomplished for the day. Then gradually increase X.
You could also do an inverse version of this, where you get a tally by default unless you pick up your phone and start to check social media, say, 3 times. So you give yourself a kind of 3-strikes-you’re-out system.
Let me know if that makes sense or not.
I own a smartphone but use it very limitedly*: I strongly second the massive positive impact on quality of life.
*Basically, I make and receive phone calls and texts, and use Google Maps when going to unfamiliar destinations. And I use AnkiDroid for French flashcards. (When I had a 2-hour bus ride one day a week, if the wi-fi wasn’t working I’d play Bridge.)
I use my phone as an alarm clock, a flashlight, GPS, and to play music/audiobooks/podcasts while driving. Also, occasionally, as a phone. Social media and news need not be part of the equation.
Being able to check email while not at a computer is definitely useful too.
I’m guessing you’re not much into fiction, huh? Because my go-to for phone content is relatively lower word count fanfiction.
Other people have found that their writing productivity has increased many times over by doing it on their phone in the little break moments.
I also tend not to go for my phone at all because I listen to music instead.
Relatedly, I can’t read fanfiction much anymore, but I’ve been enjoying Tower of God and God of Highschool on Webtoons. The chapters are really not digestible in a minute or two, but you don’t have to read a whole chapter at a time, and they’re well suited to reading on a phone.
Binging a long webcomic series can also be good for this. I recommend Schlock Mercenary.
For a quick read I like to browse Hacker News. The articles linked are rarely related to political current events and not necessarily technology-related, either. An added bonus is that the commenters seem to be of SSC-quality.
Hacker News is SSC-level in terms of intelligence, but not in terms of humility. When they encounter someone with a different opinion who they can’t laugh at as stupid, their brains break.
https://www.google.com/search?q=+site:news.ycombinator.com+shill
When I checked yesterday, this seemed legit.
Although as I type this, their #2 article is a “racism bad” post that is about as blatantly CW as you can possibly get…
Seems to be overall a mix of standard bog-fare journalism stuff (heavy CW), some interesting non-CW articles (the type you might find here on SSC), and insider tech stuff which is of minor interest to me at best.
Any simple games on your phone? I occasionally use “Divide and Conquer” for a few minutes diversion.
There are books that consist of lots of short bits, which I use for bathroom reading. Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish, for example.
For years my boyfriend had been trying to convince me to cut down on social media (Facebook and Reddit). But during the pandemic, once I realized I was at home all the time, I deleted the social media apps from my phone, since I now no longer have those minutes at the bus stop or on the airplane or whatever that made it seem necessary to have them on my phone. And on my computer I have a blocker installed that blocks social media sites (I think it’s currently set to operate 9 am to 6 pm 7 days a week on one computer, and 9 am to 5 pm five days a week on the laptop). So I’ve drastically cut down on my use. And neither Facebook nor Reddit is nearly as interesting or compelling once I’m interacting with them in a single block or two a day, rather than as constant back-and-forths on multiple topics.
I’ll have to see what makes sense for me to do once I start traveling again.
I don’t have a replacement, but I do use Pokemon Go for some of those down moments.
Leave the phone turned off, and use it as a focus for a mindfulness meditation exercise.
Perhaps pick a foreign language you’d like to learn. You can kill a couple minutes here and learn practicing vocabulary with some Anki flashcards or something similar.
I also have the Blue Letter Bible app on my phone, and when I have a few odd minutes, I’ll try to work my way through the Greek or Hebrew of a verse or two. It’s improved my koine Greek and Biblical Hebrew skills quite a bit, albeit quite slowly.
“Fifteen minutes a day can teach you a language. What can fifteen minutes of social media do?” (Duolingo)
Apparently, prevent people from being able to talk to other people.
There must be a piece of fiction out there casting social media as a cyber-tower of Babel.
Monument valley 2. That’s the android link, apple has it as well. I find it incredibly soothing and enjoy it in 2-3 minute intervals.
OH EM GEE They made Monument Valley 2?! The first is my favorite mobile game. Well, there goes my morning. Thanks!
Matt M says:
I recoiled in terror after sampling Twitter, but I joined Facebook last year, and this week my “friends” (former friends of 25+ years ago including my brother) disperate posts have been very depressing, and I empathize with your desire to be free of it.
Frankly I’ve been reading, um… disreputable amateur fiction instead, but for “classier” reading I suggest some classic tales by Fritz Leiber:
Induction
The Jewels in the Forest
The Bleak Shore
Lean Times in Lankhmar
In the Witch’s Tent
The Circle Curse
The Sadness of the Executioner
Beauty and the Beasts
The Cloud of Hate
Sea Magic
Oh hi Plumber. I was looking for a hardcover AE Van Vogt omnibus last night and, before I could find it, pulled out the Doubleday SF Book Club Frazetta-illustrated editions of the first nine Barsoom novels and their (non-illustrated, alas) collections of Leiber’s fantasies up through “Rime Isle” (1977).
@Le Maistre Chat,
Treasures indeed, that’s awesome!
FWIW I think Leiber’s earlier stuff is usually better (my guess is he peaked around 1970), and FWLIW the very first book I bought at my favorite bookstore (when it was across the street from my Junior High School) was A Princess of Mars with the Frazetta cover, I can’t remember what was my next purchase, but the one I remember next was Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre by H.P. Lovecraft.
Trying to dig up my C.L. Moore anthology right now as I have a hankering for some Jirel of Joiry tales again, if I lose patience looking for it I may go with Niven’s The Magic Goes Away again, or finally (after decades!) finish The Dying Earth, but what I feel shamed (by all the rave reviews) into trying again is The Shadow of the Torturer or Perdido Street Station, but I just never could get far into them before
My younger son taught himself to read when he was two and was reading the Narnia books by four. That raised the problem of finding books for someone with adult reading skills and a child’s tastes. So I gave him the Barsoom books, I think at about six. As best I remember it worked, but I should ask him for his memory of reading them.
I keep meaning to try Leiber and forgetting. Maybe now that you’ve linked a bunch I will. Thanks!
@Nick,
You’re very welcome!
I feel like my experiment was going okay (I absentmindedly “cheated” a couple times, but as soon as I realized what I was doing I immediately closed stuff) right up until every corporation I’ve ever done business with in any way decided to send me an email that my brain maps to “enemy CW propaganda.” Even e-mail isn’t safe anymore. Buy a pair of sneakers once and you’re dragged into this nonsense forever.
Maybe the whole “cabin in the woods” idea was the right one all along…
You can make a habit of unsubscribing.
But what if I actually want to know about the latest sneakers and whether or not they’re on sale?
Yeah I was sticking to video games, but then I’d swing by /r/Games and it’s all “game company delays event because other voices need to be heard right now.” Which is either because they genuinely believe in BLM, or cynically because they’re worried no one would pay attention to their video game announcements right now.
Really? browsing through r/games fp and page 2, I see one post about BLM, one about Paradox and unions and one about Tencent. Nothing else political.
Also, looking at how many games companies have behaved regarding the HK protests, I’m rather inclined to be on the cynical side.
“Everything” was too strong. But Sony delayed their PS5 reveal from June 4, CDPR is delaying their Cyberpunk 2077 infodump, and while I don’t care about Madden, EA is also postponing the Madden 2021 reveal trailer. I think there was some other stuff about companies donating things. Each of these specifically because of Floyd and the protests/riots. The goal is to avoid Culture War, and not be tempted to go into the threads and say “have you seen these statistics that don’t support your narrative?”
Edit: while we’re talking about video games, I just want to add that I beat Sekiro this weekend. So everyone will know how good I am at video games. I gotta tell somebody, anyway.
Given the thread (a few days ago and below) about “quake reads,” I’d like to unpack David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality, which I’ve mentioned on SSC a few times.
Deutsch’s modus operandi is to take what he considers our best, most accurate, most well-tested, and truest scientific theories and push them as far as they can logically go. His candidate is quantum mechanics, and his “far as it can go” is the multiverse. Deutsch pretty much invented the concept of quantum computing, and I think he has an unanswerable argument about the actual existence of parallel universes: If Shor’s algorithm is ever implemented on a 1,000-qubit quantum computer, those exponential upon exponential computations have to take place *somewhere*–and that somewhere is the 10>100 parallel universes employed in the calculation.
But that is just the beginning. In The Fabric of Reality, Deutsch weaves together evolutionary theory, quantum mechanics, and ontology to explain the role of knowledge in the universe. The examples he uses are highly conserved gene sequences, like those for ribosomal DNA, which are nearly identical across all types of life (from bacteria to human beings). Alter a single base pair in these genes and the protein does not function. The situation is different for other proteins, like hemoglobin, which come in more varieties and are thus “easier to vary” compared to the most highly conserved proteins, and is even more different for “junk DNA,” which probably serves some function but is even easier to vary without deleterious results.
Now, imagine taking a multiversal view of these proteins and gene sequences. Across 10>near infinity universes, the highly conserved gene sequences will stand out against the ones that are easier to vary. You would actually see the knowledge in these genes “crystallized” against the multiversal background. I don’t remember if Deutsch actually puts it this way in the book, but what it comes down to is: knowledge is structure across universes.
This formula would applyto all sorts of knowledge, not just the kind contained in genes. Imagine you had a pair of “multiverse glasses” and you looked at the Voynich Manuscript. If Voynich has genuine meaning, and is not a piece of gibberish produced as a 14th-century prank, it would “glow” with multiversal knowledge, since the semantic structure would be preserved across exponentially more universes. The same would apply if you looked at a nearby star with a “multiverse telescope.” If there is an intelligent civilization on a planet circling that star, it would “glow” with crystallized knowledge; you wouldn’t need to receive a radio transmission to know it was there. (Evolutionary theory comes into the picture from the fact that knowledge, by definition, whether in genes, in manuscripts, or in people, has to evolve; you don’t get knowledge for free. Creating knowledge, Deutsch stresses, is hard work.)
It’s been a while since I’ve read the book, so perhaps other Deutsch fans can weigh in with any mistakes or omissions…
Um. . . what? There are two obvious reasons this is dumb.
1) You can make the same arguments about classical physics at which point it becomes clear how nonsensical this is: The three body problem requires solving a differential equation that has no analytic solution to infinite precision. But since we implement multi-body interactions all the time, those computations must be carried out somewhere. So . . . parallel universes, I guess?
2) Many worlds is a theory about why wave functions appear to collapse. Wave function collapse is not a part of Shor’s algorithm. The actual computations in Shor’s algorithm (or any quantum algorithm) work just fine in our normal, unitary quantum mechanics, which doesn’t require any notion of collapse or many worlds. In fact, you have to go to great pains to prevent decoherence in the actual machines. The many worlds are only involved in the measurement of the outcome of the calculation.
This is just such a mind-boggling wrong-headed view of quantum mechanics, I can’t believe anyone would claim this.
+1. The exponential computation only happens in a theoretically constructed “view” of what the computer is doing (the Hilbert space). You could also view a classical randomized algorithm in this way (i.e., you are actually computing all possibilities in parallel and discarding all but one after the fact). This is a correct model that explains the behaviour of randomized algorithms, but that doesn’t mean it is literally happening.
+1
Many worlds makes claims beyond those of QM. It’s not just a claim that Hilbert space computes more efficiently, it’s a claim that it has a particular structure.
I don’t know what to say. Deutsch is one of the most universally respected quantum theoreticians out there, so just going on my priors, I will trust his viewpoint. I will say that Scott Aaronson also disagrees with the calculations-across-zillions-of-universes idea, but (I think) for different reasons than you cite.
Well, you know, Stephen Hawking kept saying we were 10-20 years away from a theory of everything. When really famous people make big claims in popular science, as opposed to academic, venues or peer reviewed literature, it can sometimes be a bit outlandish.
But that claim as phrased doesn’t hold up to even the smallest amount of scrutiny. The “calculations” are just unitary operations in a Hilbert space. There’s absolutely no need for many worlds for that, and it’s almost the opposite of what the concept was invented for.
To try to steelman Deutsche a bit:
One intuitive objection people have to many-worlds is that it feels bad to postulate that the state of the universe is so unnecessarily big — that in addition to the “world” we see, the universe also contains a bunch of other versions of the world. Shouldn’t we prune away the other worlds from the theory with Occam’s Razor?
I think a defensible version of Deutsche’s statement is something like, “A working quantum computer would show that the Hilbert space really is as big as QM says it is — that N qubits have a Hilbert space of 2^N dimensions.” Each of those 2^N dimensions corresponds to a different combination of N classical bits. The Hilbert space of the universe as a whole has a dimension for each classical arrangement of the stuff in it. So every possible arrangement of classical stuff has some amplitude in the wave function of the universe. So despite the intuitive Occam’s-Razor argument above, the state of the universe does have to be really really big.
Nothing requires you to interpret all those amplitudes as “worlds”, so Deutsche goes too far if he says this “proves many-worlds” or something like that, but I don’t think a working quantum computer is irrelevant to the question.
I dunno, I think decoherence explains why wave functions appear to collapse, independent of any interpretation. I think I’d say that many-worlds is a way of talking about the wave function. Given a wave function with amplitudes for two possibilities, do we talk about them as two possible but mutually exclusive outcomes (Copenhagen) or two coexisting outcomes (many-worlds).
@Anatid That’s wrong. Decoherence doesn’t explain wave function collapse. It explains why the density matrix would become diagonal, with a bit of hand waving. Collapse requires picking one particular diagonal element of the density matrix. It needs a selection mechanism that decoherence absolutely does not provide. Many worlds just says that all of those diagonal elements continue to exist as separate worlds, but this has some issues with the born rule.
Totally agree!
I only said decoherence explains the *appearance* of collapse. By which I mean it describes how we go from a state of
“The particle is in a 50/50 superposition of spin up and spin down, and also the experimenter doesn’t know which way the spin is going to end up, and also the measurement apparatus hasn’t recorded which direction the spin is”
to
“50/50 superposition of (particle is spin up, and experimenter thinks it’s spin up, and measurement apparatus displays “spin up”) and (particle is spin down, experimenter thinks it’s spin down, and measurement apparatus displays “spin down”), and also the two branches of the superposition are almost certainly not going to interfere with each other anymore”
which is a 50/50 superposition of two states of the world, in both of which the wave function *appears to have* collapsed (one way or the other).
Totally agree that decoherence doesn’t actually pick out one of those two 50/50 possibilities though.
Yeah I feel like the Born rule is the biggest problem with many worlds. My inclination is to just postulate it fundamental law but that is unsatisfying, not least because it seems a bit tricky to define what the Born rule even means in many worlds.
How does something like this evolve?
That is a good question, to which I do not know the answer. Maybe someone else here?
Ribosome-like things are very plausibly older than DNA. Like, origin of life type stuff.
Which means the DNA that codes for ribosomes would probably come from some kind of reverse-transcription process?
It wouldn’t necessarily have to come from reverse transcription. We can imagine that once upon a time there was a chemical structure that managed to duplicate itself in purely analog ways. At some point, it also managed to start transcribing nucleic acids into amino acid sequences in more digital ways. Over time, random nucleic acid sequences got transcribed in this way until at some point some collection of nucleic acid transcripts managed to function in a way that also did this transcription. Eventually this new transcriber replaced the old one, and now all we have left is digital replicators using the digital transcription process. It didn’t have to be developed from the old analog one by some reverse transcription process – it just could have independently evolved and replaced an older one that we no longer have traces of.
Ribosomes are where information gets converted into protein.
As far as life on Earth goes, there is only one possible source of genetic information – DNA transcribed into mRNA – and a relatively small pool of amino acids that every living organism uses when mRNA gets translated into protein.
Which means the parts of the ribosome that interact with the mRNA template and those directly interacting with the amino acids and the polypeptide being formed can only change so much before you break protein synthesis and end up dead.
While theoretically you could evolve to use some other system, the raw materials for it don’t exist in nature. (Because everything alive is using DNA and the same amino acids. And only the “left handed” versions of amino acids, even something as “minor” as evolving to use the “right handed” ones has proven too costly.)
Speculating wildly, maybe when the ribosome-like-thing first arose it wasn’t so critical and not much depended on it, so it was free to mutate and evolve without any mutation instantly killing the organism. But eventually the whole structure of life came to depend on ribosomes making proteins from RNA in a particular way, so there was no more freedom for ribosomes to vary since it would screw up everything that depended on it.
If we ever fire up a 1,000-qubit quantum computer, then the simulation running our universe will hang, and the Simulator will have to reboot it.
(This is whimsy, … I think.)
I’ll take that as s challenge
There is an approach to many worlds based on coherent superposiitions, and and an version based on decoherence. These are incompatible opposites. Deutsch uses the coherence based approach, whule most other many worlders use the decoherence based approach.
He absolutely does establish that quantum computing is superior to classical computing, that underlying reality is not classical, and that the superiority of quantum computing requires some extra structure to reality. What the coherence based approach does not establish is whether the extra structure adds up to something that could be called “alternate worlds” or parallel universes , in the sense familiar from science fiction.
In the coherence based approach, “Worlds” are coherent superpositions.That means they in exist at small scales, they can continue to interact with each other, after, “splitting” , and and they can be erased. These coherent superposed states are the kind of “world” we have direct evidence for, although they seem to lack many of the properties requited for a fully fledged many worlds theory, hence the scare quotes.
We do have evidence of small scale superpositions. Is there evidence against large scale superpositions? A multiverse of large scale superpositions would be a surreal Alice in Wonderland multiverse ,where half- dead , half alive cats are visible to the naked eye. Probably…
Many worlders hope to resolve the Schrödinger’s cat paradox by proposing that the observer splits on observing with the cat in such a way that one of the newly split observers sees a dead cat, and the other a living one. But , while raw QM allows this convenient outcome, it doesn’t require it. This is called the basis problem. Many worlds is not a direct consequence of pure and simple QM ,as Deutsch says. To match the fact that we witness a classical-seeming macroscopic reality, an additional posit is needed: that the quantum level has an intrinsic preferred basis,which is just right to allow (the appearance of) a classical world or worlds to emerge
In the decoherence based approach , worlds are large, in fact universe-like. And they are causally and informationally isolated from each other. Why not conclude that Many Worlds is true based on this, more satisfactory, definition of world? There’s a problem of evidence, and a problem of theory. The evidential problem is that because large worlds are decoherent branches of the universal wave function, no interaction with them is possible, and therefore no direct evidence of them is available. The theoretical problem is that the mechanism and nature of decoherence is far from fully understood. Decoherence is an ongoing research programme, not a done deal.
What happens to police officers who are fired for misconduct? Are they rehired by other police departments? Are there any organizations which try to track this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_cop
The more important question is why aren’t cops, when they exceed their legal mandate, routinely criminally prosecuted for what would be a crime if a citizen did it?
The standard answer seems to be qualified immunity + the power of police unions. But I don’t know if it’s a genuinely accurate explanation or just the received wisdom among a certain set of the twitter intelligentsia.
I think it’s important to note the limits of qualified immunity — it only applies if (a) the officer personally (b) is being sued in civil court for money damages for (c) violating a statutory or constitutional right. So to the specific question here, qualified immunity has nothing to do with whether an officer can be criminally charged. (It also doesn’t protect officers from things like internal discipline, stop lawsuits against their police departments, etc.)
Also, each state will have its own, state-law version of qualified immunity when suing state officials, which may or may not be broader for federal qualified immunity, and might shield an officer as well.
So yes, I think “qualified immunity” is becoming a bit of a buzzword, although that is different from asking whether it is too broad regardless.
I don’t think qualified immunity is the end-all be-all, but if a dismissal for unnecessary force was accompanied by a $5M civil decision it would be a pretty big incentive not to go back to policing (and not to have done whatever it was in the first place).
Also juries don’t like sending cops to jail–bad things might happen to a cop in jail. Even if the cop was both a) a dirtbag who beat up a criminal and b) unlucky because the criminal died from the beating, the jury may feel the cop probably feels pretty badly about that and doesn’t need hard time locked in with a bunch of criminals, particularly given perceptions (not sure how widespread, but not zero) that many prisons are basically a-rape-a-day facilities for less popular inmates like pedophiles and cops.
Three reasons. First, the doctrine of qualified immunity extends very broad protections to government employees, shielding them from responsibility for things they do on the job.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity
Second, law enforcement officers in many states have procedural protections in the form of Law Enforcement Officers’ Bills of Rights that ordinary citizens do not. This tends to give officers a lot of time to get their stories straight before questioning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Enforcement_Officers%27_Bill_of_Rights
Third, juries tend to be very deferential to police officers, giving them very broad benefit of any doubts. This makes prosecutors leery of trying to prosecute cops unless the facts are very cut and dried.
+1, and #4, police unions. Good news is there seems to be a minor trend towards challenging qualified immunity more and more.
https://reason.com/2020/05/08/courts-grant-qualified-immunity-to-cops-in-more-than-half-of-cases-when-invoked/
This makes prosecutors leery of trying to prosecute cops
They have to work with those same department of cops tomorrow.
Cops should probably always be investigated and tried by a different group, such as state police or FBI. This raises some “who watches the watchers?” issues but I think smaller ones than we started with.
Largely because the cops don’t make the laws, but the organizations that do make the laws need them to enforce said laws. The legislature gets to wipe their hands of the outcomes and in exchange they protect those who enforce the outcomes.
Another issue I suspect is that there are a lot of very unprofessional things which the police can do but which are really difficult to measure in the first place. Consider the “rough ride” treatment that the Baltimore Police were known to do. Sure, a dead body is nice, objective evidence. But how do you separate “intentionally drove in a way to maximize discomfort” from “geeze – this car needs a new suspension, the road has lots of potholes, and the sergeant wants this prisoner transport completed as urgently”?
If Floyd hadn’t died (or suffered permanent injury), would anybody have cared? Would anything have been able to have been proven?
As a criminal defence lawyer, I am genuinely shocked by the simplest explanation not having been presented yet:
Cops are on the right side.
Way, way, way, way too many prosecutors and judges see the police as heroes doing a difficult job, while ordinary citizens should get out of the way/let the police handle it/probably started it.
The cops get the benefit of the doubt more than they should, but I would argue what they get is a lot closer to what everyone should get – and doesn’t.
It has nothing to do with the system lacking the power to hold police to account, and everything to do with the system simply having very little interest in doing so and lying to itself about there being a need to do so.
Would it be worthwhile to make police officers buy “misconduct insurance” to pay damages resulting from their misconduct, like car drivers? And if they had a record of minor misconduct, their rates would go up until they were forced from the profession?
No because with the current power balance where they can routinely literally get away with murders they will have no problem externalizing those costs on the public.
Isn’t this already a thing?
I swear I read an article about some Sheriffs department in rural California that like, had to work with its insurance company and re-negotiate and implement all sorts of reforms because they had too many issues and complaints and the insurance was going to drop them and they basically can’t operate without it.
I think it only applies to smaller locations though, because big city police departments are “self-insured” by the local government coffers.
That sounds like per-department insurance. A much worse idea than per-officer insurance.
In general when an officer misbehaves, the department ends up paying the fine. This is bad because it removes most of the incentive for officers to behave. But making the officer pay directly doesn’t work either, because few officers have millions of dollars saved up to fund a wrongful death suit. So the solution is insurance on a per-officer level. I think.
This is a common libertarian argument for reform and I’ve never heard any good counter-argument. Set the free market loose on this problem and they’ll solve it.
The natural extension of this argument is that we don’t need a penal system at all – just a personal crime insurance and fines.
I’d bite that bullet, the problem is what happens when someone refuses to pay a fine? Eventually you have to have a punishment of last resort. Of course that isn’t an issue in the police-brutality case. If a cop can’t afford or get approved for police-brutality insurance he can’t be a cop anymore. The comparison would be to medical-malpractice insurance. This obviously has its own issues, but I do think it would be better than the current law enforcement system.
Oh I meant that as a reductio ad absurdum, I don’t actually think it’s a good idea.
The more glaring flaw being that anyone rich enough could buy themselves the ability to do crimes, it’s one thing to have some people being able to afford speeding but another thing to have people being able to afford DUIs
You exile them to the Wastelands beyond the Wall.
No, this only works for specialized roles like driving a car or working for the police. You can’t afford the car or police insurance – you don’t get to drive or work for the police.
It doesn’t work for crimes in daily life, because what happens if a person can’t afford their insurance (either they are too risky or their income is too low) – you don’t allow them to live until they can pay it? You put them in jail until they can pay it? How exactly are they going to develop the job skills to pay for it in jail?
The counterargument that comes to mind is you’re solving “how do we start to hold police accountable?” with “lets change the way accountability is implemented”. If you haven’t actually started holding police accountable in the first place, the insurance scheme doesn’t help because it’ll ~never have to pay out anyway.
There are payouts from the actions of abusive cops, and they cost the taxpayers millions of bucks.
The good news is there are so many things that we can do to improve cops’ behavior.
The bad news is that there are so many things that we can do to improve cops’ behavior.
The problem is they cost taxpayers.
Obviously lawyers go after police departments (=taxpayers) because they have deeper pockets than individual officers. Of course this removes the officer’s incentive to behave.
The point of insurance is to provide deep pockets for individual officers too.
You might expect the police/misconduct insurance dynamic to work with doctors and malpractice insurance. Does the malpractice insurance market for doctors actually work in the way we’d hope, to drive bad doctors out of the profession?
Note that if doctors had Qualified Immunity, malpractice insurance would probably cost about a buck ninety-five a month.
Good question. I really don’t know.
With drivers, insurance companies use data to calculate someone’s risk, for example record of traffic violations. Are there any such calculations for doctors? Is there any way of knowing a doctor’s malpractice rate except for extremely rare successful lawsuits against them?
For police, pretty much every interaction is with an emotionally uncooperative other party, and now there is the expectation of wearing body cameras, and many officers have a record of smaller disciplinary actions before they get around to killing. So there should be more than enough data for insurance companies to calculate risk.
I have seen arguments for years on this from activists in Minneapolis. The thought is that cops might hesitate before they thump someone if there was a financial penalty to pay. Also a couple of supplementary arguments for it: then the city wouldn’t have to pay damages when a cop went bad, and that way the insurance companies would ensure that thumpers would be pushed out of police-work because these cops couldn’t get insurance anymore. I am a little on board, but I think there are down-sides:
1) Obviously the likelihood of cops getting into these circumstances varies greatly; an office job not at all, a tough neighborhood much greater than a peaceful one. Should the cops have to pay more insurance because they work in a tough neighborhood. I suppose the department could vary the salary for different environments, but it would be complicated.
2) Not sure if insurance would make a difference in cop behavior — reckless drivers still exist even though they pay for it with higher insurance rates.
3) Will the insurance companies cooperate? Sounds like a a lot more work on their part.
4) Do we want the insurance companies to be in charge of what is acceptable.
Might be worth an experiment.
That’s why you don’t have regulations creating an assigned risk pool.
They do in the UK – they force insurance to treat teenage boys and girl alike.
3) I’m sure they would, there is plenty of profit to be made.
4) So choose a different insurance company
1) I expect that quickly there would emerge “standard rates” for policing a particular area. But yes there would be major teething pains establishing these rates.
I think the issue with this is how much the rates would need to go up to actually force someone out of the profession. As we’ve been discussing on other OTs, unjustified / questionable police shootings are still relatively rare, and even adding in other unjustified uses of force, it’s still probably a small fraction of the millions of police – citizen interactions happening each year.
Building a model to stratify by risk when the baseline level of risk is very small is really a hard problem, even with massive training datasets and years of experience. Take credit risk – the baseline risk of a generic corporate going bust is probably on the order of 1% per year. The most sophisticated risk models might be able to assign some corporates to a category with an estimated 10% probability of default (10x the risk) – not 70 or 80%. A company that is assigned that PD will still in many cases seek financing and deal with the extra interest.
If the baseline rate is now only a tenth of that – 0.1%, the situation becomes harder still. Your baseline actuarially-fair insurance premium is going to be 0.1% of the average settlement (so, maybe $10m x 0.1% = $1,000, plus insurer profit margin & capital charge). It would be fantastic if you were able to build a risk model with a first-decile capture of 70% in a new domain like this (when I’ve built models in new domains I was happy with 60%, and that was with a higher baseline risk, which makes calibration much easier) – so that would mean your bottom 10% of officers would have a hazard rate of 0.7% while the other 90% have a hazard rate of 0.033%.
So now you can charge the bottom 10% $7k per year and everyone else $333 per year. (obviously there would be gradations within that group, and maybe if you’re lucky you get a smaller but really uninsurable group that contains 30-40% of the total “bad apples”). Is a ~$6.5k premium enough to drive a really committed officers out of the force? Especially if some portion of the risk rating is due to the community / geography they are policing (meaning it will be partially subsidized)? At the margins, yes, but I’m not sure overall.
And if you can only get the first-decile capture up to 50%, then you’re talking about a $4.5k difference, etc. Plus there will be political pressure to limit the spread of insurance costs, especially when police recruiting becomes a challenge – and this political pressure is not unfair, because in my example, the “bad” group is 99.3% good apples and only 0.7% bad – so charging them all $7k per year might never get anywhere.
Thanks for the criticism.
Would insurance stop someone like Timothy Loehmann, who resigned from a prior cop job rather than being marked as lacking the emotional stability to be a cop, from being a cop at all?
There are definitely “uninsurable risks” in many types of insurance, so I think it’s certainly possible. But to me it depends on the base rate of these risks vs the base rate of the negative outcomes. I.e. how common is it that someone faces the situation that Loehmann did? And how many unjustified uses of force were carried out by such people? If 1,000 people per year end up in such a situation, even if they only have a 50% chance of turning bad, it’s no problem to call them uninsurable… but if they have a 10% chance, maybe it’s harder.
And if those diagnosed with lacking emotional stability only account for 10% of the uses of force, then you need to find a bunch of other variables that have the same strong link to negative outcomes, such that it is considered “fair” to rule them uninsurable.
Overall I do like the concept of insurance for these types of risks and think it is an idea worth some experimentation; I’m just a bit pessimistic about our ability to build good enough models in such an untested area.
I agree that creating those models would be a very challenging exercise, but one of the nice things about relying on a profit-motivated insurance system is that it provides an incentive for someone to figure out these complexities. If insurance company A has a terrible model, then they’re more likely to go bankrupt than company B, which has a realistic model. Over time — ignoring outside interventions (e.g. from politics) — we would expect the insurance companies with superior models to gain market share, ensuring that a larger and larger proportion of the police force had their insurance premiums set by progressively more accurate models.
I’m sure it would remain imperfect, but I can’t think of any equivalent motivation to push the current system toward greater “accuracy” in filtering out bad cops, other than occasionally triggering societal anger enough that we get pushback (whether via voting or via massive protests). And those feedback mechanisms don’t necessarily seem calibrated to provide good information either.
I’m not sure insurance does a great job of discouraging bad doctors or corporate board members or whatever.
IMHO, I’d recommend:
(1) End qualified immunity. Probably the states and counties would end up agreeing to pay the money judgments, but that would encourage police departments to clean up their acts.
(2) Outlaw police unions from interfering with or negotiating terms of disciplinary proceedings.
(3) Continue improving data in terms of who gets stopped, who gets use of force, improve punishments for police whose body cameras aren’t on, even when it’s not an emergency, etc.
The risk is that you might demoralize a police force that is, for all we know, mostly operating the way we want them to.
Timothy Loehmann, who shot Tamir Rice, was previously asked to resign from another department for lacking the emotional stability to be a cop.
Private liability insurance would surely have uncovered this.
Exactly.
England and Wales have recently (in the last few years) brought in a blacklist of officers who were either fired for misconduct or resigned while under investigation. These officers now cannot be hired as police (or I think as civilian* staff), or provide services such as consultancy or training to police forces.
This was introduced after Simon Harwood, a member of the Metropolitan Police TSG (riot squad) struck Ian Tomlinson, an innocent passer-by, with his baton and killed him. Harwood ended up being acquitted of manslaughter (for various reasons largely to do with a poorly conducted autopsy), but it emerged during the trial that he had resigned from the Met for health reasons while under investigation for misconduct. He then worked for the Met as a civilian for a while, then joined the neighbouring Surrey Police as an officer, before transferring back to the Met.
*Normally I don’t like referring to non-police as civilians, but it seems to be a sensible way to describe people who are employed by the police but aren’t police officers.
Hi there…your name looks familiar, somehow.
Anyway: my impression is that Police officers can get the best training if they begin in a large Police Department of a big city. In that city, they’ll often start as a ‘walk the beat’ cop, in which they walk their beats by…driving a car around an area, in the company of a more experienced officer.
They have options after that point: take training to become a Detective, move to a specialist unit like Vice/Homicide, or keep ‘walking the beat’ until they are experienced enough to train another rookie.
Or they might look for open positions in small-town Police Departments. Or they might become security consultants for locations like casinos/concert-venues/churches/banks/etc.
One of my siblings, who did Police Academy and worked a few years as Patrol Officer in a major-city PD, had side jobs crop up. As long as those jobs didn’t conflict with his role as an Officer, he could take a security gig. Where he was, the occasional movie producer wanted off-duty cops to run security on the movie set. There were also local apartment/condo units that would pay Police to be on-site security guards.
I never did get a grasp for the average age of the average Patrol Officer, nor what the usual career-path was for Officers after their first five years. (My sibling decided, before his five-year-mark, to go to a new career that didn’t any of his law-enforcement background… I don’t know how common that is, either.)
Regarding naval disarmament after WWI, how did the powers ensure that they didn’t destroy their own ships, while the others cheated? Was it a combination of long-range communications and ship-by-ship destruction?
Could we accomplish something similar with nuclear disarmament today, or would the secrecy around #’s of nuclear weapons be an insurmountable problem?
Battleships are, if you’ve ever seen one, really fricking huge. They also have to be stored somewhere on a coast, a merely one-dimensional locus of possible hiding places, and they require regular maintenance in major port facilities of which even the great powers had only a handful. It’s not really practical to hide a working battleship from professional spies.
Nuclear warheads can be stored in relatively small underground bunker that can be hidden just about anywhere, and the necessary maintenance facilities are not much bigger. Complete ICBMs are a bit more conspicuous, and there you can at least insist that, once you know they exist, you’ll assume that they continue to exist unless their owners smash them to bits in the presence of your observers. But if you e.g. let your arms control treaty lapse and dither about trying to negotiate a new one, the other side may say “Oh, those missiles we dismantled last year” and you’ll never know for sure.
Short and medium-range missiles tend to be dual-use, along with strike aircraft, so even if the enemy lets you inspect them and verify that they aren’t currently fitted with nuclear warheads, it’s hard to be sure there isn’t a bunker full of E-Z-fit nukes just down the road.
How long would it take to fit nukes back on a B-1?
It’s really complicated. There’s the bay bulkhead, which is fixed in place to preclude ALCM installation. Not sure how long it would take to pull that out. If the B61 uses standard suspension components (not sure offhand), you could presumably load 24 to the rotary launchers this afternoon if you were so inclined. But modern bombs have to talk to the airplane, and there’s been no reason to spend any money on the B-1s nuclear avionics since the early 90s. And they’ve done a complete refresh of those systems since then. Because nuclear-certifying software takes a ton of time and money, I’m pretty sure that the B-1 doesn’t have the code to talk to the B61. So now you have to get that written. If you do it the normal way, probably 3-5 years. You could do it in less, but you’re running more risks of things going wrong. And people almost never let you use “risks” and “nuclear weapons” in the same sentence.
the external carriage would be simpler, wouldn’t it?
On the B-1? Unlikely. They’ve gotten enough access to the pylons to hang a targeting pod on one, but I haven’t heard of them doing external carriage of weapons, except for very briefly during the test program, and that was both a long time ago and before the pylons were blocked.
Edit: Addendum to my post above. I checked one of my books, and they used separate rotary launchers for nuclear and conventional weapons, although I wouldn’t be surprised if the changes were pretty much entirely on the wiring/electronics side. Of course, most if not all of those launchers were probably converted to the current conventional rotary launchers, which weren’t in the original equipment for the B-1.
Would a nuclear Bone be of any strategic use? (or conventional alcm)
Say if WWIII kicked off in East Asia?
The B-1 carries JASSM-ER today, so there’s really no reason to give it CALCM capability. (Not to mention that CALCM was officially retired 6 months ago.) As for nuclear capability, probably not. We have the B-52 for ALCM, and the B-2 theoretically handles all the strategic nuclear gravity bomb missions. (I’m skeptical about fleet size on that, but it’s worth pointing out that the B-52 officially lost its gravity bomb capability only a couple years ago, and I don’t think they’ve done any major software upgrades since then, so refitting the B-52 with B61 and B83 capability will be a lot easier.)
My understanding was that weapons carried in the nuclear rotary launchers were deliberately incompatible with standard rotary launchers for treaty reasons, at least at one point.
Apparently tested recently for the purpose of larger conventional and hypersonic weapons. Moving the bulkhead is a few shifts in maintenance, and six of the eight original hard points are still usable for external carriage.
Agreed that the wiring and software is a bit more complicated, at least if nobody already did it last Thursday.
The fastest, and most generally useful, way to do it would be to kitbash a “B61 mod 13” that impersonates a Mark 83 or a GBU-32 or something else a B-1 is already set up to talk to and deliver. And every other aircraft in the fleet.
This could almost certainly be done safely enough for wartime use, even if it doesn’t quite meet current safety standards in peacetime. Bean is correct that “doesn’t quite meet current standards” is not going to fly in the real-world US military any time soon, but for arms-control purposes everybody has to assume that everybody else is secretly thinking about doing this and maybe did it last Thursday.
It mostly doesn’t matter because we mostly don’t care about aircraft bombs in serious nuclear warfighting – everything important will have been nuked by missile before the bombers ever reach their targets. But if we’re imagining a future in which even the superpowers are limited to say 200 missile warheads each, that will change.
I don’t think the B-1 has Mk 83 capability. For reasons that are mysterious to me, the Navy likes the Mk 83, while the USAF refuses to acknowledge that it exists. I’d guess you’d make it imitate a Mk 84/GBU-31. Other than that, if you were willing to do this, it would be a good plan. But nobody is going to be OK with this.
Also given their size, crew size, discreet cost, individual impact on national prestige, etc. battleships were just much more public. I suspect that all major naval powers knew the name of every active battleship. Also given how discreet battleships are, any violation would clearly be in bad faith.
First, what John said. You can’t hide a working battleship, you really can’t hide a battleship being built, and even if you just want to mothball one in secret, it’s going to be extremely tricky. (Battlecruisers, at least ex-German Turkish ones, might be a different story…)
Second, there’s the matter of raw numbers. The largest fleet of dreadnoughts ever was Britain’s, and it was less than 50 at the end of WWI. Compare to thousands of nuclear weapons.
Third, military secrecy was nothing like it is today. They were shockingly open by modern standards, and I suspect a lot of the secrecy we deal with now dates back to the Manhattan Project, which was a massive industrial enterprise taking place almost entirely off the radar.
Even then, the Manhattan Project had some kinda obvious-in-retrospect security fails. My great-grandfather was involved in the medical research side of things; apparently he figured out what was going on when he got a letter from the War Department ordering him to report to Los Alamos, went to check out a book on New Mexico from the university library, and found that everybody who knew anything at all about nuclear physics or radiation, all of whom had mysteriously left town over the preceding months, had checked the same book out.
You know, that makes an interesting point about how much harder espionage was back in the day. While this is a pretty glaring red flag, the actually information was most likely stored only in the book itself and the library’s files. It would have taken a spy to both be holding the book and know off the top of their head a list of reputable physicists to actually put two and two together to glean anything useful.
Now it’s a security flaw, because all that information would be on a unsecured server somewhere.
Most libraries don’t maintain records of who checked out the book in the past, only who currently has the book.
If they are responsible about backups, they have a record of who checked out the book in the past.
Or it is not. Pre computers, the common system was simply a piece of cardboard or heavy paper stock in a pocket in the book you would record your name on and leave at the library when you checked a book out, so the library had a record of all books checked out, and who had them, that piece of paper stayed with the book so anyone holding it also knew the last dozen or more people who checked that book out.
Modern practice is a bar code or QR code on the book, and some way to identify yourself to the library when you check out, the library then has a database of who currently has a book checked out. Those databases are however very frequently deliberately prone to amnesia – the second you return the book, the library system forgets you ever checked it out.
Because the library has no actual need to know who checked out a book in the past, and the easiest way to avoid privacy and data mining concerns is to just not retain the information.
Libraries purposefully destroy those records because they don’t want anyone to come calling to get them.
That’s a pretty cool story. I’m toying around with having library checkout stamps in a book as a clue in the mystery campaign I’m running, and it’s neat to see it occur in real life.
The process was helped along immensely by the fact that battleships were expensive, the older ones were obsolete, and the major powers all genuinely wanted to economize. the ships that were called for scrapping were, for the most part, not very effective in modern (i.e. 1920s) combat and could not have been made so without expensive modernization. Only the British really had to give up highly capable ships, and the US didn’t even build up to its treaty limits for most of the treaty period.
Capping the naval race within relatively fixed boundaries really took the wind out of its sails. As others have pointed out, it’s not like you could build a fleet, or even squadron, of battleships in secret, so there wasn’t a real way you could gain serious advantage. There was plenty of creative accounting and sometimes outright cheating around the various tonnage limits (the mogamiswin the gold star here, with a claimed treaty displacement of 8,500 tons) but even this most blatant example of cheating bought them a grand total of maybe one extra ship. Ships take years to build, so it just wasn’t possible to obtain a serious numerical lead before people noticed.
This isn’t really true. The WNT had no limits on any ship under 10,000 tons, and everyone was up against the battleship limits immediately (Britain retained a few of the KGVs until the Nelsons were ready, IIRC). The carrier limits were a different matter, but they were still experimental in the early 20s. After the 1930 LNT, there were limits on smaller ships, generally somewhat greater than the size of the current fleets. Because ships are expensive and take time to build, the plans from this point on were basically “let’s hit the treaty cap in 5-10 years”. And by the time they were getting close, the 1936 LNT was signed, removing all fleet tonnage caps anyway. There’s a reasonable theory that the treaties helped navies during the Great Depression because they were easy to spin as targets, not just as caps, while the armies and air forces had no such protection, and took more cuts because of it.
Over the Trieste?
when you combine it with their up-gunning? most definitely.
Hiding ships would be hard, but the naval disarmament treaties defined classes of ships in terms of things like displacement and caliber of guns and imposed limits on how many of each class a country could have. I don’t know of any countries that cheated on caliber — the German pocket battleships, which were basically heavy cruisers with 11″ guns instead of 8″ guns, were taking advantage of a loophole in the rules. But I believe that both Italy and Germany cheated on displacement, built ships that were bigger than they were claimed to be, and other countries may have as well.
Japan was notorious for breaking the displacement limits. On one class of Japanese cruisers (may have been the Mogamis), a British constructor is reported to have said that the Japanese were either cheating or building the ships out of cardboard. And nobody lied about caliber, AFAIK. There were some cases of deception, but that’s a slightly different thing.
Perhaps others misunderstood my question to be more intelligent, but I meant something exactly as stupid as “The US and UK scuttle their fleets on Monday, and then on Tuesday, when it’s the Japanese’s turn, they say ‘take-backsies’ and decide not to scuttle theirs, becoming the preeminent naval power overnight.”
I did not mean secretly hiding warships, I meant faking their destruction. It would be a very short term ruse.
My not very expert understanding is that, in the post WWI naval disarmament, scuttling existing ships was mostly limited to ships that were no longer of much use, such as pre-dreadnoughts. The important reduction was either not completing ships that had been laid down — the Japanese, as I recall, completed two battle cruisers as (permitted) aircraft carriers (Kaga and Akagi), which arguably turned out to be an improvement — or not building additional ships.
Destruction is not a binary. In January, everyone removes one Big Gun from all their ships, and mutually verifies. In February, everyone removes all but one Big Gun from all their ships. In March, the last gun goes. In April, remove the control panels from the bridge. In May, remove the control room. … In December, remove the engines and/or break the hull.
At each point you remove substantial capacity, while preserving the ability to rebuild almost as fast as whoever cheated on the most recent step.
That’s not how they did it. There were two stages recognized: “rendering the vessel incapable of further warlike service” and actually scrapping it. The first had to be done in 6 months and involved pulling all the weapons off, the later in 2 years.
In the case of the WNT, one big aspect is that not everybody was starting from the same place. Japan actually decommissioned exactly one dreadnought. Their cuts were primarily in the massive building program. The UK had no dreadnoughts under construction, so their scrapping was of older ships. The US was somewhere in the middle. So there’s no risk of Japan doing what you describe, and the British simply didn’t have the money or public support to try anything like this. Also, if Japan reneges, they’re unambiguously the bad guy, and the US and UK combine to crush them. (Remember that there’s no threat to the British in European waters at this point, so they can deploy their whole fleet. This was very much not the case 20 years later.)
I have a question about the scientific method. To what extent is the scientific method responsible for technological development? For example, with pharmaceutical development, I’m pretty sure the scientific method is heavily involved, with all the trials and reviews before a drug is allowed to go on the market. But what about other pieces of technological progress? Computers, GPS, the internal combustion engine, agricultural advance, etc. Most of the definitions of the scientific method I have seen involve hypothesis testing, rigorous data collection, and peer review. How well does this describe the process of inventing and developing the computer, or the GPS, or the internal combustion engine? Is the scientific method an accurate description, or was it more like very knowledgeable and creative people trying different things and seeing what works?
I’m not sure about the internal combustion engine, and there are people who are far better to explain this than me. But both GPS, and modern microchip computers make use of concepts, that we have because of Einsteins relativity. We have Einsteins relativity because people did rigorous tests about what they thought to know about the world. (In this example physicists not beeing able to find evidence for the Ether).
I’ll try to answer regarding computers, because it’s my area.
There’s definitely a scientific/experimental aspect to developing the hardware itself. How can I turn this analog physical behaviour into a digital (i.e. discrete) logical signal? How will this material behave under thermal stress? How physically small can I make this logical unit before the error rate becomes unacceptable? etc.
On the software side, the gold standard is to have mathematical theories. Many subareas of CS are brimming with elegant results, and we have a deep understanding of how to get the basics right: computational complexity, algorithmics, distributed systems, signal processing, statistical learning, information theory, cryptography, etc. All of this is not “sciency” science, but rather “mathy” science. For algorithms this is illustrated well by the typical introductory CS material: sorting algorithms are O(n*log(n)), 3-SAT is NP-hard, here’s how you create a self-balancing binary tree, and so on.
However, some of the most prominent algorithms today don’t fall in this category. The most salient example of this is machine learning, where progress often consists of designing a new architecture and statistically testing its performance, with deep understanding of why it works coming much later, if at all. Other examples are linear programming, SAT solvers, query planning for databases, and so on. Often, these are problems that are either theoretically unsolved or known to be hard in the worst case, but we have heuristic algorithms that are fast most of the time. Progress here tends to fall more on the sciency side, but there’s a lot more tinkering and just trying shit out involved than in a “proper” scientific experiment. One reason for this is that collecting high-quality data tends to be much easier than for “real-world” science. Other times, the problem is ill-defined and subjective, so there’s not even an unambiguously correct solution (e.g. rendering algorithms in computer graphics).
In conclusion, one good chunk scientific method, but also huge chunks of stuff that’s either more rigorous or less rigorous.
>trying different things and seeing what works
That’s all the scientific method is. It’s just that for stuff like biology, it’s often really hard to tell if something works, which is where the stats comes in.
I’m not sure if trying different things and seeing what works would fall under the standard definition of the scientific method. Because trying different things and seeing what works describes a very broad range of human activity, and did not start at any historical point, such as the scientific revolution. In fact, most things people do probably involve some degree of trial and error. Even the most primitive neanderthal would try different ways to grip the spear until he settles on the best way (not sure if neanderthals had spears, but you get my point). But I wouldn’t call that the scientific method. Obviously, when it comes to technological breakthroughs, this trial and error is happening on a much higher level, because of the knowledge/intelligence of the people involved.
In my opinion, what made the scientific revolution special, was that the scientific method became the sole metric for determining how the natural world worked, and consequently became dramatically more disciplined.
Before then, there was trial and error, and that was in line with the method. But the trials were less carefully measured and recorded. Furthermore, the explanations still permitted being based on things like “the gods willed it” or “corresponds to our fingers” or “the king said so” and so on. The scientific revolution began when people consciously tried to explain everything in nature without those extra-method arguments.
If you are really interested about the relationship between modern technology and science you migth want to check out What Engineers Know and How They Know It by Vincenti.
The wikipedia page i a good introduction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Engineers_Know_and_How_They_Know_It
It also doesn’t really apply to a lot of science either. If you want “falsifiable” hypotheses then you’re going to have to decide what counts as a falsification.
The Quine-Duhem problem is one major problem. Was Newtonian gravitation falsified by the perihelion shift of Mercury? Nowadays we think of that as one of the crucial tests, especially once they failed to discover the planet Vulcan that supposedly caused this. (If you don’t wait until the non-discovery of Vulcan, then you have to say Newton was falsified by the anomalies in the orbit of Uranus until Neptune fixed everything.)
Statistical theories are another major problem. I don’t exactly know the relationship Popper had with Neyman and Pearson, but many Bayesians might suspect that Popper is behind the unholy dominance of Neyman-Pearson statistical testing, not just over the Bayesian alternative but also many Fisherian methods as well.
Foundational. A Chinese economic historian, whose name now escapes me, wrote about this a few years ago. Why did China not go through the development process of the West despite having invented a large amount of innovative stuff in history up until ~1700 (when the process of divergence started in earnest).
His answer was essentially that the West “invented science”, by which he meant a formal method of discovery that put an emphasis on rigor and documentation, not to mention later also a patent system. I still think this institutionalist answer remains very compelling, much more so than the geographic determinist answers or ‘drain theory’ etc.
I originally found SSC because of a reference in a Cracked podcast (from David Wong, natch) something something cyclical universe
How do you guys think David Wong found all these blogs?
I’d like to pay someone $40 to help me think through a (mundane, personally-relevant to me-but-not-you) question for an hour. If that’s worth it to you, message me – mostly dot connect at gmail.
Not sure if this counts as a hot-button political/social topic; it’s Irish history from the 16th century so it still might be live (and it tangentially includes Spanish liberal revolutions and Henry VIII-style suppression and seizure of monasteries from the 19th, so beware!)
We might be close to finding the remains of Red Hugh O’Donnell! Cue traditional air, Lament for O’Donnell.
Part of the problem is that the church where he was buried disappeared. How does a church disappear, you ask (or at least I asked myself)? Especially when Christopher Columbus had been buried there? (Before his body went on its own series of fascinating peregrinations):
Well, turns out the Church of Miracles of Valladolid was part of a larger Franciscan monastery, and first during the Peninsular War parts of it were seized, occupied, sold off or let fall into disrepair, and then later in the 19th century during (one of) the Spanish liberal revolutions, it was all confiscated and sold to secular purchasers, or at least those willing to come forward and buy parts of the property and buildings. Being confiscated from the monastic order and the former occupants forcefully evicted, the entire complex was left abandoned, allowed fall into ruins, and eventually the ruins were cleared and new buildings built on the site.
Which brings us neatly back to the present day.
You may think (as did I) that Spain was a very Catholic country, but it seems that there were quite a few waves of “let’s take these properties off the Church and sell them to finance the national debt” over the centuries, along with moves towards secularisation during liberal reforms and revolutions. And yes, the Freemasons were involved 🙂 (this English-language Wikipedia article on the 19th century main mover of one such alludes to that, the Spanish-language version goes into his family background etc. in a lot more detail).
Does anyone have any suggested sources for learning to use TensorFlow?
What perspective are you coming in from? As someone who wants to play around with machine learning concepts, or as a developer who wants to deploy things? As someone focused more on the former, I found it most beneficial to implement various standard architecture types using relatively low-level APIs. (I’ve since switched to PyTorch though and haven’t stayed up-to-date with Tensorflow 2.)
Primarily the former; I’m trying to teach myself Tensorflow for some optional stuff for my job.
So since they have been pushing eager mode, TF has gotten much easier to learn. It is now very much just like Numpy, or any other linear algebra platform. I was able to pick it up just by reading the few tutorials on the TF website, then trolling the documentation. But I strongly recommend sticking to the low-level architecture while you are learning. If you want a standard dense layer, write the matrix ops yourself. That will force you to develop a better understanding of what is going on below the hood. You can save yourself time by using the higher-level APIs once you are a pro.
If the question you are asking is “how to I learn to think in linear algebra,” that is a little harder. There is a lot of power to be found from replacing your for loops with linear algebra operations, but it is not always obvious, at least not to me. I think I just looked at a lot of examples. Sometimes I write out an algorithm using loops first, get it working, and then spend some time thinking about it and exploring ways to replace the loops. It takes some tinkering and multiple attempts, but I can usually come up with some improvements eventually.
The Intro to TensorFlow coursera course through deeplearning.ai is a pretty good overview
Thank you for making the Blogroll intelligible!
Agreed. The old one was too opaque for me to use at all.
I tried cooking with a kitchen scale for the first time last night, and it is just as revolutionary as everyone said. The only real issue is with things that don’t pour well, or don’t pour well *slowly*.
For example, a lot of liquids will tend to stick to the outside of bottle and end up under the bottle rather than the opening if you try to pour them slowly. But pouring quickly means you overshoot the weight. Any ideas on how to solve that problem?
The trick to sticky and viscous liquids is usually oil. For example if you have a recipe that calls for honey+oil in in you measure the oil first and then the honey second and the honey will just slide right out of the measuring cup. You can wipe a tiny bit of oil around the lip of your jar and that will reduce the cling and allow it to flow more freely without dripping down the edge. Of course you will get small amounts of oil in your molasses/honey etc so not a solution for everything.
Ironically, in this case, it was vegetable oil that I had the issue with.
For vegetable oil use a wide mouthed funnel and you can pour slowly with the actual mouth of the oil touching the inside of the funnel.
You could get something like this to help with pouring:
https://www.amazon.com/Tablecraft-916M-Oil-Vinegar-Cruet/dp/B0001MSDOC/
It’s quite handy.
What kind of liquids are you thinking of here? Something like honey if it’s not squeezing out of a bottle (e.g. becuase it’s a glass bottle) I will just scoop with a spoon.
In this case, it was vegetable oil.
Try an adjustable measuring cup.
… honestly, mostly not buying things in containers that will not pour well. You can pour the offending item into a measure (Measures always pour well) but that rather defeats the point of the whole “Weigh things to avoid too much cleaning” so I just note if something comes in a container that cant pour well at all and stop buying that brand – oil in particular should not be giving you problems, so either you are Doing It Wrong ™ or the bottle manufacturer is.
Something like oil generally has a lot of leeway so that overshooting by a few grams won’t destroy the recipe or anything.
Figure out what the minimum average amount is getting poured for the shortest fast/clean pour, and then scale from based on that amount.
Why is daycare so expensive, they said. Why can’t government make it cheaper, they said. Meanwhile, the DC government seems to be doing its damndest to make daycare *more* expensive, with new rules that you must have a college degree to take care of kids. Does anyone actually think that a high-school graduate is not qualified to look after a 2-year-old?
Link to org challenging the new rules
Graduate? I’m old enough to remember when hiring a neighborhood teenager was a perfectly reasonable solution to the “I need someone to look after my kids” problem. In fact, I’m pretty sure I started being that neighborhood teenager in late middle school, 7th or 8th grade.
Long term, I suspect the problem solves itself because the societies that won’t let teenagers take care of children will inadvertently wind up teaching all of their young adults that they can’t or don’t want to have children.
I was going to say “don’t exaggerate, this only affects businesses over a certain size” (which I think is true but sources are paywalled), but then I saw this:
which is beyond absurd. “OSSE require her to get a degree even though she has 2 decades experience…” — OK, I can imagine a steelman of their thoughts here not being completely crazy — “…and a master’s degree…” — OK, getting harder to steelman — “…two master’s degrees…” — um? — “…in education and social work” — what.
It reminds me when family member needed to go to a totally pointless course to keep her job as librarian in an elementary school, despite being already a teacher (of Polish in Poland, so equivalent of teaching English in USA).
She had a relevant university degree but they invented a new one.
Elementary school library had less books than her personal library at her home.
Don’t know the ins and outs of the American system, but from Irish experience that is not totally unreasonable.
You don’t need a degree in early childhood education, a basic certificate – Level 5 on this wheel here – is the minimum required to get a job in childcare (be that creche, playschool, whatever) here. It’s vocational training with a work experience placement needed.
What it does is that everyone has an understood qualification with the same basic components. A Masters in Social Work is great, but do you know how to calm down a crying two year old who has just bitten one of their little playmates? The problem with the example quoted is that she is too qualified on a theoretical level for the job (you need a Level 5 award, she has a Level 9 award); you can start with a Level 5 cert and work your way up to a Masters if you like but the other way round does require “we need you to have the basic qualifications that everyone else on the job does”.
You don’t need a rocket technician to fix your lawnmower, you get what I’m saying? Also, if the American rules are like the Irish rules, the regulations* say “you need X qualification to be hired” and it doesn’t matter what additional or higher you have, if you don’t have X, you can’t be considered (that’s not just red tape, there’s every possibility an unsuccessful candidate with a Level 5 will cut up rough over ‘she doesn’t have the Level 5 why did she get the job instead of me’ and the threat of LAWYERS makes institutions very, very nervous).
*
Hire someone without the Level 5 for your room and sorry, you are not getting that funding subsidy.
Not even teenagers, used to be that your 8+ kid could look after their baby sibling.
For what it’s worth, just last year I stayed with a family at an AirBNB, where I noticed that the (I think) teenaged daughter was advertising her babysitting services to the neighbors.
Wait, is “pay a neighborhood teenager $50 to babysit for a few hours” now forbidden? It’s not so common anymore, sure, but I thought that was mainly parent-driven.
I’m old enough to remember when hiring a neighborhood teenager was a perfectly reasonable solution to the “I need someone to look after my kids” problem.
That’s the “make sure they don’t stick their fingers in the electrical socket and that they get something to eat” solution, which for basic childminding is all most parents want for a few hours before they get home from work/at night so they can go out.
Nowadays, childcare is also to enable both parents to go to work, and there’s a range of things the child is supposed to be doing in regards to attaining developmental milestones. In the Bad Old Days of Oppression when women were at home raising their own kids these generally happened naturally but now we need to ensure that the kids are not just being stuck in front of the telly watching cartoons and that they are put on the path that will lead them along the steps of the educational and qualifications ladder so they get good productive white collar jobs to become contributing tax-paying members of society.
Which is why your neighbourhood teenager, if they want to work in childminding services, needs to undertake the below as one module of their training course:
You may well be up on your Constructivist Theories, John Schilling, but not all parents can make up that shortfall themselves! 🙂
Surely there’s a middle ground between “caregiver has zero training or experience” and “caregiver has a college degree and parents have to pay $2000 per month per kid.”
‘Zero experience’ and ‘zero state-legible experience’ are importantly different here – if the goal is to use highly regulated private and government services to replace what was historically done by extended families, neighbors, and parental common sense, I’m not sure how surprising it is that things have gotten this weird.
parents have to pay $2000 per month per kid.
Still likely to have to pay that, because the teenager you are paying $50 to watch your kid for a couple of hours is doing it in your home (hence no overheads for her to cover), you’re not likely to sue her and her parents if, when you come home, little Johnny fell down and scraped his knee (so no insurance costs), and he/she is being fed, clothed and sheltered by their parents so the money is going to whatever teenagers spend stuff on plus savings and not “wage I need to pay my mortgage and live on”.
A commercial childminder, even “Ms Jones who runs it out of her house”, is covering a whole lot of expenses plus wanting to make a profit out of it on top of that, like any other business. Even if she is using her own family as unpaid labour, those costs and incentives remain. “Ms Jones Merry Kids Fun Place” that is a separate building hiring on staff comes under a ton of regulations and requirements and is costed accordingly. The staff don’t need university degrees (I think the article is misleading, in that it’s from the point of view of ‘I already have Excessive Qualifcations, why do I need to have these to get hired as a childcare practitioner?’ slant rather than “what qualifications do you need and why?”) but they still need some training, and they need some level of wages to make it worth their while to leave their homes and go out to work every day. $50 for “just make sure little Johnny doesn’t play in traffic” for three hours childcare isn’t going to work on that scale.
When our daughter was little, we hired a girl to help with babysitting; she was eleven. The original idea was that she could watch the baby while Betty was cooking and such, but it turned out that she was an eleven year old adult, sufficiently so that we were willing to sometimes leave her in complete charge of the baby. She continued as our baby sitter for several years.
That was nearly thirty years ago. Many years later I got an email from her — she had apparently come across something I posted or some reference to me online. She attached a photo of the fighter plane she was now pilot of.
This is a clear example of college being a proxy for conscientiousness. Certainly college coursework is not necessary and likely rarely relevant, not nearly as relevant as having a couple younger siblings, but as a first pass way to narrow down a candidate pool with zero effort, probably does some work.
Oh, wait, it’s a government regulation, not a dumb HR rule? That sounds like cargo cult thinking.
At this rate, a couple of decades from now, you’ll need to be a college graduate to have and raise children in the first place.
Thankfully by that point everyone will have a college degree.
Then you can capture 100% of the populace by offering student loan forgiveness.
Intermediate step will be to require parents that homeschool to have a college degree. If I lived in a liberal state, I’d be seriously worried that my wife would have to go back go college just to raise our children the way we want to.
Some states already soft-required that back in the 2000’s, by making non-college-graduates submit more curriculum information up front and jump through some other hoops.
Realistically, this probably shifts the child-care equilibrium further toward nannies being paid under the table.
Yet another “make it illegal to be poor” example.
Is anyone anywhere defending this as a good idea? This just seems like such a terrible idea on its face I’d be very interested to see arguments from the other side.
People with college degrees looking for work in the child-care sector are probably thinking this is a great idea.
Probably so are upper-middle-class parents who are looking to hire professional child care and don’t want to have to think about whether the caregivers are A: trustworthy and B: smart and cultured enough to give their precious younglings a proper middle-class upbringing.
An awful lot of stuff the poor and working classes desperately need, is increasingly illegal to offer in the market because the middle to upper-middle classes are afraid that if it were available they might accidentally buy it without thinking about it.
The rule was likely made to sound good to the degree having class, not to actually do anything useful. After all, any sixteen year old, and most younger, can watch kids.
“any” is pushing it quite far but if you cannot leave kid with sixteen year old then there is something wrong with either one (it is not necessarily their fault – for example in a case of a very complicated disease).
Well, OK, “any sixteen year old within two standard deviations of the norm can watch some defined number of typical child-units”. But I do try to avoid sounding like an evil robot, and thought that was close enough for government work.
Scott may post on how to avoid sounding like an evil robot, but the comments section is an attempt to mold you into one via behavioral reinforcement.
Requiring basic training involving first-aid stuff they are likely to face (eg. choking) may be worthwhile. But my understanding is that can be done in a handful of hours or so, even for someone of that age.
Making the blogroll literal reminds me of when TVTropes put a large amount of effort into removing obscure references from their trope names — changing https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheToblerone to https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BoisterousBruiser and so forth.
Maybe less fun, though I didn’t understand the old blogroll either, so this may make it more likely that I click on some of them for once.
I must have read and re-read the page for The Toblerone half a dozen times.
Each time I’d think “Yeah, okay, I guess I get it. I can sort of picture what kind of character that is.”
And then I’d forget and have to re-read the page when I saw it linked elsewhere.
In contrast, I haven’t read the page for Boisterous Bruiser once. I knew immediately, from the name, what that’s all about.
Yeah, it’s definitely a net gain for usability, but a slight loss for whimsy. I’m glad they kept some of the more entrenched names – e.g. The Dragon and Xanatos Gambit and friends.
But, Conviction by Counterfactual Clue is just so much less fun than “Encyclopedia Browned”, which was a nice complement to the (still unchanged) Dan Browned.
I miss them. I knew exactly who “The Starscream” or “The Jonas Quinn” was, and if you didn’t it became quickly learnable.
I am glad to see that “Hitler Ate Sugar” remains intact…
“Xanatos Gambit” is pretty understandable though. Once you’ve heard the description of the trope, the name fits, even if I have no idea where the word “Xanatos” is from (regardless of how many times I’ve read the page).
How does the name fit when you don’t know Xanatos?
Also, go watch Gargoyles.
Oh, so that’s the official title of Star Trek: TNG: The Animated Series…
I always thought it was awesome every time a new voice actor from Star Trek popped up on the show. Off the top of my head, I remember Johnathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis, Michael Dorn, Brent Spiner, and Kate Mulgrew, but I think there may have been others, too.
False. No way. Not this time.
How have I never seen that clip before? Definitely saving that for arguing with friends.
Biweekly Naval Gazing Links Post:
First, yesterday was the 104 anniversary of the Battle of Jutland, the largest naval battle of WWI. I celebrated by talking about the British blockade of Germany, having covered Jutland itself quite well in previous years.
As for the rest of the past two weeks, I’ve been taking a close look at the revolutionary Tomahawk cruise missile, from its origins as a nuclear missile through the very interesting anti-ship version to the early conventional land-attack weapons, as used in Desert Storm. On Wednesday, I’ll finish the series with a look at where it is today.
And I’ve continued my tutorial for Aurora, a very interesting 4X game. The series starts here.
Hi there
long time fan and the first time I write a comment. I decided to start blogging again and I figured readers of SSC might like my contents too: short-form articles about interesting concepts, not bound to any particular topic. Check it out if you fancy! https://gerardclos.com/
Cheers,
G.
If the universe is a simulation, why would the Implementers make gravity work the way it does? It seems really computationally difficult to simulate, having every mass exert a force on every other mass. I feel like most of the rest of physics, as we understand them so far, aren’t too challenging to simulate, but gravity really sticks out.
This seems like a great argument for general relativity. In Newtonian physics, you have to worry about every mass acting on every other mass, but in Einsteinian physics, each mass just deforms space, a single universal field, and then other masses behave according to the local shape of space.
I think your question can probably be turned around, and you could argue that relativity supports the simulation hypothesis, because it’s much more computationally efficient, I think it’d be O(n) instead of O(n^2)?
I don’t think this follows. Computing some aspect of the field everywhere would be O(n*m), where n is the number of objects affecting any point and m is the number of places you want to know the curvature of spacetime. And I assume m needs to be greater than n because you at least need the curvature everywhere there’s a mass.
Perhaps a relevant caveat that I’m a *very* mediocre programmer.
The way I’m picturing it, you have some field “space”, and then you have your array of particles. In Newtonian physics, you have to compute the force between every pair of particles. In the einsteinian version, you just have to run through the particle list twice, once to set your space shape, and once to compute your forces.
I think you’re saying that you need such a high resolution on the space field that you end up worse off? I guess I could see that, but it seems like since the influence of a mass on space is continuous and linear (in the linear algebra sense), you don’t actually have to compute every point. You’d have some existing solution that’s “how much space deforms at every point due to a point mass”, and then you just superimpose a bunch of those.
I guess this trades computational steps for memory? Maybe that doesn’t make you any better off, but it does seem like this should just be O(n) in space even if not in time.
But when you’re setting your space shape, isn’t it m*n^3? You do a pass over each mass (m), and then have to update every point in space (n^3).
Or if you use your approach of “that’s how much space deforms at every point…”, that’s back to the m^2 complexity.
Yeah you still have to deal with all of space. I’m imagining that you already have to deal with all of space for lots of purposes anyway though. The specific concern that gravity is inefficient because it happens between every pair of masses no longer applies in general relativity, because gravity is masses impacting and being impacted by a universal field.
If storing all of space is a problem then you probably aren’t simulating a universe anyway. I agree there are other coefficients in the O(C*m) behavior, but at least in terms of number of particles, it should be possible to be linear in that.
The problem is that each point in space is basically now another particle whose motion you have to keep track of.
That is, you’re way oversimplifying the step “[run through the particles] to set your space shape.” The Einstein gravitational field is not only influenced by the objects in it but also by itself. So if before you had n particles and O(n^2) work to do you now have n particles plus m points in space where m must be much larger than n for any hope of accuracy, and the step where you update space goes like O(m^??).
Think of it this way: is it easier to simulate the effect of ships’ wakes on each other by using a simple formula to approximate the wake a ship by itself generates and doing the O(n^2) algorithm OR by realistically simulating the fluid dynamics of the waves in between the ships?
@smocc I had forgotten that curvature of space can curve space further, that probably does throw a bigger wrench in things.
As far as the ship analogy, I think the “simulate the ocean” angle makes more sense in a context of the simulation being about the whole ocean anyway. It was never about influence of ships on ships, it was about the whole ocean in the first place, so this is only relevant to the question of how the ships interact with the ocean. Once you’re simulating the whole ocean anyway, treating ships as perturbers of the ocean instead of interacting particles seems likely to be simpler.
Also, my understanding is solving gravitational warping of space is *much* easier than solving turbulence. That we can add the influence of individual particles to eachother. If that’s just a low-energy approximation then perhaps it isn’t true, but I was picturing the actual computational step from each particle to be the same and therefore much easier to scan across every particle (since you basically have a single matrix of the effect of a point mass, which you then add to various points in space).
But yeah I may be oversimplifying gravity too much.
@smocc: But field theories are local, so (assuming a discretization) the field value at point x at time t is only determined by the field values at the that point and a few points in the neighborhood of x at time t – 1. By contrast, Newton’s Law is non-local, so you really need to keep track of all the particles in the universe to find the force on one of them at a given time.
@Alejandro
Yes, the theory is local, which means doing the wave propagation at each time step is O(m) rather than O(m^2). The downside is that now your model accuracy depends on the resolution of your spatial points. While your computation time may be O(m) your error is bounded from below by something like 1/m, (details depend on the kind of interaction).
And the real pisser is that you can’t ignore any of the m space points unless you’re really sure they don’t matter. When x and y aren’t neighbors you can’t tell a priori whether or not what’s happening at point x matters to point y without doing the simulation to tell.
@drunkfish The original question why simulators who have a choice would choose the gravitational field model over the Newtonian model. In the Newtonian model the question is “what is every single particle in the universe doing right now” and in the field model the question is “what is every single particle in the universe plus every single point in space doing right now.”
The second question is just harder and if you could get away with only asking about the dynamics of the particles it would be easier.
If you’re going to try to calculate the curvature of all of space, then that’s exactly as much work as calculating the (Newtonian) gravitational field vector at every point. And then that’s the acceleration of any particle at that point.
Of course calculating this for all of space is incredibly wasteful because most of space is empty.
I just feel the need to point out that there is a gravitational field in newtonian physics which can be described by a scalar potential. The equation for this potential is very simple, laplacian V = rho. In vacuum (most of space) rho=0.
By contrast, the relativistic gravitational field is described by a tensor with 6 independent components (due to bianchi identities and symmetry). Additionally, the field equations are significantly more complicated (although the stress energy tensor is also zero in a vacuum) .
That the laws of physics seem to be simple is something I’m curious about, particularly in combination with the idea of Tegmarkian multiverses. I’m confused in two spots.
First, why so little? Four forces, 17 particles, maybe double it for dark matter, between 3 + 1 and 11 dimensions? Why is the program so short? Appealing to Kolmogorov complexity doesn’t get you out of this. Yes, shorter programs are fundamentally more likely for any given phenomenon. But a randomly selected universe out of all possible Tegmarkian universes should have an infinite program length! Is it possible that most of the entities simply don’t interact? That is, not only is there dark matter and dark energy, but there is also super dark entities, which doesn’t even interact with gravity. Maybe most of the universe is such boring entities, and we simply happen to be playing in a rare tidepool of a handful of laws that interact in complicated enough ways to support life.
The other thing that confuses me is where the complexity is spent. Even if we assume the program length isn’t weird, the division of complexity seems weird. We have, at most it seems, a few kB of physical laws. But there are 10^80 particles! In a database, this wouldn’t be too unusual, but that is because databases were designed like that. As far as a Tegmarkian universe is concerned, the number describing how many particles there are (or really, how much energy there was in the initial conditions) is just another number.
Thinking about it, it might not be that weird? If we assume the fundamental particles aren’t stored individually, the actual amount of program length to store the initial energy is something like log2(10^80), that might mean that most physical laws in the observable universe should be close in length to that, otherwise the number of bits dedicated to the initial conditions would be weirdly long or weirdly short. Or the initial conditions are anthropically biased in different ways, and this isn’t valid.
When people do simulations of galaxy formation, they generally use a newtonian framework because it’s easier to simulate and sufficiently accurate.
Gravity sucks to simulate because it’s long-ranged. You can formulate this either as having to consider many non-negligible pair-wise interactions, or as having to update field strengths over a large volume.
If I were analyzing physics as a computed simulation, I’d definitely peg gravity as the complicated hack that got added on top of the original framework at the last minute to make things work out in practice. When combined with other models it tends to create a lot of issues.
For most intents and purposes you can formulate gravity the same way you formulate the other forces, namely as a field that permeates space, where the evolution is “local.” As far as a simulation is concerned, “local” means that the value of the field at position P and time t+1 only depends on the values of the field at P and its neighboring points at time t.
One consequence of the locality of gravity is that if the sun suddenly disappeared, it would be about 8 minutes before we flew off into space.
And that moment where we stopped travelling on an ellipse and started “flying off” in a straight line would be the *exact same* moment that we saw the light from the sun disappear!
Don’t gravity waves violate that?
On the contrary, this is why gravitational waves are a thing and why they move at a finite speed.
Do you mean gravitational waves? No, those travel at the speed of light (and I think, though I’m not sure, might require gravity to have a finite speed to exist at all)
They propagate at the speed of light (the maximum of any information propagating thru space, besides, possibly, quantum entanglement?).
Quantum entaglement isn’t really “information” in the traditional sense: it’s a quantum state that induces a correlation between measurements. This correlation is what causes the “spooky action at a distance” phenomenon, but can’t be used to transmit information.
Replying to zero:
That’s my understanding too but ‘inducing a correlation’ seems like some kind of propagation of information (by ‘the universe’ itself) even if it can’t be used to transmit any other info.
Compared to other things that need simulation gravity seems to not be excessive.
And anyway, if we are being simulated then their computation model and physics enabling it are so different from ours that calling it “computation” and “physics” is stretching the terms.
It’s already been covered by others a bit, but that’s a newtonian way of thinking about gravity. With relativity effects are all local and propagate out at the speed of light. That’s why you can have things like gravitational waves. These actually makes things a lot easier to simulate, computing the next time step of the simulation need only look at the neighboring bits of space once things are initialized (not to sound too much like Wolfram…).
I… think you’re right? Something about this doesn’t sound right to me, but I can’t really come up with a counter-argument.
Ok, I know what was confusing me about this, but it’s not gravity, it’s just non-locality of quantum physics.
Non-relativistic gravity has local field equations as well: laplacian V= rho, where rho is the local charge density. A very easy way to find the potential of a point mass is to solve laplacian V = 0 in spherical symmetry (rho =0 in the vacuum around the mass) . A similar truck can be used to get the Schwarzchild metric, but the relativistic equations take quite a bit more work to solve.
The absurdly complicated part in relativity is the boundary conditions. In newtonian physics, the equations are linear, so the field of particle 1 and particle 2 is just the sum of the two individual fields. Not so in general relativity.
Isn’t electromagnetic force pretty similar? Every positive charge exerts a force on every other positive or negative charge in the universe. It just so happens that most positive charges and negative charges are closely enough bound to each other that the net effect of both of them together decays at an inverse fourth power or something else much faster than an inverse square. But to get things technically right, you do need to consider all of them.
Unhelpful answer:
If the universe is a simulation, ipso facto the simulator has enough computing power to simulate it, so this can’t be that serious a problem. Maybe they just have really good hardware and the calculation is exported to a hundred thousand cores running in parallel timelines.
Alternatively, if the universe is a simulation, the simulator doesn’t in fact need to do gravity calculations in the technically correct way, they can just round it to zero at some plausible threshold and program an exception that runs the full calculation for really well-done physics experiments. Or not, and print an experimental design error code, or something.
Still, if some types of universes are harder to be simulated then such universes are less likely to be simulated.
Simulated universes are more likely to be simulation friendly.
I would be very surprised if it turned out that we could usefully assess how simulation-friendly the universe is from inside the universe.
Yeah, it is a de facto a theology and a quite silly one.
The really annoying thing to simulate is quantum mechanics. In classical mechanics, if you have two particles moving in three dimensions, you can describe the state with 12 real numbers: each particle’s position and velocity has three components.
In quantum mechanics, you need an infinite number of real numbers just to describe the state of these two particles. The state is determined not by 6 numbers but by a wave *function* f(x1, y1, z1, x2, y2, z2) that gives the probability* of finding particle 1 at (x1,y1,z1) and particle 2 at (x2,y2,z2).
This is one way of thinking about how quantum computers could in some cases be more powerful than classical computers. To describe the state of 100 classical bits, you need… 100 bits. To describe the state of 100 qubits, you need 2^100 = 10^30 classical bits, because the quantum state specifies a different probability for each possible combination of 0’s and 1’s, and there are 2^100 possible combinations. So it’s very very expensive to simulate a quantum computer with a classical computer. But a quantum computer could simulate a quantum computer quite easily!
*well, really the complex square root of the probability
Maybe in the container universe, they have really easier-to-build quantum computers, so it’s natural to make a universe that works the way ours does. (You make a good point, though)
New blogroll arrangement seems nice. Pity that Eric S Raymond has dropped off it, though. His blog is actively updated and often has rationality-related posts (e.g. here and here). For the rest… well, not wanting to get into CW territory, I’ll just say that he has a Nassim-Taleb-like knack for being controversial on almost every topic and plausibly right on a large enough fraction of them to be worth reading.
Thanks for the effective suggestion to check out ESR’s blog!
Since approximately the same time as the change to the blogroll headers, I’ve noticed a layout change, at least with Safari 11.0.1, that’s very much not an improvement. The old left hand side bar is replaced with a sidebar that loads in collapsed form, and can be opened out – to cover up part of the text.
The natural result is that I don’t see the side bar at all, and don’t notice any new posts until I receive them as part of my RSS feed, which does not include “hidden” OT threads.
It depends on the width of the browser window: if it’s wide enough, the sidebar is always shown, otherwise it’s collapsed by default. Perhaps something changed in such a way that now the threshold is slightly wider?
Thank you so much.
The way Safari decides what size to use for a new window is basically to pick the size of one of the windows the user has open. I’ve never been able to determine which one it picks; but the result is weird behaviour if you have windows of multiple sizes. I probably resized something else, and when I next went back to SSC, Safari decided I wanted it the same width – which was close enough to normal that I didn’t notice. (Alternatively, there was a change to the layout, making the needed size wider. But unless others are reporting this, I’m happy to blame Safari itself.)
Resizing the Safari window fixed the problem.
As 10240 says, this depends on the width of the browser window. But at least with Safari 13.1, it also depends on the text size. If you decrease the text size (Cmd -, or View->Zoom Out) you will probably see the side bar reappear. Unfortunately, depending on your visual acuity, this it will likely reappear just about the point that the text becomes slightly too small to read comfortably!
I guess I never really believed that TheLastPsychiatrist was dead until it was removed from the SSC blogroll. Even though the blogroll obviously had no effect on whether some of the older, abandoned blogs continued or not, I still choose to blame you for this
Magic Rules Update:
1. Companions have been re-worked. Now, instead of just being in your hand from the start, you have pay three mana to bring them in from your sideboard into your hand. As far as I can tell, this means that the “companion zone” is not a thing anymore. This effectively adds three mana to the costs of all companions, although you can pay that over two turns. I’m not sure what the effect of this will be… three mana to draw a card is below rate, but not horrible, especially if you are guaranteed to draw a powerful and known card.
2. Fires of Invention is banned – good. Card was broken from the beginning; shouldn’t have seen the light of day. Too vulnerable to shenanigans.
3. Agent of Treachery is banned – F-ing finally. I hated this card even before all the recent additions made him trivial to get onto the battlefield. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Overall, I’m interested to see what will happen. My first guess is that we’ll see more Temur Reclamation decks running around; that was the only tier-1 deck that didn’t really rely on companions OR fires/agent. Maybe mid-range will make a comback? With agent gone we can go back to having permenants in play.
Well Obosh and Gyruda are dead – Lurus probably still gets played main deck in some stuff, but I don’t think the restriction + the mana is good enough – except maybe in cycling.
Yorion seems like the one where you might still find 3 mana for a card and the deck-building restriction worth it.
I think rakdos/jund sacrifice and cycling are still good too and we’ll definitely still see some kind of u/w control.
Yorion stood out for me as the biggest winner among the losers as well. That deck routinely has 3 extra mana… although I forgot to mention also that the companions can only be brought back at sorcery speed which maybe even that deck doesn’t want to do.
I had honestly blocked these from my head. Yeah, I think the cat machine will keep on ticking along and cyclings as good as it ever was.
Wow, they went ahead and power-level-errata’ed Companion. I didn’t expect that, and it sets a scary precedent, but it’s probably the right fix from a gameplay perspective. 3 mana seems a little excessive; I’d have liked to see it at 2 mana but I can understand that they weren’t willing to risk it not being enough. Given that attitude toward risk I’d expect that companions see near-zero tier 1 play going forward, except maybe for the occasional Companion that’s just played for incremental value rather than having the deck built around it. That makes me sad because it’s the opposite of what Companions were designed to do.
Overall Magic seems to be taking a more aggressive attitude toward experimentation recently, which is really interesting. I can think of 3 possible reasons for it:
1. There’s increased business pressure to sell cards in the short term, which given the popularity of non-rotating formats means ramping up card desirability; being experimental is a way to print highly desirable cards without outraging the customer base too much.
2. There’s concern over the long-term health of the game and the experimentation is an attempt to find fruitful design ideas that will keep it dynamic.
3. The online Arena platform makes it easier and more rewarding to “move fast and break things” relative to paper Magic.
Mark Rosewater’s claiming that it’s mostly point 2 – they are deliberately changing their philosophy more towards big, splashy stuff that they might have to ban over relatively safe but boring stuff.
I personally think 3 is also a big factor as well though. It’s objectively easier and less disruptive to change rules in digital than it is paper; I personally see this as a potential indicator that paper magic is becoming less of the main focus and the real time/developer effort is shifting towards arena.
Also, they’ve had twenty years to pick the low hanging fruit. New ideas are probably going to be either weird or boring at this point.
Maybe they should start re-releasing some of the early sets — the ones before Modern, or maybe pre-Pioneer. Just tweak them a bit based on accumulated experience. Should be much cheaper than designing from scratch, and most of the grognards who played those sets the first time around will be gone anyway.
That’s similar to ‘Masters’ sets, which, quibbles about pricing aside, usually play pretty darn well.
Just re-releasing some old expansion set verbatim would not necessarily be an improvement, since a lot of cards back then were overly complex or pointlessly bad.
I agree with this a lot. Especially with Arena. Just adding old sets back would be huge value for limited work.
Twenty-five actually.
I really enjoyed the “Killing a goldfish” reviews of MTG sets, and especially the one about Time Spiral a block which has probably the most weird ideas, while also being super inward looking.
I kinda disagree – I mean, look at mutate. It’s a great mechanic, provides interesting choices for the player, has a bunch of levers that R&D could tune to adjust power levels (IE by increasing the on-mutate effect or the new creature’s power level). It also really worked from a flavor perspective and isn’t, IMO, especially weird.
And that’s just from this set. Skipping Theros, which for some reason I don’t remember, Eldraine brought us Adventure which is one of my favorite mechanics ever. Again, interesting decisions, super tunable and really cool from a flavor standpoint without being overly complex.
Mutate isn’t any weirder than Bestow, but it is pretty weird and has a lot of confusing corner case interactions you probably would rather not risk in a fresher game with plenty of design space.
You can’t say it’s just like an aura, since it doesn’t fizzle if the target creature dies in response. But it doesn’t stay on the field like bestow. It’s basically an enchantment but doesn’t count as such. And it makes clones a real head ache. Blinking and reanimating it work as the rules would predict, but not intuitively.
Adventure cards are just a bit weirder than split or aftermath (because they mess around with exile), but those are also kind of weird, two little cards in one. There’s lots of edge cases around anything that cares about converted mana costs or countering a specific type of spell, say. It’s not hard to grok, and they are kind of cool, but certainly an example of experimentation.
I think a good rebuttal to my point would be that this kind of experimentation has been going on for some time, and isn’t related to recent power level spikes, which have been on an upswing, non-linear but with a positive slope, since about, what, Smuggler’s Copter?
How is 3 mana for +1 card below rate? isn’t 2U the standard cost for a draw 2 sorcery? So 3 generic mana is great value as long as the companion is better than what you’d get on average from your deck (which is easy given that there are >1/3 lands in there).
I don’t think there is a single deck in standard playing divination, or even Of One Mind, which is probably closer to 1u in effective cost. It can be the normal cost and still be below rate; 2U is balanced for limited, just like a bear is, and I think it’d be fair to say grizzly bears is below rate (for basically all colors at this point).
It’s part of why I think Yorion is still pretty decent – a control deck is much more likely to want a free divination then an aggro deck.
Fair enough on the power level of divination, but I was trying to factor in the high option value that this effect grants. Sure, divination is sub-par, but a divination has opportunity costs: awkward mulligans, being down 1 card until you play it, the danger of drawing too much card draw, etc. This effect doesn’t have any of those downsides. It’s basically not there at all until the exact moment you want to use it. If we weren’t comparing against the previous companion mechanic which was absolutely bonkers, this would be considered strong, specially for a control deck.
By the way, I’m not an active player, so I’m reasoning from first principles rather than the state of the current meta.
Yup, that’s fair – I think your estimate of “draw a card, put your companion into your hand” being slightly better then divination is true – so the question becomes, how far would you change your deck for a free divination in your starting hand.
It makes them less powerful, but also makes the aggro/tempo ones relatively less powerful compared to the control ones.
Yeah, what Itowel said. Look at what it’s competing with in standard.
1U gets you Omen of the sea a flash scry 2, draw 1.
1UU get’s you narset, which lets you filter through 10 card, pick 2 of them and locks down your opponent’s ability to gain card advantage.
1WU gets you 3feri which helps you stabalize and serves as repeatable card draw.
1UG gets you Uro, which draw and ramps and gains life.
I know I’m comparing generic to colored mana, but still – what turn do you want to spend 3 mana on your main phase doing basically nothing? Turn 6 or 7 maybe?
Agent for 7 mana without cheats was totally fair. There’s a ton of stuff for 7 mana that is comparable.
Fires on the other hand? Functionally triples your mana. On turn 3 or 4. Insanity.
Sure. Fair, but feelbad. I still hated it. That being said, when was the last time you saw a deck that was actually trying to cast Agent for 7 instead of either warping him up with either Winota or Lukka or whatever?
ETA – and sure he can be “fair” at 7, but not when Thassa’s flashing him every turn.
This. Obscenely unfun.
The hilarious thing about Agent is that is has *more* text. You draw cards if you control it and, like, 3 opponents cards.
If you don’t have the game locked up after stealing and keeping 3 of the opponents permanents, you don’t deserve to win, let alone draw more cards.
Don’t see how Agent is less fun than a boardwipe or a Gyruda. Both of which are much cheaper to cast.
@axiomsofdominion
Two reasons:
1st, if you do a Gyruda combo, you just did a super cool thing. If you do an Agent combo, you just stole my cool thing. Having your stuff stolen feels way worse than “I did awesome, he just out awesome-ed me”.
2nd, with Gyruda or boardwipes or whatever, there’s usually some comeback potential. Maybe I had an Anax and still have a bunch of tokens after a boardwipe, maybe I’ve got deathtouch or fliers or something where I can weasel out a win. Epic comebacks are rare but awesome. With Agent, you just stole whatever I was going to use for my comeback.
Being stolen from inherently sucks and deprives you of comeback resources.
Three play scenarios:
1. I have a cool nonland permanent in play. Agent comes out and takes it unless I have a counter spell. I now get to experience the un-fun feeling of getting beaten to death with my own thing. That feels bad.
2. I have several nonland permanents in play. Maybe a few small creatures and a planeswalker. Agent comes out, takes the best one, then gets flashed a bunch and takes the rest. I now get beaten to death with my own things. That feels bad.
3. I have no nonland permenants in play. Agent comes out and takes my mana, then gets flashed and takes another mana. Now I’m down 2 mana and since agent is getting flashed every turn, I can never go up mana again. This feels really bad especially since now I have to face 10 turns of a 2/3 beating me to death.
These just aren’t fun. Losing to a deck that doesn’t play any wincons because it knows it can kill you with yours feels worse than getting your board wiped or combo-d out. At least to me.
I wonder if we’ll see decks with 4 copies + companion. Eg, a Gyruda deck with 4 Gyruda’s plus Gyruda companion. That way you can run the Gyruda combo and if you miss your Gyruda draw on turn 4 you can still grab Gyruda from the companion zone. Yeah, it slows you down a turn, but as a fail case that’s not bad.
I’ve been running a cycling deck with Lurus and I really like him, I kinda want to run 4, but ironically you can’t have Lurus in your deck if you have a Lurus companion.
I don’t think this changes the way you play it – Gyruda was already playing 3 main + 1 SB, and will probably continue to do so, if that remains a deck.
I think the 4x restriction includes sideboards.
It does.
I thought this was interesting. Apparently, police shootings have gone down in urban areas over the last years, but increased in rural and suburban areas, with the net result being little change.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/police-are-killing-fewer-people-in-big-cities-but-more-in-suburban-and-rural-america/
538 ascribes these changes to different policies on police response, but conspicuously absent is any correlation or comparison to crime rates. Given the stereotype of rural laid-off coal miners and opioid crises, I would suspect declining socioeconomics could lead to an increase in crime, and thus more police response – in other words, shootings correlate with the quantity and not (solely) the quality of police work. So while crime rates overall has a strong downward trend, I also find the claim that rural crime has reached its highest level in a decade:
https://www.governing.com/topics/public-justice-safety/gov-crime-rural-urban-cities.html
I think there’s a case to be made that crime is increasing in rural areas. In general, where there is decay, there is probably crime and chaos of all varieties. I’d bet that the drugs are a major part of it. Also demographic change might also contribute.
Further, I remember reading about how in rural areas you might see such things as looting of copper wire and church bells, which @ana53294 has described in these open threads in Spain, but also is a problem throughout California, including its rural central valley, or a right-wing but local source.
That matches my anecdotal experience growing up in a rural California town. Definitely feels less safe than it used to, mostly from increased drug use and a lack of good work. I also think it’s enforced by a cycle wherin the town is seen as “dead-end” so motivated kids work hard in school to go to uni, then leave and move to the city. That leaves behind mostly dropouts and people who didn’t have the motivation to leave the town as the main youth population. It’s a brain/motivation drain that sucks people out of smaller towns and into larger cities, making the smaller towns seem more dead end, making more people who are able to leave, want to leave.
I can’t put together stats, but of my highschool graduating class (2015) the number of people who are already parents, often single, is wildly higher among those who stayed in the town. Same for people in my graduating class who’ve died of overdoses. As far as I’m aware literally all of them were people who stayed in the town after graduating high school.
So since the geocentric model of the universe was based on Aristotle’s Physics, where things in the air or aether fall not because of gravity as we understand it, but because everything falls to the center of the Earth/universe unless buoyant liquid or a solid surface is in the way, the Moon and planets would have to be either useless spheres embedded in their crystal spheres or possibly-inhabited flat dirt spots on the otherwise clean and transparent spheres, right?
Only if planets and Sun are not rotating.
I always liked the Euclidean position, where for all we know the universe really is heliocentric, but telling people this will make them immoral.
My understanding is that the Aristotelian system (or at least, later versions of it) had the idea that every substance has a proper motion. The principle of earth had a proper motion that moved downwards to the center, while the principle of water is a proper motion to move downwards unless stopped by earth. The principle of fire had a proper motion to ascend upwards. I’m not exactly sure what the proper motion of air was, but it was less downwards than water and less upwards than fire.
These four principles only govern the sublunary objects that are inside the central crystal sphere. Beyond the crystal sphere, everything is made of a quintessence/fifth element, that has its own proper motion of moving in a circle around the four other elements. I think they considered the stars and planets to be perfect spheres made of this quintessence, though it’s possible that they thought of them as spherical impurities suspended inside a transparent crystal sphere that itself did the rotation.
Incidentally, I think this paper is a good look at the parts of Aristotelian physics that don’t depend on an outdated theory of the elements. It turns out to have Newtonian physics as a limiting case where you assume zero friction motion in a vacuum: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-american-philosophical-association/article/aristotles-physics-a-physicists-look/60964532EE56BA65655971A314FD9717
I think an easier way for moderns to conceptualize it is to think of it as layers of density. Just like how in a beaker sediment, water, and oil will separate into layers, so too the four elements separate themselves into layers based on “purity.”
Analyzing the Siege of Gondor. First of six parts. Mostly about logistics. Compares book and movies. How much food does it take to move an orc army of a given size?
This is excellent- as are his similar posts about Game of Thrones and Helm’s Deep (the latter is still in progress).
Yes, this is excellent and I strongly recommend the entire blog!
+1. Came across this a few months ago (via HackerNews IIRC) and have become a regular reader. Come for the movie nitpicking, stay for the insights about premodern society!
Seconding this – I was worried this would just boil down to a list of grievances stemming from movies being unrealistic – but it does a good job recognizing the necessities of filmmaking. And it gave me a newfound appreciation for how the book depicts the realities and details of war.
I’ve been reading the blog on and off the last few weeks and there’s some great stuff on there. I will signal boost the Cicero post since that is his least read, and undeservedly so. I also liked his two posts on cities: one, two.
+1, +2 on the cities. I think we’ve mostly hammered it into geek consciousness at least that you have to study some logistics if you don’t want to sound like a complete noob when you talk about all the warfighting in your favorite genre entertainment. The logistics of cities is an equally fascinating subject, that gets far less attention.
“If X people and animals live here, what do they eat?” is always a good genre fiction question.
According to Michael Mornard, a guy who was playing in the original Dungeons & Dragons campaigns at time of publication, people were already raising that question about vast, lightless underground settlements. Apparently the answer was “McDonalds.”
The drow, eating the impossible burger before it was hip.
Chemotrophic fungi, radiotrophic fungi, fungus people?
If your entire species dual-classes as magic-users, “impossible” is more like guidelines anyway.
@Lambert: Plumbers are needed to get the dungeon’s feces to the fungus people, as well as a Princess who performs the distribution of fungus people to be eaten.
How worried should we be about COVID spread at these protests? I know it’s mitigated by people being outside and mostly wearing masks, but obviously large gatherings where everyone is shouting are not good.
On a personal level – people might want to stay away from vulnerable loved ones, just out of the possible guilt – on a societal level, I’d say very little – what’s done is done and I don’t think discussions about it are going to change behavior in the future.
Not sure what the numbers are but aren’t transmission rates much lower in open areas than in indoors? Most of the rioting activity is outside. Though, this is balanced by the fact that there are many protestors in dense groups. Plus, rioters in particular have two reasons to wear masks.
I think that’s mostly because open areas typically give people a chance to spread out more than they do indoors. Possibly with a side order of sunlight acting as a disinfectant, but I saw a lot of rioting happening well after sunset last night.
The biggest risk factors seem to be crowding and noise, and riots have plenty of both. I do not think improvised masks are going to save these people. Youth, will save almost all of them from actually dying – bringing SARS CoV-2 home to their less youthful relatives, that might be a big problem.
I was told by someone who should know what he is talking about (and what to say in public), that an important part of being outside is that the virus concentration will get diluted much faster.
That on the other hand might get offset when a lot of people standing close together and chanting protests slogans.
I am anticipating a big blowout of cases in the next 2 weeks, and will assume a lot more people around me have been infected.
I think it depends on which area you mean. The US as a whole has 20-40 million cases already, mostly centered around urban areas so I don’t think you’d notice a bump in many of these spots.
Which Science Fiction media has the best music?
For the classic properties, I actually rank the Alexander Courage TOS theme over Star Wars. It does a few slightly more interesting things with the melody, which really hammers in that “weirdness in the unexplored” sense, which is at the core of Sci-fi.
However, Star Wars is still a juggernaut, because John Williams is truly the man.
I found the TNG theme to be a little too conventional. It’s a theme that could be applied to a non-genre setting, while not being quite as epic genius as Star Wars to make up for that. The Halo theme is actually more interesting, in that sense.
I am not familiar with the other Trek themes.
I initially liked the reboot Trek theme by Giacchino, but it turned out to be empty calories. Lack of rhythm means that it doesn’t hold up outside of a very narrow range of orchestration, and it’s damning that one always gets a thrill when they return to teasing at the Courage theme.
It might be cheating, but I also put Yoko Kanno’s work (Cowboy Bebop and GITS:SAC) in the top tier. Kenji Kawai’s work was good, probably better than some Trek themes, but also isn’t really sci-fi on its own. Its power comes from the juxtaposition of the traditional with the imagery it’s accompanying.
The Fifth Element gets some novelty points, but also cheated by using proven opera masterpiece. It’s basically an insert song remix.
I have zero memory for any themes from Blade Runner or The Matrix.
I’ll second Yoko Kanno, and add Clint Mansell for his work on all of Darren Aronofsky’s films, as well as Moon
One that I only recently discovered thanks to Netflix was the soundtrack for Evangelion. The story is interesting, albeit very confusing on a first watch, but the music really sticks with you long afterwards. It’s really good at capturing alien horror, and also has some of the best combat themes I’ve heard anywhere.
It all comes Tumbling Down
Tumbling Down
Tumbling Down
I guess you can’t really beat 2001: A space odyssey, which brings Richard Strauss and György Ligeti to the table.
Are we talking music that’s terrific on its own, or that complements the film perfectly? They could overlap of course.
Since they’re long-preexisting pieces, the director could shoot and edit everything tailored to the music.
Cowboy Bebop.
I absolutely love the work Bear McCreary did for the reimagined BSG.
His blog has some really awesome description of how he went about scoring the show, coming up with themes, etc.
Beat me to it. Almost everything that man produces is excellent.
The blase runner sound track isn’t about motifs. It’s about ambience and texture and maybe tonality.
The blase runner, just jogging aimlessly…
Vangelis did also do the Chariots of Fire soundtrack.
The Battlestar Galactica reboot had some great music, especially the opening mini-series. I also like the music for Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve knows how to choose his composers).
You got me thinking of the first two seasons of Lost in Space (1965-1967), which had an absolutely terrible opening theme by John Williams. He must have known how bad it was, since he wrote a new theme for season 3.
“Duel of the Fates” is the height of music for SF/fantasy media. For the OT, he turned in straight instrumental Classical, which was well-executed but, well, you could have the Germans in WWI marching to the Imperial March. Gregorian chants in Sanskrit was a conceptually brilliant way to say “this place is culturally alien.”
What he was doing in this piece of sh–urely quality cinema…
And also, Duel of the Fates didn’t completely wreck film music the way Hans Zimmer’s BWAAAAAHHHHHHs did!
My ranking of Trek opening themes from best to worst is:
Voyager > DS9 (first few seasons) > TOS > TNG > DS9 (later seasons) > Discovery >> Enterprise.
Picard kind of stands off to one side- it’s very good for what it’s trying to be, but doesn’t feel like a Trek theme. The Discovery theme is trying to be a Trek theme, but would fit better with a documentary about Trek.
Seconding nuBSG, 2001 and Star Wars. In particular, Duel of the Fates is the best thing about the prequel trilogy.
The prequel love theme is amusingly dramatic, and still better than any MCU theme.
Psssh. My wife and I did a vow renewal on the bridge of the Enterprise at the Star Trek Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton (in costume) and played the theme to Enterprise. It was awesome. “It’s been a long way, gettin’ from there to here…it’s been a long time, but our time is finally here!”
The opening credits to Enterprise perfectly captured what I think of as the “Green Lantern theory of technology”. There will be FTL travel because it’s a next stage in the unfolding of the human willpower to explore that started with inventing Paleolithic rafts.
what do you mean? That’s not the enterprise theme, this is the enterprise theme…
+1 to Voyager. That theme still makes my emotions swell every time I hear it. I’ve sometimes considered requesting it be played at my funeral.
the DS9 theme is more mournful…
True, Voyager probably wouldn’t be a good fit for a funeral because while it is a bit sad it is mostly hopeful. I think the main reason I considered it for my funeral is that if I played it at my wedding I would have died of embarrassment.
But this of how more efficient it is if you only have to fly all those people into town once!
There are two old scifi series that I would have forgotten a long time ago if it weren’t for the great theme music:
1) The “Space Rangers” Theme by Hans Zimmer: Youtube
2) “Wild Palms” Theme: Youtube
The Matrix along with Reloaded definitely need a mention, there was a whole bunch of tracks that are instantly recognizable decades later.
I’m nominating Paul Ruskay’s excellent Homeworld soundtrack. His comeback for Strike Suit Zero wasn’t bad either.
Ah, left out my favorite Matrix tune out of all of them: furious angels. I used to rewatch that scene just to hear the song again.
I don’t know about best but I gotta give a hand to The Expanse for producing a Belter version of Deep Purple’s Highway Star.
+1 for Yoko Kanno, she’s probably the most versatile composer for sci-fi media and Cowbooy Bebop is her masterpiece. In the same series she ranges from Tank! to The Real Folk Blues to Blue and so on.
I’d also mention Nobuo Uematsu for his work on Square Enix games, notably the Final Fantasy series.
As for Western composers, John Williams wins hands down for Imperial March, Cantina theme and Duel of the Fates. Star Wars theme and Return of the Jedi theme are ok, all the other stuff from the prequels and the Disney trilogy is completely forgettable.
My favorite, or at least most stirring, theme from Star Wars is the “Throne Room” theme right before the closing credits of A New Hope.
I think of that as “definitely not chewie’s theme”
But he does sing lead vocals.
The Disney trilogy music is completely forgettable? It’s a bit derivative, sure (like the rest of the trilogy) but Rey’s theme and the Resistance march are good stuff that stands up to the original trilogy.
Also, how has nobody mentioned The Mandalorian yet?
The music of the Mandalorian is quite good and distinctive, while even after listening it yesterday I still can’t remember Rey’s theme or anything else from the DT.
I actually find her GITS:SAC work even more impressive. It has some of the same quality jazz and funk tracks as were done for CB, and then adds on EDM tracks that still hold up today, so spans and even wider range of genres.
There are plenty of Japanese composers that I adore, including Uematsu, but this thread was specifically for sci-fi, though.
I’ve remembered she also did the music of Vision of Escaflowne, with a completely different sound (ah, ye olde good times when Isekai anime weren’t all copycat harem NEET wish fulfillment crap or deconstructions thereof).
+1 for TOS over TNG. The TNG theme weirdly fails to fit the tone of the show– it feels more triumphalist/martial than TOS which is the opposite of the direction they took the storytelling. In this sense I think Giacchino’s reboot theme hit the mark well– it captures some of the wonder/mystery feel of TOS while adding in more overt action/adventure elements, which is exactly what the movies did too.
It isn’t quite sci-fi in the classic sense, but the score for Gravity won a well-deserved Oscar.
I would have to give the nod to Star Wars just because of how timeless it has become. Dual of the Fates is also quite good.
That said, I think that Blade Runner’s music might be the best match of music to film ever. So much of what I love about that movie is because of its ambiance, and the music fits perfectly. As great as Star Wars’ soundtrack is, I think it would have been a great soundtrack for many different kinds of movie.
I’ll have to take your word for it. In Argentina in the late 80s and the 90s the Blade Runner theme was used as the theme music for the weekly summary of soccer matches TV show. This became the earliest association with this music for me and other kids of my generation, so later when we saw the movie the reaction would forever be “why is soccer music playing now in this sci-fi movie?”
Funny, the book Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial already exists! So I guess the theological work is done?
As of today (June 1), is there any discernible trend in the number and intensity of the ongoing riots in American cities? Is it getting worse, staying the same, or tapering off?
My current guess would be tapering off because weekdays are starting and curfews are becoming more strict, though police are also spread more thinly. Hard to say though, it’s still pretty early to tell.
I get the impression too that the protests are dying down a bit. Here is a website that has live updates on what’s going on today: US Protests Live map. Protesting every day is exhausting, and people probably have personal responsibilities that they can put off for only so long. They may flare up again next weekend.
It reminds me of that passage in Homage to Catalonia that describes the May 1937 civil strife between anarchists and communists in Barcelona dying down:
I would look at a weather forecast. Rain keeps people away.
I’ve been struggling with an issue and the previous two posts sort of “encouraged” me to ask: how do I resolve my distrust of news agencies? I have the difficult to articulate impression that there is a large gap between what’s reported (the focus of the reporting, in particular) and what’s happening outside of the internet. Given that journalism has a great power to influence many people and “drive the conversation”, this perspective on news agencies causes me a lot of anxiety. (My parents grew up in communist Poland so I heard plenty of stories on reporting/reality inconsistencies.) Does anyone else wrestle with these kinds of thoughts?
I’d start further back – is that something you want to resolve in the first place? Trusting the untrustworthy seems like a potential mistake, and healthy distrust of all sources isn’t a negative. Make them do their work.
I think my issue centers around your term, “healthy distrust”. What if this list contains publications like the “New York Times” and “(My City) Times”? On one hand I see red flags leading to loss of trust. On the other hand, millions of people read these publications. As a result, I’m worried that the tinfoil hat in the corner is looking mighty inviting. Perhaps I’m having trouble separating the wheat from the chaff?
The New York Times is not trustworthy. I don’t know about any other Times that is trustworthy. Millions of people trust untrustworthy sources. There is no reason for you to change, and no benefit to be had by starting to trust those sources.
The reason that millions of people trust these sources is that western cultures have lost, or never had, the immunisation against propaganda that Eastern Europe has.
If you are trusting them because you are “supposed to” – lots of people read them, they’ve been around a long time, etc – then you have an unhealthy level of trust in them.
Healthy is “I’ve assessed them based on their behavior as I’ve observed it”. If you’ve observed them being untrustworthy and trust them as if they haven’t for any reason whatsoever, that’s the part of your trust system that needs fixing.
You can distrust them but still read them occasionally and just treat them with some skepticism. Read a few different sources and synthesize yourself. I think the line into conspiracy territory is when you start seeing them as “out to get you/misinform” vs just being people with their own biases and reporting incentives.
Also, basically treat the OpEd section of any large newspaper as essentially a different publication, and maybe avoid it all together, because they’re usually terrible.
I’d recommend to stop reading them.
Both because I share your impression and because stuff you can’t change that makes you anxious is best avoided.
I like having a few small outlets whose bias I understand and consider reliable as a major component of my reading, as opposed to larger outlets who may be more sophisticated in their goals. Larger outlets, I read the WashPo intermittently (and pay for the digital access) and whatever else hits my feeds, but larger outlets prolly make up less than 1/2 of my news.
E.g., I scan through JoeMyGod quite a lot. It’s written by a gay man who was at the center of a big NYC 80s and 90s gay scene, a guy who saw many, many of his closest friends and really just whole chunks of his social embeddedness sicken and die while Reagan’s CDC seemed to not care, or even to think it was karmic justice for being gay or out. JoeMyGod has a clear agenda: normalize gayness, mock anti-gay people, provide hub for pro-gay commentary). Sometimes it’s even quite enjoyable, particularly the mockery of the more ridiculous elements of the tribal right (e.g. he loves calling the Concerned Women of America the Concernstipated Women of America). He continues to be extremely embedded in his network, and quite independent, and a total loudmouth. He won’t catch every story–that’s not what he does at all–but he’s trying to talk about the world as he sees it, so his general sense of how the world works bleeds through a good bit.
Another place like that I really like is popehat.com, where a former U.S. prosecutor, who realized prosecutors have way too much power and not nearly enough discretion, and switched to being a for-hire defender. The blog very sadly is defunct (though he still tweets a good storm pretty regularly, and continues to be acerbic and funny).
Others like this… idiosyncraticwhisk.com (housing market econ), the quora feed of a comp sci prof I had in college (Thomas Cormen), I guess I have a couple dozen things like this that I wheedle through periodically. At the moment, only SSC really gets comments, so I guess I like it here.
I think your local paper is another good place like this–it *really* wants to get the details right on things like the high school sports score and the spelling of the names in the obituaries and wedding announcements.
Aside from that, if you want to keep tabs on what everyone else is reading… a news aggregator with a big subscriber base (e.g. reddit or something) might be better. Not very many people follow one main source anymore, if that was ever a thing, IMHO.
Thanks for the suggestions. My trust in the SSC community is, at the very least, higher than the major news outlets so I’m willing to look into some of these sources with an open mind.
You don’t ever get to trust publications for one because they can be acting 100% in good faith and still be deceived by their sources or have misinformed staff, for topics you actually care about enough to put in some effort you should compare reporting from different publications with known biases, affiliations and target demographics, hopefully you can avoid outlets that outright fabricate purported facts.
Yes, this is a common experience. Many other people feel the way you’re feeling.
On a similar note, reading Andrew Gelman during this crisis has not been good for my faith in medical science.
I was thinking recently that I need to be less confident of a lot of my own beliefs because I can’t always remember exactly which things are actually more likely to be true and which might be as ‘true’ as average (or bad) medical science.
It occurred to me that it’d be nice if Gelman would just a maintain a big list of facts he’s verified! (I know that’s ridiculous.)
Maybe I need to blog what I believe and why just so I can remember!
All media are wrong, but some are useful.
I struggle with a distrust of news agencies, although for maybe different reasons than you. Sometimes I’ll just sit back and let the propaganda be pumped into my head, but if I really want to understand something I’ll look at how ideologically opposed sources report on it and look at the “raw data” the articles are based on.
I believe this approach helps me get closer to the truth, and better understand what level of uncertainty I should assign to my conclusions. Personally, I value these outcomes, but they’re not very practical.
In my situation, having heterodox political opinions (even if carefully explained and well cited) is dangerous to one’s livelihood. Reports to authorities of even small deviations from the orthodoxy are not uncommon. So yeah, sometimes I wish I could just listen and believe certain news outlets; it would be so easy to participate in conversations about how stupid the other tribe is, but I just can’t do it.
Note that looking at ideologically opposed sources will only help catch mistakes that fall along partisan lines. There are a lot of failures that are pretty much inherent to the news business but do not necessarily manifest in a politically charged manner.
And “news business” should probably be considered to include scientific journals, or research generally, to a certain (lesser) extent.
I remember Michael Crichton talking about the accuracy of reporting (and how you notice errors in subjects you know a lot about, but then assume the rest of the paper is accurate) in something I read when I was a teenager and not really giving it much thought, but it stuck with me over the years. When I actually gained some useful knowledge, it started to stick out to me like a sore thumb. Now, everytime I read a news story I automatically think of all the times I’ve spotted simple errors and it makes me doubt what I’m reading.
It’s not a left wing or right wing thing either. I don’t even think things like most errors of omission are intentional. I think that unless you are a reporter on one single subject that you know inside and out, it’s just almost impossible to accurately report a story.
The moment I stopped trusting journalists was when I was reading some guy’s blog, and he was participating in Occupy Wall Street and describing a 2k+ people tent city, and it was completely absent from the news. My country’s media? Nope. CNN? Fox? BBC? Literally nobody covered it. I think the coverage started around two days after you’d expect it to. The papers weren’t sure if they are allowed to talk about it.
You can approximate what happened by reading a bunch of completely antagonistic sources with huge bias (e.g. NYT, Al Jazeera, possibly even Russia Today with a huge grain of salt) and interpolating something resembling the truth.
That’s a major issue–even if everything the news covers happened exactly as they tell it, they are still choosing what’s “newsworthy.” For an example, how much coverage did you see of the March for Life in January? There were well over 100,000 marchers.
Off the top of my head, here are some of the ways the news is necessarily biased, even if coverage of an event is (hypothetically speaking, of course) “faithful”/”truthful”/etc.:
– What is covered (what’s “newsworthy”)
– How much coverage something gets
– The order in which things are covered
– Who presents the information
– What type of verbal, visual, and/or aural language is used to cover something
– The level of detail, disclosure, or technical sophistication
– When the content is published
And all these except the last one are at play both within a given news story and across the news in general.
Note that every formal aspect of the news is designed to make you forget or ignore these constraints.
Also, do they present statistics or anecdotes? The latter are often unrepresentative and/or chosen based on the narrative that the reporter decided on in advance.
Also, what often happens is that they quote person with a favored point of view without fact-checking their claims, but not doing so for disfavored people. Journalism ethics/claim is that they are not responsible for the correctness of what other people claim in their paper, but by often fact-checking people’s statements, they create an implicit assumption that claims that are not called out for being wrong by the reporter, are actually correct.
Of course, both of these issues are logical outcomes of the human tendency to not question what matches our beliefs, but by not guarding against it, the reporters’ beliefs impact what they tell us is the truth.
Statistics can be just as misleading or incorrect though.
It’s a tough problem, since as Aapje mentioned, you’re fighting human nature. Also a business model that does not incentivize truth seeking much.
That’s definitely true, but that requires some form of trickery. Using anecdotes merely requires cherry picking. Of course, you can cherry pick with statistics, but it is typically far more obvious.
Two days isn’t long at all, given that 2000 people isn’t a lot compared to a country of 300 million. The media covered Occupy Wall Street extensively after that. I’m sure there are many events that the media should cover yet don’t, but OWS is not one of them.
I think you have mistaken the point that “a real dog” is making. It’s not that OWS wasn’t (eventually) covered adequately, but that this was when he first observed an undeniable intentional delay in coverage. This can be taken as evidence that the media is not simply reporting what is happening, but is consciously and collectively deciding which events to cover, and how they should be be covered. It implies that there are probably events (or aspects of events) that unlike OWS are simply never reported. The point is not how the short delay in coverage affected the perception of OWS, but the realization that the media is consciously sculpting a narrative and deciding what to cover (and how to cover it) based on how it affects that narrative.
You can resolve your distrust by remembering that the news is just a show put on by people who majored in stuff like English and Acting, in which they pretend to be authoritative gatekeepers of truth and matters of importance.
Once you realize it’s entertainment, then simply decide if it’s a show you enjoy watching. Don’t put any more “trust” in it than you would in Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones or Real Housewives of Wherever.
That’s an exaggeration. What is in the news has some relation to what is happening.
One way of getting a more accurate picture is by remembering that the consistent bias is in favor of telling a good story.
It’s true that the news has more relevance to real world events than scripted dramas, in the same way “Tiger King” or “America’s Funniest Home Videos” do. The people who make the show (mostly) don’t script and produce the actual events depicted/discussed in the show, but they decide what to depict and how to depict it, and they use any number of techniques to depict it in different ways.
This is as true for print as it is for radio, television, and web journalism, even though my examples were two TV shows.
It isn’t an exaggeration to say that the news is, at the end of the day, another form of entertainment alongside all other media people consume for fun — sitcoms, fiction novels, fashion magazines, gamer vlogs, etc. — and that it deserves no more trust than any of these.
Certainly not in the way someone might “trust” things like the judicial system, the speedometer in his car, what his physical therapist recommends when it comes to exercises, what the MLB website says the score of last night’s baseball game was, etc.
Again with this obsession. As if engineering majors don’t have their own all-encompassing biases distorting their views of how the world works.
Though I do think we’d be better off with more reporters who didn’t go to college at all, the crusty hard-drinking working-class types who only exist in old movies, if they ever did.
At least historians are trained to recognise biases.
But yeah, more of the sort of reporter who bangs therir fist on the table and demands photos of spiderman.
That’s not fair calling it an obsession. Seems like an ad hominem, like I’m crazed or something. It’s a hobby horse of mine for sure and I harp on it consistently when it gets brought up, but it’s not like I’m staying up at night grinding my teeth thinking about what a big charade journalism is. (OK, I’ve done that once or twice. But that’s it, and it was a while ago!)
Yes, people who major in anything, as well as those who major in nothing, all have biases. And I don’t even care about credentials, really. The point when I say “English and Acting majors” is that journalists are people whose only particular skill is in crafting narratives on tight deadlines, yet they present themselves as authorities on what is both true and important to know about, who are supposed to have some kind of special status as a result.
Most of the journalists I’ve encountered in real life are exactly the drinking, rumpled types you describe. As I said in a previous thread, journalism is a tough industry that doesn’t pay well, and those who survive in it are pretty road-hardened. But it doesn’t change what journalism is at its core.
One of the best writers ever – H L Mencken – fits that description.
His Newspaper Days, along with The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, are both great to read and capture the mixture of news-finding and coverage decisions that shape my picture of the news.
Don’t try to resolve your distrust of news agencies. They ARE all biased and present skewed visions of reality, though some of them are worse than others. The best advice I can give you is to get your news from multiple sources from across the ideological spectrum, pay attention to how they cover the same events differently and to which events are ignored by some agencies but not others, and to use your judgement to determine what is actually happening. It takes time and mental energy, which most adults lack, which is why so many people are biased and ill-informed. There are no shortcuts or easy answers.
A parenting advice question, if anyone has suggestions or relevant experience, on dealing with a middle child surpassing their older sibling in some academic front.
Our oldest child is 6 1/2 and just finishing kindergarten. She’s doing fine, about average for her class at reading and well above average at math. We’ve been doing a lot of reading practice and lessons at home throughout the year, but especially since the schools went remote since it’s such a foundational skill. Middle child just turned 4 and was interested in the reading lessons too (I’ve been using a DISTAR related phonics book to teach them both, it seems to align well with how they were teaching in her kindergarten). Anyways he’s been doing really, really well with it. It’s all organized into challenges of increasing difficulty and he’s been rapidly catching up to older sibling. At current trend, sometime in ~ the next week or two he’s going to pass in her in level of reading difficulty, a prospect he is super excited about.
I’m not sure how to manage that milestone (if indeed I should manage it all). He’s a (barely) 4 year old, a bit competitive (middle child?), and honestly not unlikely to be a bit of dick about it (not in an intentional mean way, more of an excited belaboring a point to death not reading the crowd sort of way). The older one hasn’t expressed any direct feelings about it, though she has been more sensitive about him reading (e.g. when reading stories I usually pick out easy sentences to let one or the other of them read, and lately she’s been requesting that in stories she picks he doesn’t do any reading / gets annoyed when he wants to read a lot of the story he picks [they share a room so we usually do bedtime stories together]).
I’m not sure if emphasizing areas, like math, she’s still much stronger then him in is a good approach or just setting up further issues if he surpasses her in that too sometime down the line. Or if there’s some other approach that would work well. I’d hope to avoid her pulling back from reading, which I know she’s found challenging at times, as a defense mechanism. I had a bit of a similar dynamic with my sister growing up, but it was reversed since I was older so while it was a bit of her having to live in my shadow it’s not quite the same thing.
On the upside, it will be a great teaching experience. Life is filled with people who are able to do things you value yet struggle at with unconcerned ease, and vice versa. So it’s a chance to train them in graceful behavior. That said, it is nice for each child to have an individual niche that they can claim as their own, though of course it can’t be as expansive as ‘reading’ or ‘math’ since all kids need a decent foundation of these. When one child’s passion is impinged by another, there’s going to be friction.
Here’s an example/brag from our house. Our middle child is passionate about horses. Each child has their own favorite animal, cats, horses, and dogs, respectively by age, which they theme their clothes, toys, and stories after as much as possible. But middle daughter has been devoted to horses with a greater fervor, and as a result was one of youngest members of the local 4H horse project, and the only rider their club entered into the virtual competition held yesterday. Her older sister recently joined the club, partly since it’s a much better Covid activity than being in plays. Oldest child gets to be shown up by her younger sister’s much greater experience and expertise, while younger sister gets to have her passion made somewhat less unique, a sore spot for a middle born. Honestly, they’re handling it pretty well without a lot of intervention, but we’ve tried to prepare them both by discussing that the older one has her own strengths, and she may need to struggle and/or accept help from the younger since age doesn’t automatically equal expertise, and stress the joy that comes from sharing what you love rather than feeling less unique for the other.
My youngest son, 9, was at least for a long time physically stronger than my oldest son, 11. My oldest son is also nearly blind in one eye and lacks detailed depth perception as as such cannot sports very well.
My right answer for him was to explain that some people are better than other people at some things, and that some people are even better than some other people in every respect. What his job was, I explained, was to find a thing he’s particularly good at in local reference to himself and try very hard to be better at it. I then explained that this doesn’t let him off the hook of the things he’s bad at; he’s expected to have a reasonable baseline on those things.
I think the hard thing on this is it was then pretty vital to provide him with a minimum of sympathy about this – it wasn’t a big deal, it was something he was reasonable expected to deal with. A request like you mentioned above in the mutual story-reading time where the child asked you to set up a situation in which you would both agree to pretend/ignore the skills the other child had worked for would have been ignored in the me-and-my-son situation.
This doesn’t mean that this is the “right” way – it was for us/him, but kids vary and parents vary. I think it’s good you are looking for a variety of answers on this.
Explaining comparative advantage to an 11 year-old seems like a tall order, but good on you if you accomplished it!
He was 9 at the time, I think. I don’t think it’s really that hard of a concept – “You are bad at some things. You just are. You are good at other things, and you can still win by being better at your things than they are at their things” wasn’t that indigestible.
In his case I explained that there was once a small, weak boy and not particularly pretty boy named Bill Gates but he became the richest man in the world by specializing at one thing, and that I’m pretty good at a variety of things and all being pretty good at a variety things reliably provides is poverty.
Does it though ? Being a 70th percentile registered nurse sounds much more profitable over a lifetime than a 99.9th percentile painter or flute player.
That’s a bit different – both a nurse and a professional artist are specialized; they’ve chosen a particular thing to focus on, they’ve usually gone to school for it, etc. There’s no denying there isn’t a range of incomes within the “specialized” category, and I didn’t represent there were to him. There are also exceptions – I know some jack-of-all-trades people who never specialized who make a lot of money and some failures of specialists. But generally I think what I said is true.
I don’t have advice because I’m not there with my two kids…. I will probably face a situation like this at some point myself, but my current untested thought is first that if your son is behaving in a way that doesn’t read the room, this is a good opportunity to help him read the room? I don’t know how to explain “yes, you’re better, but don’t rub it in people’s faces” to a four-year-old though, and also how to do it in a gender-appropriate way…. I have girls, so my approach to this would probably be different than to a boy, who tend to be competitive. (Lots of boys in my extended family, so I have *some* experience.)
Yeah, I think a few years really makes a difference for something like that. I can definitely have that sort of conversation with the 6 year old, but couldn’t really when she was 4. Not sure if any girl vs. boy comes into play too, but at 6 she seems to have a much more intuitive notion of the mental states of others whereas at 4 (for both of them) it was a much higher order almost sort of reasoned approach (e.g. they know A so feel B) which tends to not get easily triggered. Certainly worth trying to encourage him to be more graceful (he’s a really sore loser, something we’re working on to be more graceful in winning and losing).
I also really subscribe to the “us/our family against the world” view. What happens in the family, stays in the family, we can play-compete with each other, but in real life we support each other and build each other up.
There’s also the concept of a “highly sensitive child”, as outlined for example in this mommy/advice blogpost.
Early reading is a sign of giftedness (= having an IQ >= 130). I don’t know how much time you invested in teaching him, but I guess even if he heard most of the lessons you gave his sister, at barely 4 this is still quite an achievement. Gifted children in the classroom are a challenge, but it is always important to remember it is not their fault that they learn some things very fast.
So I think you need to make sure that the needs of both your kids (and the third one) are met. They all deserve your attention equally, so you need to make sure that this is the case. I guess for storytime, this would mean that when they pick a story, they get to read it as much as they like, and you read the rest. And for the danger of your son being a dick about reading, I think it is important to stress that every child has the right to learn at a pace that suits them. So just as it is completely ok that your son reads beyond his age level, it is ok that his sister reads at her age level. Being a dick about that is very mean.
Let me say a little bit more about gifted children. There are two common problems that can arise in their life:
1. They can become bored with school, which can lead to losing interest in school, depression and paradoxically low grades. This might hit your son quite soon – learning to read is a big part of primary school, and it seems like he will learn that before he even enters primary school. You should monitor closely whether your son is challenged enough, without challenge, he will not learn how to work with effort until it is too late. This is also why you should not hold your son back intellectually.
2. They can get problems in their social life that arise from being different from their peers. This can result in being bullied or being lonely. This is why you should monitor if your son has enough genuine relationships with his peers.
Since intelligence has a huge genetic component, I must ask: How good is your daughter in math exactly?
There are two possibilities here. One, which may not be an option and, if it is, may not be a good idea is to have him skip one or more grades. That raises obvious social problems, and if he is sufficiently bright he still won’t be challenged in a grade one higher than his age. I wasn’t.
The other is to find things he likes doing that are intellectually challenging outside of school. That could be chess. It could be programming. It could be reading books intended for adults. It could be arguing politics and philosophy with older kids or adults, or with intellectual peers his own age. But I think it’s a mistake to think of school as the main thing that will be intellectually challenging for a bright kid.
I spent a number of summers a very long time ago as a councilor at a camp for gifted children. You might see if there is something similar available to you, a place where he will be interacting with kids at his level. That’s good both for intellectual challenge and a better social environment.
Most of this advice is irrelevant to the current four year old, but will become relevant over the course of the next decade, assuming that Björn is correct in interpreting his early reading as evidence of high intelligence. And relevant to other people here who have or will have bright kids.
Enjoying reading is a great idea and an ideal priority or focus even for academic reading.
But I think some amount of competitiveness should be expected, even if the kids _agree_ to read together or alone for enjoyment.
Do you not think this is true? I think it is. Adults do this to each other, tho the stakes are generally much lower. It’s not bad in and of itself. I don’t think it condones being mean to anyone tho, let alone punishing them. I also don’t think you even have to withhold praise very much, when teaching or otherwise. Praise the effort, not just (or at all) the correct answers.
Maybe try having the younger child help teach the older, and teach both to learn from each other.
I learned to read early and was probably generally an annoyance in school because it was mostly too easy. But one of my best experiences was helping teach a class, as a student, helping the other students learn. I think the other students liked and appreciated me much more because of that. I wasn’t just getting more answers correct (or better grades), I was helping them learn and get more answers correct (and better grades) too.
What are people’s thoughts on Nassim Taleb these days? I really enjoyed nearly all of his books, including “Antifragile”, which I found very compelling. I admire him as someone who is erudite, knows lots of languages and history, and seems to practice what he preaches.
At the same time, I feel like he punts on issues a lot of the times. Not that he, or anyone, owes the world their time, but I feel like if you’re going to be commenting very strongly and acidly on Covid19, you should probably have a comment on Covid19 and these riots, and not pretend that they aren’t happening?
I went to a talk by him, and it was very short, unclear and unprepared.
I find him calling “bullshitters” people who I think deserve at least an acknowledgement, especially because they seem to behave in a way that accords with the ethical system put forth in “Antifragile”. (I’m thinking e.g. of Sam Harris leaving Patreon on principle and taking a financial hit.)
This is a bit rambly, but I know other people on here like him so I thought I’d ask.
Taleb has a thing for engaging with people in an unhelpfully combative way. Don’t ever visit his Twitter, for instance.
I think one Internet Life Skill is being able to separate people’s professional conduct and social media conduct. Nate Silver the modeler is great, Nate Silver the Twitter pundit not so much (though he is fun).
I can take or leave his ideas, with the leave option being made easier by his manifest narcissism. He seems to think that people make the institutional and personal decisions that they do because they’re stupid have a poor understanding of uncertainty. I’d be fairly sure he’s wrong and that they understand uncertainty just fine; they don’t act on it because the emotional cost of challenging social hierarchies is too high, especially if you have a functioning theory of mind. But then, this is precisely what you’d expect abrasive assholes to not grasp.
Eric Falkenstein does a magnificent job of framing Taleb as a crank in this blog post.
His one idea (the black swan which is more or less the core of his work that I have read) is, if correct, the most important idea in finance in the last century. IMO his clarity, writing style and personality all leave a huge amount to be desired, I’ve written this before but I think the key point in TBS is in a footnote which changes the fundamental claim in the book. This is extremely sloppy, and I think it is almost entirely on himself that he is misunderstood so frequently. That he is misunderstood so frequently is probably one aspect to why he is so belligerent/intolerant which is what makes him likely to be a modern day Cassandra.
I’ve basically stopped reading him/listening to him because I can’t tell without going through his words really carefully if he is being subtle, brilliant and insightful or just obvious and pompous, and its the latter to often.
Whoa, what does the footnote say?
Nice to hear that maybe he’s just “misunderstood”. 🙂
Can’t copy paste so any typos likely mine. I misrememberd, its a 2 parter, both footnotes.
Thanks for posting that. The 2nd paragraph is halfway interesting. 🙂
In his defense, Universa Investments using a tail hedging strategy had returned 4000% year to date by the end of March.
I’m not surprised that *some* tail fund made money in 2020 of all years. Over time, most have not done very well. I don’t believe that NT’s has done well at all, though he isn’t very open about performance. I’m happy to be proven wrong though.
analytic_wheelbarrow: Universa Investments is directly advised by Taleb; which fund are you referring to as ‘his’?
Byrel- I was thinking of Empirica. Looks like that was run by NT and then got shuttered in 2005.
Taleb’s position is that the infrequent events are of over-sized importance, since TBS came out in 2007 I think it would generally be wrong to say that without knowing how well he did financially within the past 3 months given what has happened, nor how well he did during 2007-2009.
Yeah, I enjoy his books as well, and can even put up with the name-dropping and the silly bits of Fat Tony fiction mixed in. And he cowrote a paper on Covid 19 in late January, so I got to give him credit for that. But yeah, like Nick says, his Twitter feed is a lot of ad hominems about people like Phil “the rat” Tetlock, where he takes far too long to get to the point of contention he has with said rat. And sometimes he doesn’t even bother doing that, and just hurls insults. Oh, and he has a weird obsession with squid ink pasta. Which I suppose is harmless, and might even be a charming addition to someone else’s Twitter feed, but it’s an oddly thing to interrupt all the vitriol with.
I hope in a future book he’ll write more about localism. He throws the word around a lot, but a Lebanese guy who lives in New York, made his millions on international markets, and occasionally lectures at the London School of Economics doesn’t really seem like the poster child for localism.
Is there evidence he ever made any money in the markets? He’s a tremendous self-promoter. With enough money under management, you can make millions in fees. Many hedge funds seem to be more in the marketing business than the trading business.
He’s been right about everything! His associate Mark Spitznagel’s fund made a 4144% return this year due to the market volatility. He was one of the earliest and loudest voices sounding the alarm on COVID. He said that the economy was more fragile than in 2008, and there is an estimated 50% decline in GDP right now.
Honest question for his critics: Is there ANYTHING that could happen that would make you say that he has been correct? Or you just don’t like his personality?
Yep and the key insight from anti-fragile has been popping up in relation to Covid-19 superspreaders etc
If he actually revealed a reasonably complete track record then I might see him as something better than a self-promoter. But he won’t meet the basic standards of transparency that anyone ought to require for this discussion, and so that ought to be the end of any serious discussion of him as an investor.
Also, GDP is not down 50%. That is an annualized growth rate. It corresponds to roughly a 15% decline in actual GDP.
I’d argue Antifragile is his key work, in that it summarises all his early works and reframes them in a way that is bigger than the sum of it’s parts. Taleb’s main contributions are his work on highly nonlinear systems and the properties of tail-events, and highlighting the dangers of ‘simplified’ mathematical tools used by economists. For this I think he’s an incredibly important and timely thinker and most people involved in risk should read his work closely. His mathematical detours and technical notes are brilliant.
Where he falls down is his over-willingness to burn bridges in his interactions with society and his preference to insult people rather than plainly state his point. It’s a shame because if he put his mind to it he could probably change the way industry and academy do things to better match what he so passionately thinks they have an obligation to do.
I think as far as he’s concerned, he’s made his money, he’s shown us all why we’ve all been stupid, and if we still keep blowing things up then that’s just what you get for being a sucker. Gabish?
Have been commenting a bit less, but the Dutch expressions keep coming.
‘Tuig van de richel’ = Scum of the ledge
Riffraff. One theory is that this refers to the cheap seats in the theater, which were called the ledge. Another possibility is that it derives from ‘vee van de richel’ = cattle from the ledge, which referred to ledge that cattle would stand on (and perhaps deposit their manure onto).
The word ‘tuig’ is also interesting. It originally meant rig or gear and is still used in many words like:
– ‘werktuig’ = literally work gear, but better translated as tool
– ‘vistuig’ = fishing gear (anything meant to catch fish: nets, rods, lines, weights, etc)
– ‘vliegtuig’ = literally flying rig, but really an airplane
– ‘zintuig’ = sense. ‘Sin’ is an old Dutch word that is extremely similar to ‘sense,’ having many comparable meanings.
‘Tuig’ gained an additional meaning of low quality gear and then was applied to low quality people.
‘Dat zit wel snor’ = That’s rather moustache
That is or will be all right. First know use in 1948. May have military origins. There is no sensible explanation for why people adopted this expression.
‘Je snor drukken’ = Press your mustache
Being absent or shirking an obligation or duty. The Dutch word for pressing can also be used to mean: lowering something. For example, in this fixed expression:
‘Dat kon de pret niet drukken’ = that couldn’t press the fun (= that didn’t reduce the fun we had).
This probably led to the word being used to indicate that someone is trying to hide himself when tasks are being assigned, by effaceing themselves. The addition of the mustache may be a joke or may refer to people covering their mouth and upper lip with their hand, in an overt gesture that they won’t volunteer themselves and/or to be less recognizable in a group and thus passed over more easily.
For the “Scum of the ledge”, there is a nice English expression, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_gallery
Of course we have the same word in German: “Zeug”, and “Werkzeug”, “Flugzeug”. It can also be slightly pejorative and mean “stuff”. But we don’t have zintuig (“Sinnzeug”?), and that’s a pity. (Unless Heidegger conjured it up; he seemed to have had his own private definition for “Zeug”, as for several other words.) I particularly like the expression: “Heb je zin in een biertje?” = “Do you have sense in a beer?”
Nobody says “Das ist mir Schnurrbart”, but people would understand it as “Das ist mir egal”, “I don’t care”, because there are several expressions for “I don’t care”: “Das ist mir wurscht” (that is sausage to me; yes, it should be “Wurst”, but in Swabia they pronounce s as sch, they say “Augschburg”), “Das ist mir Latte” (piece of wood), “Das ist mir Hupe” (signal horn), “Das ist mir wumpe” (no idea what that means), “Das ist mir Banane”, “Das ist mir schnuppe” (apparently, a charred candle wick! Well I never)…
In German, they don’t say drum kit. They say Schlagzeug, which means ‘hit stuff’ and I think that’s beautiful.
Pah Schlagzeug, try Flugzeug (air plane): flight stuff.
I’d always assumed that was from Zug.
Nope. “Zeug” and “Zug” happen to be etymologically related in that they’re from the same root, but they are completely different words which have had nothing to do with each other for many centuries.
I like the French and Spanish, too: They call it a “battery”. (“battre” is “to hit”!)
Both could be related through “Das ist mir schnurz[piep[egal]]“, which in turn is tempting to relate to “Schnurrbart” (“Schnurz” means “Schnurrbart” in Luxemburg.)
For “Zeug”, there used to be the “Zeughaus” (still found in street names) where a city stored its weapons (still called so in Switzerland).
A bit sad that all the science blogs are of a quantitative nature (except Scott Aaronson’s).
Hello from Minneapolis. In light of our custom to not talk about CW issues in these big open threads, I’ll not say much more, but I’d like to talk to anyone about what’s happening here. I’m a resident living downtown who just graduated with a JD, my coursework largely focused on constitutional criminal law. I’d be interested in talking with anyone, but especially anyone who lives in Minneapolis, or who is interested in the criminal law. You can write me at my email address, which is just my username at gmail dot com. I am also in the discord.
You can post in the prior fractional thread.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/amid-spike-in-virus-cases-schools-in-outbreak-areas-set-to-shutter/
Israel, which had done a good job of managing the virus, re-opened schools. And had a super-spreading event,
The article notes that Israel’s having one of the problems that I believe the US is now experiencing – that once people start relaxing, it’s hard to get enough people to show up for testing to monitor for community spread.
IIRC, early estimates were that we would need somewhere between 1 million tests/week and 1 million/day to monitor and control spread, but it turns out that it’s pretty hard to get those people to show up and get tested. You could imagine telling everyone with a social security number ending in 01 to get tested this week, but it’s harder to imagine many of them showing up.
All you really need to do a test on someone is a couple of cotton swabs, right? I wonder if it would make sense to set up some teams to just go door to door sampling one person per household. I’d guess that if the testers come to people, the people would be a lot more likely to get tested.
No, you also need reagents and it’s not that hard to run out of them.
Do you need them right there, or could you just send out people with the swabs and then bring them back to the lab? Does it matter? Isn’t running out of the reagents is kind of a different question from the problem of convincing people to get tested?
Cotton swab, sample tube or bag to drop the swab into, and a lab to send it to.
I think you need to swab the upper nasal cavity – can people do it themselves?
I’m not super excited about getting a swab in my upper nose – I hear it’s painful and distressing to some people – I’m not sure I would do it unless I had symptoms.
I’m not proposing people do it themselves, I’m saying send people door to door offering tests. You wouldn’t really need to do too many to find out if the virus is present in a community, so it seems like it would be fairly doable to me.
The incentives aren’t great for participation. Suppose you’re a healthy 30 year old guy–what’s the upside to taking the test?
If you just want overall community levels, you can apparently get that by monitoring sewage.
From what I understand, we don’t have standards around it, but could probably figure it out with a big push and have it be accurate to within a factor of 3.
We’ll still need door-to-door for places where most people don’t use a public sewer system.
@albatross11: You might want some peace of mind, or be able to isolate yourself from your loved ones if sick. A guy without those, and/or who just refuses? Doesn’t seem right to force him.
Reduce need for material and tests.
Testing saliva is ~reliable as testing nasal swabs; or acceptably less but this is overcompensated by losing the need for painful nasal poking that crashes compliance. Testing can be made mandatory at the workplace, school, day care,… with fines for everybody found working without a documented sampling of that shift begin. Also, pooled testing (say, always the same group of 4…10 people) is a thing.
So, everybody, when arriving at work, spits on a small tissue (maybe not the same open-lidded bucket) and signs the sample container. At the lab, samples are pooled and tested.
For people who are not at work, school, etc, pools can be on living together basis, family, roommates, dorm floors, whatever.
If a pool tests positive, all of its members are quarantined immediately, and subpool or individual tests determine who can leave quarantine. Pools should include people who have the most contact at work anyway.
How far are we from having wide availability of at-home tests? It may not be just relaxation that causes people to be reluctant to go to a test site: if your baseline risk is low, the additional exposure you take on by going to the site may just not seem worth it.
Ancient warfare was based on food. Consider:
A man marching needs 3000 calories a day. This is two loaves of bread, or 5 pounds. A man can carry 75 pounds for long durations, but more weight causes long term problems. This is only a 15 day supply of food.
But what about water? A man needs 2 gallons a day, and a gallon of water is 10 pounds. So now a man can carry only a 3 day supply through a desert.
Can someone else carry food to the army? No. A man porting the food to the army still needs to eat. Even a horse, which can carry multiple times what a man does, needs to eat the same multiple more (camels have the same problem). Horses are good for carrying tents, or things which require multiple men to carry, but otherwise are no better than letting humans carry it. What about carts and wheels? These work, but are slow and unwieldy. For example, Alexander the Great made his army carry all their equipment so they did not get attached and bring too much waste in carts. Carts cannot also travel where there are not roads. Food CAN be ported in over boats, which is why traveling along the coast and rivers is possible.
Consider that the interior of Papua New Guinea was discovered only recently by explorers, even though the island has been colonized for hundreds of years. The mountains are too dense and do not contain food and water. Since you cannot carry more than a three day supply, and the trip is longer than 3 days you cannot make it through the mountains. If I recall they airdropped food from helicopters (helicopters could not land in the interior because there was nowhere flat to land. All trees. I suppose they could have airdropped people but whatever)
There is some land which armies cannot travel over. If too little food, and nothing in vicinity that can be carted in, an army cannot travel through the land. Even in fertile lands, the army may eat all the food and be unable to retreat back over the land. Armies without sea access also cannot sit and wait forever, they must move. Sometimes this forces armies into bad battles.
When armies must travel through the Middle East, they can either travel along very obvious routes, such as down the Tigris/Euphrates, or they can split up the army into pieces. This is why armies tend to split up for the winter and campaign in spring/summer. But armies frequently are ambushed in the winter by locals while they are split up.
Games like Risk (and even more advanced games) do not take into account the carrying capacity of the land to support an army, and do not take into account seasons and depletion of food. In Risk, there is no reason not to ball your entire army into one blob.
These factors mean that there are maximum army sizes and very narrow paths for them to travel. It also means that burning your own land is a foolproof strategy that defeats any invading army (though may alienate your subjects in the burned regions). The German tribes would intentionally create wastelands around their borders for this purpose.
Fun fact:
If a road is ten men shoulder to shoulder wide, and your army is 60,000 men, then your army is 6,000 men long. If the first man begins marching, and the second man in line takes a second to begin, then the man at the back of the army won’t take his FIRST step until after 6000 seconds, which is equal to 100 minutes, or over an hour and a half. This of course assumes that every soldier has an immediate response when it’s his turn to take a step, which is very optimistic. The whole process needs to be repeated whenever the army encounters and obstacle, and when it stops for the night. The army MUST move in formation like this, otherwise, the army gets too strung out to defend itself.
For a detailed description of the implication of these constraints in classical antiquity, see Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army.
The author was one of the people I dedicated my first novel to.
Thanks, I guess I should’ve cited my source. It’s a book review, it’s a short book.
A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry makes the point on one of its posts (I cannot remember which one) that one of the ways that history’s greatest generals, like Alexander or Napoleon, were able to secure the wins they did was their ability to, at the right time for the right battle, leap off their logistics trail across ground they either shouldn’t have been able to cover while maintaining good supply or shouldn’t have been able to cover so quickly. They would take essentially calculated gambles that they could do it quickly enough to not run their army down out of lack of supply and show up to a battlefield before they were expected or even just entirely unexpected.
Napoleon’s capacity to defeat his enemies in detail before larger coalition forces could join up was specifically attributed to his instinct for leaving his logistics behind when the risk was worth it.
He also goes into detail on the paradox of the things moving your food also need food in this post.
This was also what made Ulysses S. Grant such a brilliant general. His reputation as a butcher is mostly based on the Overland campaign in the constrained Virginia theater and lots of Lost Cause revisionism. But Grant’s capture of Vicksburg in 1863 is one of the most brilliant in the history of warfare.
To sum up: Vicksburg was a fortified city sitting high on a bluff above the Mississippi River. North and west of the city were mostly impassable swamps and absolutely no good roads. To the east was Jackson, the state capital, and a large garrison of rebels. The terrain was easier to the south, but there was no way to get to the south on account of all the other terrain in the way. The rebels figured Vicksburg was impregnable, because any Union approach to the city had to either come down the river from the north – where they’d run smack into the swamps and get massacred (this happened to the first Union attempt on the city in December 1862), or they’d have to approach slowly overland from the north, and their supply lines couldn’t be held against cavalry raiders like Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Grant spent months trying to work out a way to get an army into the open country south of Vicksburg, with lots of increasingly zany and desperate engineering schemes meant at slipping boats past the city so he could maintain his line of supply south of the city. They all failed, though, so Grant (some say inspired by a Union cavalry raid that rode straight through Mississippi from Tennesee to Union-held New Orleans and never wanted for food) decided, “Fuck it,” ran his transports past the batteries (not without loss), marched his army down the far side of the river, then launched himself into enemy territory.
When Grant landed behind Vicksburg in late April 1863, he was cut off from his own base of supplies, in hostile territory with an unfriendly populace and only his own scouting to rely on, and quite probably outnumbered in toto by all the enemy troops in the area. But those troops were scattered all to hell and back, so before they could concentrate against him, Grant marched hundreds of miles rapidly, beat 3 separate armies in 5 separate battles, driving the rebels every which direction, captured Jackson and tore up the railroads for miles in every direction, preventing Johnston from bringing reinforcements against him, then turned and penned the main rebel army up in Vicksburg. All in the space of about two weeks, totally in the air as far as logistics were concerned. Only once Vicksburg was safely besieged did he re-establish his supply lines to the north, now that the enemy armies could no longer interfere. The city that was supposed to be impossible to take was captured in just a few months.
Sherman later repeated the same tactic of cutting loose from his supply lines in order to reach an important objective where he could re-establish himself in his March to the Sea. WHen he cut loose and marched into the heart of Georgia, Jefferson Davis thundered that his fate would be same as Napoleon’s army when it marched to Moscow.
Grant supposedly quipped in reply, “Who is to furnish the snow for this march?”
The “Grant the Butcher” legend is a mischaracterization even for the Overland campaign. To oversimplify, the recurring theme of Grant’s operations in Virginia was:
1. Grant disengages and sets off in an unexpected direction to get around Lee’s flank
2. Lee scrambles his army off to block a key choke-point and avoid being cut off from his own supply lines once he realizes what Grant is doing
3. A bloody meeting-engagement battle ensues at the choke point as the two armies arrive piecemeal.
4. Grant stops assaulting Lee’s positions once it becomes clear he won’t be able to overwhelm them at a reasonable cost.
5. Grant’s main force besieges Lee’s position for a period of days or weeks.
6. Repeat.
This cycle gets stuck on step 5 for a while at Petersburg and the outskirts of Richmond, where Lee’s strategic lines are now short enough that Grant doesn’t have good opportunities to outflank him strategically. Grant tries a series of direct assaults and tactical flanking maneuvers over the course of the siege, eventually succeeding in one of the flanking maneuvers (Five Forks) and forcing Lee to retreat and abandon both Richmond and Petersburg.
Then we get into the Appomattox campaign, where Lee is trying to disengage and link up with the other major remaining Confederate field army and Grant is trying to stop him. That ends when Grant finally succeeds at getting around Lee’s flank and boxing him in between two superior forces without hope of relief or resupply, and Lee does the obvious thing and surrenders.
Overall, my read of the campaigns is that Grant is still a very capable strategist and army organizer, but Lee is also a good enough strategist and organizer (especially with the advantages of strategic defense and operating on interior lines) that Grant has to grind him down gradually rather than being able to win a dazzling series of victories the way he did at Vicksburg.
Right. I endorse all of that. Plus, we’re leaving out the fact that Grant was repeatedly let down by his subordinates, which is the only reason the siege even happened to begin with.
I don’t mean that as excuse making. Grant’s initial plan to capture Richmond was, well, McClellan’s, because that was frankly the best way to seize the city – a landing on the peninsula to bypass all those nasty rivers and tangled woods defended by the Army of Northern Virginia, with secure supply lines, and then set about taking Richmond by siege. But that was forbidden by Washington since the political consequences of returning to the failed Peninsular venture would be disastrous – northern morale was VERY low in spring 1864.
So Grant’s second plan had the Army of the Potomac making the main thrust south from Washington, but it was mostly there to tie up Lee. I don’t know if it was technically the “main effort” in military terms, but Grant hoped to quickly seize Petersburg and Richmond with a swift blow from a second army, the Army of the James, made up mostly of soldiers who had been faffing about up and down the Carolina coasts for two years. They would sail up the York river, land south of it, and seize Petersburg, which would cut Richmond off from the rest of the south. With Lee’s army tied up in the north, the Army of the James would be more or less uncontested. If Lee turned south to strike that army, Grant would follow hard on his heels and catch the rebels in a pincer.
Unfortunately, Grant was forced to appoint Butler to command the army, since Butler was one of the last surviving War Democrats and again, northern morale. Need those Democrat votes to maintain the war effort. And Butler bungled things horribly, getting the entire army bottled up in the Bermuda Hundred peninsula by a vastly inferior army under P. G. T. Beauregard. “Butler in the bottle” became a famous expression, even.
Grant then had a SECOND chance to seize Petersburg without a siege. After fighting his way across northern Virginia in the manner you described, he then slipped south of the James without Lee catching wise, and this time had Petersburg dead to rights. Now, Grant was still on the northern side of the river overseeing the delicate act of crossing right under Lee’s nose, so the assault on Petersburg was left to Hancock and Warren, both of whom cocked it up again. Beauregard was again able to hold things together with spit and duct tape until Lee realized what was happening and rushed reinforcements in, and at that point, Grant had no choice but to steadily work his way further and further around Lee’s flank until at last the rebels were stretched too thin and broke. That took 9 months of patient siege work.
Note that this means if you were a pre-modern consequentialist, you would support big governments. Those wastelands around the borders are unused fertile land that could support more human beings, rather than deserts humans have to just shrug at and make what little they can of like the Arabian interior or Sahara.
A better take would be ancient warfare, like modern warfare, is constrained by logistics. You’re specifically talking about the concept of what I’ve heard called an operational tether. This is basically a concept that operations have limited ranges based on their logistical constraints. For example, if you want to put an occupational force into the field indefinitely then the occupational tether of that force is the maximum limit at which you can indefinitely sustain the occupational force. Meanwhile, a raid has a much longer tether because its tether is only the distance at which you can sustain the relevant force for however long a raid takes. This is why Native Americans had much longer range operations than contemporary Europeans despite having much worse logistics: they fought by ambush and raid rather than protracted siege.
Caesar reports this but I see no reason to believe it was different from the phenomenon of other hunter-gatherers we see, where they fight over control of empty land where they hunt and gather. If you read the passage carefully Caesar specifically mentions that the purpose of their warfare is to drive their opponents out of their fields (since they practiced some agriculture) and villages and put them further at a distance. He also says that one of their primary economic activities was hunting. Hunting takes a lot of empty land. And we’ve seen this dynamic in more modern tribal groups, so it seems like a pretty obvious inference to me.
Meanwhile, as Caesar points out, they do not expect it to prevent a siege (indeed he doesn’t mention walls and emphasizes the lack of permanent structures) but that it makes ambush and raids on their own villages harder. He specifically says that it makes such attacks less likely, not impossible, so they apparently still happened. He is talking about tribal raid warfare. The point is to create a physical yet economically productive barrier between them and potential opponents. This did little to stop an army like the Romans or Gauls, who they basically ran from. (Caesar somehow doesn’t pick up on the dissonance of saying the Germans are stronger than the Gauls yet knows the Gauls are colonizing the Germans. Colonizing generally requires being stronger.)
Likewise, archeological evidence shows that the German strategy against the Romans (and previously the Gauls) was to deny them the existence of the urban centers and fortresses they relied on to effectively govern a territory. When the Germans had the Romans on the backfoot, they immediately went around attacking things like forums or destroying oppidum. This made them effectively ungovernable except through the medium of tribal politics, something the Germans could do quite naturally but the Romans and Gauls were not used to. It was a strategy of illegible resistance against a stronger opponent.
Indeed, the Gauls had explicitly colonized the most desirable parts of Germany (that they knew of) prior to the arrival of Caesar.
Archieological evidence disputes this claim. Garbage heaps from that time contain way less evidence for wild animals, than for agricultural products.
Ariovist might want to have a word with you about that.
Link? I’m curious to see what the composition is and how much we can sustain Caesar’s claims through looking at it as gathering rather than agriculture. (Since, after all, gathering produces plants and not animals.)
Colonization is not the same as being settled on territory, seemingly in a quasi-subordinate role, by your victorious foreign allies.
Will try to find some tonight. I have this claim, from a German pop-sci book.
Ariovist settled Gaulish territory against the local tibes/polices wish. They called in Cesar to get rid of them.
I’m fully willing to believe I’m wrong but it’s important to note the degree of settlement, technology, and homogeneity among early Germans is somewhat controversial. Or rather, there’s a general consensus that isn’t very popular with various nationalists. And there were some since discredited ideas in the 19th and early to mid 20th century.
Yes. Likewise the Romans settled allied tribes on territory they controlled, which meant the Romans were stronger than the original inhabitants of the territory, not the allied tribes.
Caesar was a liar. He made himself look good by claiming his enemies were stronger than they really were. To that end he claimed that barbarism is strength, and that his enemies were more primitive than they really were.
Quite possibly. But some of what he says squares with archeology. His emphasis on urbanism and hill forts in Gaul appears to have been correct, as does his contrast with the lack of such in Germania.
This was interesting, and my comment is tangential to your main point, but the highlands of Papua New Guinea have been inhabited for thousands of years and are not really short on food or water. In fact, I would say subsistence agriculture there is easy compared to many parts of the world since irrigation is typically not required. I normally live there myself, and we meet all of our water needs with rainwater and much of our food is local as well. I think the reasons for the late exploration of the highlands are somewhat complicated, but probably had more to do with the very imposing terrain, along with Europeans not understanding the extent to which the interior was populated (which is somewhat baffling since there has always been extensive trade between the coast and interior, but it seems like people just didn’t ask about it or something). It would have been relatively easy to trade for food in the interior at any rate.
You normally live in the highlands of Papua New Guinea? Where are you from and what do you do there? Sounds interesting.
I work for a Bible translation organization (PNG has 800+ distinct languages) as a sysadmin / network admin. Some of the work is pretty typical, but also some weird stuff like email over shortwave radio. I’m originally from the US, we came back for my wife to give birth and now we’re stuck here because of the plague.
The culture over there is pretty far out from a Western perspective. It’s a VERY communal culture. Major social problems are tribal violence and killings over sorcery accusations. A funny/sad anecdote: One of the groups near us was at war with a neighboring tribe, and mercenaries are a thing there. Someone with a cell phone got ahold of an old Rambo movie and showed it to everyone, and they were all like, “This Rambo guy took out 100 people on his own, clearly he’s the best mercenary out there, this is the guy we need!”, and were trying to figure out how to hire him.
That does not seem helpful.
Yea, not someone on our end, one of the local people with a cell phone. Cheap Chinese cells are fairly common now, though you might have only 1 or 2 per village that get shared, and the network is not very reliable.
I think that’s the plot to The Three Amigos…
The existence of water, and food if it is accessible to marching soldiers, or exploreres are different things.
In hilly, mountainous, and wooded terrain, drinkable water, might not be easy to find for a none local. If the local people don’t want to supply them with food, it might be hard to even find their villages. It is not unusual for the people in the interior of islands to not want to support the litoral powers. And even if you have a string of villages that are ready to supply you, in this kind of terrain with out good roads, even 15km might take one or two days of travell.
Quantity matters. Armies require a lot of food and water, and “drinking rivers dry” is only mostly a figure of speech. If all you’ve got are streams, small ponds, and springs, the local tribes may be doing fine but the land can still be impassible to armies.
Yes, that too. But in the context of Papua New Guinea I think small expeditions from exploreres should not be able to drink an area dry.
I agree that the interior would not have provided enough food for a large army, but a smaller exploration team would not have been a problem. You can literally carry a tarp and collect enough rain water to drink probably 9 months out of the year. My understanding is that the Europeans somehow didn’t know the interior was inhabited, which is a bit odd since there are trade routes through the country. One possibility is that the local groups on the coast only knew about the next group or 2 along the route but not any farther. The country has a huge number of languages which could have exacerbated this.
It’s my understanding that New Guinea has people in the highlands in the middle of the island, and people near the coast, and no one in between. The highlanders were so isolated they thought they were the only people in the world until about a century ago.
This is true in some parts of the highlands but not all. There has always been trade to some extent between the highlands and the coast. Now, if your colony is starting from some point on the coast with no good route inland that might explain things.
If I’m recalling correctly Papua New Guinea’s lowlands were also host to some of the most horrific diseases in the world, at least for Westerners. The terrain may be surmountable but if half the expedition drops dead from fever within a week of getting off the boat, no one is getting very far.
On Roman armies, I’ve read that the Romans set up fortified camps every night when out in hostile terrain. I’ve also heard about how long it takes to get an army moving. How did they get anywhere if they had to spend hours setting up these camps every night?
If you think an army that builds a palisade wall every night moves slowly, wait till you see an army that can’t move at all because everyone in it was killed in their sleep.
I get that but how could they effectively cover any distance?
After the Marian Reforms, at least, you had a professional army that could be trained to march faster, carry a greater load and construct fortifications quicker than, say, Greek citizen soldiers.
the 1000 guys that get there first start building while they wait several hours for the next 4000 guys to show up.
Relentlessly.
No mention of speed anywhere in that classic description, because there doesn’t need to be.
Maybe your first column sets up the camp, wakes up early and starts the march, and the second column breaks down the camp and then starts the march?
German soliders are(were?) expected to do 30 kilometers in under 6 hours, in full kit, at least once a month. I heared several stories from people stationed at different locations that most of the “full time soldiers” did them a lot faster, since you get weekend leave after you completed the march.
If we expect the distance the legions covered daily to be around 30 kilometers, and trained Roman legionaries were able to move at least as fast as modern Germans that completed basic training:
~6 A.M. waking call
~7 – 7:30 A.M. the head of the coloumn leaves the evening camp.
~8 – 8:30 A.M. the end of the coloumn leaves the camp.
~1 – 1:30 P.M. the head of the coloumn reaches the new camp, and starts to secure the area. All incoming legionaries split into guard, or dig in duty.
~2 – 2:30 P.M. The end of the coloumn reaches the new camp.
This leaves easily three or four hours of daylight to dig in, even in winter on the nothern side of the Alps.
If you are close to the enemy, or in difficult ground were you move slower, or need to scout more, you do less distance a day. Remeber the camps behind you also serve to hold your supply line open. Moving slower but having a line of fortified camps, to resuply just in case might save your ass.
Ninja Edit: Yes this isn’t exactly the modern 9to5 workday, but I don’t expect anyone to do an eight hour day back than. And I also doubt a legion would have been expected to keep up that pace for more than a couple of weeks.
Another thing you need to remeber: Mules also do not move more than 30 kilometers a day. Ox- and horse carts even less. Even if the ideal of the Roman legionary tells us he carries all his gear himself, Romans did have a bagage train.
Moving so moving much faster than that wasn’t possible anyways.
Minor quibble: The Romans burned their camps behind them so the enemy couldn’t use them.
The Romans marched hard, too, as a consequence of being some of the only professional soldiers in a world of civilian militias and tribal levies. Vegetius says the legionaries were expected to cover 30 km in 6 hours of marching, or roughly 5 km an hour, which is a pretty rapid walking pace. With ~12 hours of daylight in the campaigning season, that still left plenty of sun to set up the camp at the end of the march, and the set up could be done rapidly since everything was standardized and everyone knew his job.
Now I finally know why those documentaries represented movement of armies as dotted lines on a map!
Two gallons a day? That’s awfully generous. I’ve done a week of strenuous physical labor in a desert on one gallon a day, with water to spare.
What did you get to eat? But yes two gallons a day sounds like “including washing”.
Mostly quesadillas and cashews.
See also the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation.
Sometime violence becomes self-sustaining and completely divorced from its root causes. In 1849, a deadly riot in New York City spiraled out of a rivalry between two actors starring in competing productions of Macbeth.
Is there a lesson to be learned from this applicable to our current situation? I don’t know, but it’s a good story.
I meant, break one of your own legs.
You just reminded me of the Nika riots in Constantinople, which started with chariot-race violence (these guys were the original soccer hoodlums) and then spiraled out of control.
Yes and no. It was centered around the chariot factions, but those factions played a prominent political role in the city–they’d grown beyond mere sports affiliations–and the protests were rooted in dissatisfaction with Justinian’s policies. The emperor came in, sat down, and was presented with a bunch of guys screaming “Nika! Nika!” right at him in a threatening way. He freaked out, everything got out of hand, and eventually something like 30K people got slaughtered in the Hippodrome IIRC.
Football clubs were an important part of the Arab Spring.
I said it on this site bevore, I think the reason is obvious. For an authocratic regime an sports club is a way young man can channel their energy with out organizing politically. Thats why the internal intelligence agencies allow those groups to organize big groups of young man, with out having to much of a tap on them. This usually works well to distract this young organized men from politics, until it stops working.
Yes, but the Blues and Greens had grown beyond that, to the point where eventually there were official duties for them, and a designated spot for their representatives in parades and city functions. There’s no straightforward modern analog for them.
Of course, in the Eastern Bloc the internal intelligence agencies tended to organize their own sports clubs, usually called Dynamo (the original Dynamo Sports Society was founded by Dzerzhinsky).
The most infamous of these was Dynamo Berlin- perhaps because, while the power bases of Dynamo Moscow’s rivals (the Army for CSKA, the trade unions for Spartak) could rival the Interior Ministry, the Stasi’s control of East German society was unrivalled.
Same city, different millennium:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87ar%C5%9F%C4%B1_(supporter_group)
They weren’t kidding about that curse.
A mining company just blew up some caves that humans inhabited, and left artifacts in, 40,000 years ago. Apparently it was an accident – they apologized.
Assuming you think this was undesirable, what’s your favorite theory-of-governance of how to minimize such things happening?
– Legal penalties after the fact?
– Social penalties after the fact?
– Some kind of regulation beforehand?
– Shake your head and let it happen?
If they owned the land I’d go with #4, if it was on public land they had a permit to use, I would go with #1.
Sounds about right. The past is sometimes interesting, but rarely useful. If you try to preserve all of it, you end up choking on history.
This, if the artifacts are not very interesting. If they are interesting, prohibit them from blowing it up even if they own the land, but pay them compensation: both out of fairness, and because otherwise landowners have a perverse incentive to quietly destroy any new artifact they discover.
Standing offer to buy such location, at prices that will ensure that company will prefer to sell it over destroying.
Such offer may be from public or private funds. (“My best test for a libertarian so far is to ask what needs to be done to protect ancient sequoias. If you say you need to buy them, you pass.”)
That assumes that such places are worth paying such price – it may or may not be true.
For bonus effect – couple it with social and legal penalties. But penalties alone will ensure that such things will be quietly destroyed as soon as spotted.
I also think “make it profitable to find such sites and sell them to the government at a profit” is a much better strategy than penalizing them. If you want to preserve archaeological sites, you want people doing building and mining to want to find evidence of them, not to want to avoid finding any such evidence at all costs.
I mean, surely the mining company considered “let’s sell this site because people who care about conserving this stuff will pay us more for it than it’s worth for us to mine it” right?
And if the answer came back “No, they won’t,” well, that settles that, the market has spoken. Right?
Depends. Construction crews are known for occasional mindless destruction.
Railway company in my city needed to build a better pedestrian bridge after they destroyed existing one – by accident.
Or stories of workers who installed doors and trashed floors. With next batch of workers who remade floors but trashed doors.
I am betting that it is not better with mining companies.
I think the point here is for the government to step in and offer to buy the site at rates that are above what the market value of the site would otherwise be.
The assumption being that it’s hard to coordinate everyone that would be interested in preserving the archeological site and/or that it would be hard for the mining company (which is not set up for this kind of work) to find a buyer even if one existed.
That’s not sustainable though, is it? What if it’s a minor archeological site, but the land is worth hundreds of millions? How much would you be willing the government to spend to save something only a small fraction of the population would ever see or care about?
Yeah, this pretty quickly collapses into a standard sort of debate regarding whether or not we can expect the government to do a better job of satisfying everyone’s preferences than the market can.
Note
part in my comment. Sufficiently minor sites will not be bought but just excavated and documented.
In fact, vast majority of such cases are handled in this way, at least in Poland.
See for example https://wib.ibemag.pl/wp-content/uploads/wystawy/archeologiczna_autostrada/03.jpg – an aerial view of an archeological excavations, it is the first stage of a motorway construction.
Or page 16 of http://www.archeologia.ur.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/AAR11_13_Chochorowski.pdf where you see the motorway route based on just locations of archeological excavations.
AFAIK there was plenty of such excavation and no changes of motorway routes.
(though AFAIK investor/constructor is obligated to fund excavation works, it is not refunded – but in case of motorway construction it is probably quite hard to avoid this)
From pdf that I linked
though it also mentions about some problem related to investors getting better at faking proper excavations.
Though probably some amount of penalizing may be combined with that to make destruction of such sites even more dubious perspective.
“Hmm, what I would want? 12 million and some paperwork or 12 million and risk going to a prison?”
Those who have replied so far in a thread created by the person who replied to this first, I want to be as charitable as possible, but I find your viewpoints to be maximally repellant.
I was going to argue that should this take on the value of our shared past dominate, we would completely lack the material to discuss the subject of the latest post on this blog (a posited fundamental shift in the workings of our minds, based on cultural changes around the bronze age). Now, I looked and I suppose true to form none of you commented on that, and perhaps it’s because you find such discussion to be sophistry or simply uninteresting, and maybe not, maybe you just didn’t have anything you felt compelled to comment, fair enough in any case. I put it to you that without the data from archeological study, any charlatan philosopher can make baseless claims on human behavior and the state of nature; and would you rather just do feral child studies to try and untangle the relation between human evolution, psychology, culture? Attempting to put together our earliest history from such fragments is a task probably doomed to meagre success, but at least those soft sciences which rely on evidence of the past have the potential to be hardest among them, should this evidence eventually be forthcoming and valued.
Without asking from whence we came, are we not as a whole living the unexamined life? In any case it seems a popular enough topic here to discuss how culture works, how it arises, its value even in the face of its irrationality. To Chris Phoenix, I apologize for not answering the question, the practical matter of how to preserve such sites is important, but there are also those whose views are not captured by your original post, who are not moved by this even so far as to shake their heads.
I don’t think it’s fair to judge people based on what they didn’t say, particularly on-line in a crowded discussion forum.
Your point would have been well made without this part.
Sorry, I think this is a place where I argued internally and made some salient points on both sides and then wrote as though everyone had witnessed it, funnily enough a basic theory of mind failure that came from insufficient care; that’s there because at first I was going to write from a place of assuming that the latest post would be of interest to anyone here, but I thought it would first make sense to check whether anyone I was reacting to had actually engaged with said post. I’m trying to grant that there may be those for whom such discussion seems valueless, and I do mean that whether anyone believes that or just hadn’t commented on that post for any other reason, I consider that fair enough.
So this is what it feels like to have a brother.
I think the assumption behind the original question was “Given that this is not a historically important site/we’ve already extracted information and artefacts from it and what remains is not unique, then if…”
I don’t know if anyone was arguing “Sure, bulldoze the Pyramids and slap some apartment blocks up on the sites, Cairo needs more accommodation!” Though that would be an interesting point to argue: my property rights and right to do what I goddamn please with what I own trump any bleeding-heart “think of the lost knowledge!”
This is why we have regulations around building on historical sites, because there were cases of “oh crap, just excavated a Roman lead coffin, if we tell the archaeologists about it then everything will have to shut down while they excavate and we need to get this construction project finished fast, just dump the thing somewhere and forget all about it”.
What is wrong with reality-based policies?
Why you consider “maximally repellant” to protect valuable archeological materials by taking account that some people are greedy, especially ones leading companies?
What is wrong with considering as acceptable to penalize people for destroying archeological materials (while not considering it as sufficient)?
As I understand you consider https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/31/open-thread-155/#comment-905735 as “maximally repellant” plan because apparently anything that involves money is evil?
WTF?
Wow, my comment hasn’t gone well. I was talking about the other thread of responses, not yours, and I felt uncomfortable calling anyone out by name while calling their views repellant, but I really should have done so to be more clear and less cowardly. I thought your response was extremely reasonable and on point, I agree with it entirely. My comment is directed at the idea that there are those who don’t take the values behind the original question for granted, that such sites have intrinsic value. Reading my comment as a response to yours, I’m not surprised it seemed incoherent.
OK, now I am far less confused. Thanks for that reply.
I did say that interesting artifacts should be protected. Also, artifacts can be recorded and samples taken. As such, I presume that efforts to protect the original sites are often not so much for their scientific value as for what some people perceive to be their intrinsic value. For intrinsic value purposes I’m OK with preserving only unique artifacts, and a sample of less unique ones. Now, I don’t know how many artifacts remain from various ages; it’s possible that from really old eras nearly all are pretty much unique.
Our alien “friends” have wiped out all our electrical power plants. Pinpoint strikes by orbital deathrays have destroyed them all, whether powered by coal, gas, hydro, solar, wind, oil, geothermal, or nuclear reactors. All our gear that uses electrical power is still in place, as is the electrical distribution grid. Batteries are untouched, as are household and building-sized generators. But anything that can power even a neighborhood is gone.
How screwed are we?
Pretty badly screwed. Everything is electrically powered, so we have in our homes no means to cook (how many people have non-electric cookers, or if they have electric cookers, also have an open fire or other means of creating a heat source?), store food, get drinking water to our homes from the town supply, get money out to pay bills, etc. You’ll do better out the country where you have a well/can access some water supply, light fires for cooking and heating, be able to gather fuel such as firewood to keep those fires going, maybe have a garden or plot of land to grow food and so on, but unless you’re totally self-sufficient in a 19th or 18th century manner (quick, how much tallow do you have ready to hand to make candles?) you’ll still suffer.
That’s not even counting places like hospitals.
Many people still have gas stoves which work when the power goer goes out. I would be able to cook (but not bake) in this scenario until the ensuing chaos collapsed the infrastructure to deliver gas as well. But since everything in my refrigerator and freezer would go bad, I’d be relying heavily on beans and rice, and that’s assuming water remained available.
You can make a meths burner out of a couple of coke cans.
Expedient wood burners for cooking are viable at scales ranging from ones made from a soup can to the classic hobo bin fire. If wood is scarce, various oils can be added to provide fuel.
The city water supply will likely have a decent amount of pressure until the water-tower is empty. The pumps that push filtered water up into the tower run on electricity, and may have a backup generator that would be considered a ‘building-size-generator’. But if that generator runs out of fuel, and they can’t scrounge any fuel within a couple of days, the water pressure might be gone. And then once someone tries to get the water pressure back up, they’ll discover all the weak places in the pipe that collapsed once the pressure got too low.
For those with a natural-gas stove: the natural-gas supply might get spotty. I suspect that the control station for the natural-gas suppliers has its own backup-generator. They likely have a big control-board for pumps/valves/etc., and that board likely needs electricity to run.If that counts as a ‘building-size generator’, then everything is good for a little while. But it probably needs to have a person sitting at a control station to keep everything running properly. And that person might be trying to scrounge food/fuel/something for themselves, instead of sitting in the control center watching the system.
Hospitals typically have some sort of building-sized backup power generator, but I doubt they keep enough fuel for more than a week of loss-of-power. By the time that week is up, they will be hurting for fresh food. And fighting everyone else with a generator for fresh fuel.
This doesn’t sound very good at all.
Badly. Mass deaths in the ensuing famine, total collapse of civilization is likely. Partial is unavoidable.
I wonder how many places will manage to restore and keep power, probably not enough to keep anything stable. Some places will have half-finished generators but…
Even with assumption of 100% effective leadership and lack of total societal collapse (despite famine and most of population dying)…
Can you do a happier scenario sometime? Like the aliens decide to give every child a free kitten or something? They weren’t always this dickish.
I warned you. When they wanted to give us free stuff, I wanted antimatter to cram right up their alien assholes.
Call me violent and untrustworthy, will you???
Honestly, overrunning the world with two billion cats, most of which will soon become strays and multiply uncontrollably, is still pretty dickish.
Now I suddenly remember that blogger who wrote fascinating pieces about the power outages in Caracas last year. Did I have the link from here?
I’m pretty sure it was shared here, but I can’t google it up.
I think it was this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/13/open-thread-123-25/#comment-730796
Thanks!
How did that crisis in Venezuela play out? Is it still going on? I have the attention span of a goldfis
You could probably get a long way by using various vehicles as generators on wheels.
Is it possible to run an extension lead to a Nimitz? That gives you almost 0.2GW, or 0.04% of the average US electricity usage.
Naval gas turbines could also be used to power infrastructure on the coast.
Diesel locomotives are usually serial-hybrid, so power can be drawn from them, too.
Assuming hospitals already have backup gennies, I’d prioritise powering oil infrastructure (to run the combine harvesters and generators), communications (doesn’t use *too much* power) and the parts of heavy industry needed to rebuild our generating infrastructure.
I don’t think so- the propellers are mechanically driven from the steam turbines. In fact, AIUI the Nimitzes have had issues with limited electricity generating capacity and upggraded systems that require more power. The new Ford-class carriers generate more electricity (partly because their catapults are electromagnetic not steam-powered), but they still IIRC don’t have the generating capacity to convert all of their reactor output to electricity.
Some other navies (and the Russian civilian icebreaker fleet) do have nuclear powered ships where the reactor powers a generator and the propellers are driven by electric motors. Similarly, some conventionally-powered warships use electric propulsion either completely (the Royal Navy’s Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers and Type 45 destroyers) or partially (the Type 23 destroyers, which use diesel generators driving electric motors for cruising, and gas turbines mechanically coupled to the propellers for high speeds).
In 1929 & 30, USS Lexington (with Robert Heinlein serving onboard) supplied electrical power to Tacoma, Washington during a drought until the reservoir behind the hydro-electric dam filled up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Lexington_(CV-2)#Service_history
Lexington was very unusual in being able to do that, due to having turbo-electric propulsion. I get the sense from this Naval Gazing post that historically this was something that the US only really did in the 1920s.
I work in a chemical plant that produces chlorine by performing electrolysis on saltwater. This uses a ton of electricity. I’ve been told that our chlorine circuits are about 80% of the electrical power consumption of the entire site. A small town’s worth of air conditioners, heaters, pumps, machine tools, and welding equipment are the other 20%. So producing chlorine in any industrial quantity is probably right out. That means even if you somehow manage to keep indoor plumbing working, without water treatment we’re back to the days of dysentery and cholera.
I expect something else would collapse civilization before the lack of clean water but that’s the first thing that comes to mind.
You’re right, especially for urban environments, but there are exceptions. We don’t have mains water – like a fair number of people in rural France we source it from a hole in the ground. We run it through a charcoal filter, mostly because otherwise it tastes bloody awful, but if the grid went down, getting potable water would be the least of our problems.
Not everywere chlorine get’s added to the tab water routinly. In many regions in Germany it is basically only happens when something went wrong at the wells.
We seem to cope.
Do you have manual wells? Because when I lived with a well, our water would go out in the event of a power outage.
It is surprising to me no one mentioned how similar the riots in the US to the riots in Chile earlier this year.
Both the uncoordinated protesters, the lack of coherent agenda, the violence of the protests, along with most protesters being peaceful, and the support of large sections of the population for the protests and their cause.
Really, my wife told me “The US is going Chile”.
Como dicen in Chile, “Weon weon weon…”
As amusing as all the hypotheticals are, I wonder if we could ask johan_larson’s friends in the sky to take away all plastics? I have acquaintances who actually think this would be a good idea (saving the oceans and hormones and what not). Just about everything around us contain plastics nowadays, but for many uses, you can image reverting to metal cans, cardboard boxes, cellulose, aluminum, and degradable additives. If the aliens could be persuaded to simply let us stop producing plastic over a relatively short time, what would be irreplaceable, and what would markedly degrade quality of life?
A shorter list is what wouldn’t be irreplaceable. To a first approximation you’re looking at knocking most technology back to somewhere between the early 1900s and maybe the mid to late 40s, and in most cases closer to the earlier timeframe than the later.
Things get better if you say “Oh, wait, no, I didn’t mean EVERY form of artificially created polymer, to include biopolymers, invented from Bakelite onwards’, but then you’re no longer in the realm of the original question.
Disclaimer: I work in the plastic industry
Even “reverting to metal cans, cardboard boxes, etc.” carries significant cost. While those types of containers are generally useable for the same things plastics are, they’re almost always more expensive, less durable, etc.
There are no small number of customers who have tried this (we’ll just use cardboard and metal instead!) in order to appease various “sustainability” demands placed on them by activist groups, only to eventually come crawling back…
And keep in mind, plastic is ultimately derived from crude oil, so the recent events related to a crude price collapse are going to make plastic’s cost advantage over other materials that much more pronounced for however long oil prices stay low.
Plastic also has significant benefit to science and technology research, and even moreso health concerns. Plastic is wonderful for maintaining good hygiene in all sorts of situations.
Speaking of health concerns, as someone who works in plastics, are you at all worried about the phthalate/estrogen thing? I’ve only read barely-over-clickbait-level commentary on it.
Not really no, but I’m not at all on the science end of things so I can’t really speak to it with any sort of expertise at all. Maybe Jake (below) knows more than I do.
First I’ve heard about a phthalate/estrogen thing. I am also very much not a chemistry person. Also, my site doesn’t actually make plastic, we make almost-plastic and then ship it somewhere else for the final step. And it turns out almost-plastic will kill you in much less subtle ways if it gets out.
Supposedly, phthalates are similar enough to estrogen to fool the body, and a bunch of scientists believe the ubiquity of plastics might be driving down sperm counts and causing odd varieties of testicular cancer. But I’ve only heard about it from decidedly non-academic sources like https://www.gq.com/story/sperm-count-zero and such. Was hoping you guys would have more insight into it.
I’ve had three kids in less than ten years so I’m not personally all that fussed about sperm count, but it is creepy to contemplate.
I can’t imagine the effect on healthcare. All the sterile single use medical equipment would have to be replaced by reusable things, and a system for sterilization.
I’m just trying to think of what would be acceptable as a replacement for IV catheters and tubing. Rubber, maybe? What about latex allergies?
Look around you, wherever you’re sitting right now. Everything you see that’s made of plastic would be somewhere between 20% and 500% more expensive. Some of the things not made of plastic would also be more expensive, since the tools or processes used to produce them might involve plastic.
Disclaimer: I also work in the plastic industry.
STOP BUILDING NEW POLYETHYLENE CAPACITY PLEASE
(I don’t know who you work for but I’m 90% confident this applies)
Not us, although we did just expand ethylene production. Not sure if that’s enabling the trend or responding to it.
Ethene’s a precursor to a bunch of different things though, isn’t it?
@Lambert
Probably but this ethylene facility was built right next door to one of the 15 new polyethylene facilities Matt was referring to above.
Need any wastewater treatment?
We’re fully integrated so excess ethylene is also a problem, although I work in PE specifically so it’s less of a problem for me….
COVID-19, UFOs, the US on the verge of civil war… 2020 can’t get any worse.
2020: Hold my beer.
Earth is in danger of getting cancelled so they’re pulling out all the stops to get more viewers.
This would be the perfect time for aliens in mile-wide spaceships to show up–either to destroy us, or solve all our problems.
Destroying us does solve all our problems!
As Bill Cosby said, “Never challenge Worse.”
Yeah, the most efficient thing would be if we could get all of a century’s pandemics cluster together at once. Then we only have to shelter in place once. I guess we just need two more diseases to have Pandemic.
Yeah, just make sure neither of them is COdA-403a. Shelter-in-place really doesn’t work very well if you’re sharing your shelter with a bunch of zombies. Er, “faded”, yeah, that’s the ticket. There is absolutely no cause for alarm.
The idea with sheltering in place with COVID is that the infection will be restricted to just the infected person’s household. The same general principle applies to zombies. There is the issue that once they turn, they may cease to respect the shelter in place order, but that’s more an issue of enforcing the order, than efficacy of sheltering in place itself.
Guys, the events of 2020 make perfect kabbalistic sense! And don’t miss the predictions for 2021 and 2022.
If it’s the Year of the †, shouldn’t we be seeing a mass Christian revival?
Resurrection only comes after death.
Cross is different! Various Messiahs will come and go in the 2600s-2700s.
Yikes, glad I won’t be around for the 2620s.
I feel like there’s a Dagger John joke somewhere in here.
No, no, it’s hex. The current year is 07E4, which in Unicode is, as you should know, the letter Ha in the N’Ko alphabet.
As a follow up to a discussion a few threads back, I’m looking for interesting audio only resources to learn about pretty much anything. Does anyone have any recommendations on courses or series or anything they’ve listened to that really blew them out of the water? My interests tend towards business, math/science, music, and cultural stuff. But I’ll take anything really.
In our Time:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl/episodes/player
A history of the world in 100 objects:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nrtd2/episodes/downloads
Seconding In Our Time. The episode about fungi is still my favorite; it blew me away.
Thanks for the recommendation, I’m listening to it now and it’s very interesting. I learned about the rhynie chert which I’d never heard of before.
For cinematography, Every Frame a Painting was a fantastic channel while it lasted. As someone with no prior knowledge or really any meaningful interest in cinematography, yet somehow I enjoy watching these videos about random cinematography techniques, even the ones that aren’t about relatively famous subjects like Jackie Chan or Edgar Wright.
Omega Tau:
http://omegataupodcast.net/
It’s a podcast where a german guy goes around doing interviews with scientists/engineers/pilots/professors associated with interesting projects, like ITER, or the LHC, or SOFIA, etc. It’s also non-commercial, so there are no ads, and he’s a great interviewer who asks really in-depth technical questions.
This is great! It’s in German too! I’ve been looking for a German language podcast that interested me for ages!
I’m very jealous that you get to listen to the German episodes too 😛
Are you into Audible? If you’re into Audible I can recommend in no particular order: Superforecasting, The Design of Everyday Things, The Elephant in The Brain, The Secret of Our Success, The Dictator’s Handbook, The Righteous Mind, China’s Second Continent, The Stuff of Thought, The Sense of Style, Decisive, The Selfish Gene, Thinking Fast and Slow, The Third Revolution, Upheaval, The Coddling of the American Mind, Narconomics, Make it Stick, and Galileo’s Middle Finger
If you rotated Madagascar clockwise so that its long Indian Ocean coastline were parallel with the bottom of your screen, then the island’s shape would almost be the mirror image of Kentucky.
https://utahvalley360.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Penguin-you-didnt-see-anything.gif
Simulation authors getting lazy and reusing code?
You are right! It does!
Sometimes fantasy is based on grammatical mistakes.
“Werewolf” is the Modern English spelling of Old English werwulf, “male human”* + “wolf”.
*The gender-neutral man was modified with wif to make the earliest form of English “woman”.
Wikipedia has a whole page for hilarious results of this confusion.
But surely the sort of people who would read old texts might encounter other uses of Old English wer(e)-, like weregild, the heathen and early Germanic Christian fine for homicide. So why hasn’t the sort of fiction that produces female werewolves, werecats, et al misunderstood this into humans who turn into gold during the full moon?
My main conclusion is that transwomen understand etymology.
My main takeaway is that ladies lycanthropes should be called “Wyfwolves”.
Correct to the point that there are already 16,500 Google results.
I read a story once about a woman who turns into a wolf, and she insists that she’s not a werewolf but a “weremaiden”. And I’m thinking, which part of “werewolf” do you think means “wolf”?
And I just now discovered that spellcheck thinks weremaiden is a word.
See also
Also also, Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, which could set up expectations of the Crying Game plot twist.
No, a weremaiden is a woman who got in a terrible accident with a time machine so that on every full moon, she turns into a version of her past self who’s never had sex.
This makes a disturbing amount of sense. Except I believe “were” is an explicitly male prefix, so we’re really talking about a man who on the full moon transforms into a female version of themselves who has never had sex.
Also, the “accident with a time machine” bit really doesn’t fit the mythology. And making it a sexually-transmitted condition is a lot more interesting.
*checks whether there’s an oglaf with this premise*
(warning: flagrantly nsfw)
“Wer” is a term for man. “Were” is the third person past tense of “to be.”
As discussed by Dinosaur Comics
The dinosaur is only mostly correct. “Man” did originally mean “human”, but “man” and “human” are not related.
More weirdness: English “lake”, Scottish “loch”, and German “Loch” (meaning hole) are not related.
“Werewolf” is way more common that “weregild”.
Are you sure?
Checking the text of my most recent nonfiction book, I find twenty-four examples of “weregeld” and not a single “werewolf.”
So someone on Facebook posted a whole twitter dump about the Black Panthers, J. Edgar Hoover, operation COINtel, and Fred Hampton: https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10160462738028499&set=pcb.10160462747093499 . It said a lot of interesting stuff, and referenced interesting books I think I may give a try. My question: Anybody who’s interested in reading the thread and knows the history want to comment on how accurate her portrayal is?
Someone shared that on my Facebook yesterday. I didn’t do any research beyond reading the Wikipedia article, but it more or less matches what Wikipedia says at least.
I have gotten into some serious trouble with my tendency to blithely believe whatever wikipedia says over whoever I’m talking to. Most poignantly: I somehow recalled once that circa 1950 many of the regimes surrounding Israel were staffed by people who were either Nazis or very sympathetic to Nazi ideology. In relaying that information in discussion with a Lebanese friend, I simplified that message to “Nazis”. It did not go over well. I received emails about it over a year later.
There is a mix of truth and falsehood. The overall message is not true.
Cointelpro existed and sought to undermine civil rights groups and the FBI at that time did not do much to distinguish between violent and non violent groups, they tried to undermine most of them. Fred Hampton was killed while sleeping and the police lied about the panthers shooting at them in the raid that killed Hampton.
The black panthers were not just another civil rights group that was unfairly demonized by J Edgar Hoover. They were violent and committed bank robberies. They suspected a member of being a police informant so they tortured him with boiling water and killed him. They ambushed and murdered police officers. When their bookkeeper found financial irregularities with some of their programs, she was raped, beaten, and murdered. When they tried to have a witness in another case murdered he fought back and killed one, another sought the help of a paramedic who was then shot and buried alive in the desert. They had a long list of violence and murders. That is why people were afraid of them and not because of misinformation.
I’ve been growing hydroponics and was wondering where exactly the plants were obtaining the matter to grow so much so fast. Is it all from carbon in the air? The sunlight isn’t nearly enough energy to create that much matter (orders of magnitude off in fact), and the water levels barely drop day-to-day (though I do pour it out and replace the water daily). I had always just assumed that the matter came from the dirt but now I’m not sure.
If it is all from carbon in the air, I’m surprised. I guess there isn’t an intuitive way to understand the density of a gas because they’re all mostly invisible.
I believe >95% of a plant’s mass is from CO2. There’s a great Richard Feynman explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifk6iuLQk28
It can’t be 95%, a large portion of a plant is water definitely more than 5%.
Ah, you’re certainly correct. I now remember that juicers are a thing and roughly 50% water weight seems reasonable.
From this nature article: “Overall, the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen assimilated into organic molecules by photosynthesis make up ~96% of the total dry mass of a typical plant (Marschner 1995).” So even if you only look at the dry mass and include hydrogen from water you just barely get above 95%.
Biomass is usually talked about in terms of dry mass.
So >95% (excluding water, which it’s constantly soaking up in the roots and transpiring at the leaves) will be from CO2.
Armchair reasoning:
The primary chemical reaction that produces plant matter, photosynthesis, turns CO2 and H2O into C6H12O6 (glucose) and O2. Masses of one atom each of C, H and O are 12:1:16, so 40% of the mass comes from the carbon in air, and 60% from water.
To the extent that water can be dried out of a plant, more of the mass is water.
Typical plants are about 90% water. The dry mass is about 50% carbon from the air, the rest is oxygen (either from the air or from the water) and then hydrogen from the water molecules and nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, various metallic cations and small amounts of other elements from the stuff dissolved in the water.
Some plants can absorb moisture from the air.
On the contrary, the dirt (topsoil) accumulates when plants grow on it and erodes if the plants die.
I recommend that you calculate how much carbon, by weight, you exhale everyday. Realizing that when I lose body fat I literally breathe my fat ass out is… strange.
Sometimes I walk past a huge tree and imagine that it was built by a seed that started converting air into more of itself, and my mind is blown all over again. We are surrounded by nanotechnology.
This morning I came across a mention of “French oatmeal” – soaking oats in eggs (plus a little milk and salt) and then frying it. Does anyone know how this works from a cooking theory perspective and what alterations might be worth trying? When I search oatmeal online, I find lots of references to cooking them in water or milk, but none in eggs. Anyone know why?
It seems like a sneaky way to turn an omelette into a pancake, which is attractive if you like pancakes and dislike omelettes like I do. Obviously the recipe was inspired by french toast, but my understanding is that french toast relies on the bread soaking up the eggs, and that oats won’t do that, so I’m not sure how much it actually has in common with french toast. Does anyone know the details?
How long do you soak it in the eggs? If it’s an overnight type thing I would guess that the oats would soak up most the moisture.
I tried it this morning at one hour, but I thought the oats were insufficiently soft, so I made it again tonight after letting it soak all day (eight hours). Of course, in the later case I threw in some other ingredients too so it’s impossible to do a real comparison.
As far as time goes, the main constraint is impatience when cooking since doing the overnight soaks requires you to plan ahead and have a dish to spare.
Yeah, that’s always been my problem with overnight oats as well. I was just trying to figure out how you are supposed to do this, since I’ve never heard of it, but it sounds like it could be interesting.
You could soak the oats in milk or water for an hour or two first, then add the eggs to the softened oats.
I have this recipe from my mother:
Per Person
– 100gr of oats
– 1 or 2 eggs
– ~50ml of vegetable stock
– some fresh herbs if available
mix season to taste, let soak for no more than 15minutes. With an soupspoon form small patties and fry from both sides until gold brown. Serve with a dip of fresh cheese or quark.
I don’t know if that is the French version you were talking about, but it is quite tasty.
Quark?
Not quite cheese.
Either that or they’re frying them at 10^12 kelvin.
Quark
Username checks out.
When Richard Feynman was on Wangerooge for treating his cancer, he found Quark in a supermarket. Allegedly he said something like “we are investigating them in big particle accelerators, and here you can buy them in the chiller cabinet”
What SamChevre said, I did not know another name for it in english
Fascinating. I had never heard of this. I’ll bet Muster Mark loves this stuff.
And it gives that certain something to cheesecake!
Does “oats” mean rolled oats, which is the usual assumption in the U.S.?
Yes.
Sounds like matzoh brei.
This seems like an American thing, I’ve never heard of Irish or Scottish recipes for porridge made with eggs, and I don’t know if the French even make porridge.
Looking online, the nearest recipe I see is this “no bread French toast” using oatmeal to make squares instead of bread slices, then making a custard with eggs. Your recipe might be a very simplified version? (Instead of making the custard, soaking the oats in egg and milk).
I still wouldn’t try it of my own free will 🙁
Eggs plus dairy is a pretty common “custard,” used in the likes of quiche and frittata. So adding shredded cheese to the mix would be an obvious variation, or trying other dairy in place of milk like cream or sour cream, depending on what kind of flavor profile you want.
You could try also subbing the oats for other porridge grains, like rice, cream wheat, grits, grape nuts, or maybe even shredded potato for a latke kind of thing. (Rice would probably have to be pre-cooked.)
A la quiche, other classic savory add-ins would be finely chopped bacon or ham, onion, and spinach (maybe broccoli and carrot?). Usually, the add-ins are stir-fried separately before getting mixed in with the custard.
Adding a sufficient amount of ground meat will turn the entire thing into a hamburger steak variant.
And then, of course, you can go with different spice mixes and sauces to complement the resulting cakes.
I’ve been re-reading the writings on Predictive Processing and in particular the notion of predicting good or bad outcomes with high or low confidence and it really does seem like the “missing quadrant” of “good outcomes, low confidence” describes ADHD.
* Dopamine signals top-down confidence, right? ADHD is often rounded off to “Insufficient dopamine. Prescribe dopamine agonists.”, right?”
* A low-confidence prediction of a good outcome will lead you to start considering a behavior but not stick with it if you don’t see a sign of success to re-enforce that prediction. Instead, you’ll move on to the next low-confidence good outcome — classic distractability.
* A common symptom of ADHD is “hyperfocus”, getting sucked into a video game for 5 hours straight. That just sounds like you made a low confidence prediction of a good outcome, it kept getting rewarded and no other ideas seemed certain enough of a greater reward to pop you out of the thing that kept rewarding you.
Longer explanation on the subreddit
Britain does seem to be getting serious about rights for British Nationals Overseas in HK.
If the ‘security law’ passes, the UK will give BNOs 12 month visas (currently they get 6). Extendable work visas with a path to citizenship are also being talked about.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52900700
This post is now ancient in terms of open threads but I thought I’d get this in here in terms of nominative determinism: the doctor who operated on James Garfield after he was shot was named Doctor Bliss. Dr. Doctor Bliss.
My dad, who almost certainly never heard this piece of history, wanted to name me Doctor in hopes that I’d become a doctor and have this kind of titling. Apparently it was an argument him and my mother had, which is why I’m not named Doctor or Seth.
Conversely, when the US military added five-star general ranks, the Army used “General of the Army” as their five-star rank instead of the internationally more common rank of “Field Marshal”. The official reason for this was that “Marshal” had monarchy-related connotations, and because there was there was precedent for “General of the Army” in past US usage. Unofficially, it was rumored that the US Army Chief of Staff, George C. Marshall, didn’t want to be addressed as “Field Marshal Marshall”.
Tangentially, past precedent for “General of the Army” ranks is a little confused. It had previously been created for Grant in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to reinforce his status as the overall commander of the federal armies, and was later held by Sherman and then by Sheridan. But that incarnation had been considered a four-star rank at the time. there being no “regular” full Generals in the US Army between Washington’s retirement from command of the Continental army and the American mobilization for WW1. I think during that period there was also at most one 3-star Lieutenant General at a time.
And then there’s also the “General of the Armies of the United States” rank, created on an ad-hoc basis for John Pershing following WW1, and later posthumously and retroactively awarded to George Washington. This one clearly outranks the four-star ranks, as Pershing was explicitly promoted from “General” to “General of the Armies”, but Pershing’s chosen rank insignia was four stars (gold instead of the usual silver color of General’s stars). There was some debate during WW2, for the purposes of ceremonial protocol since Pershing was retired but still alive, over whether Pershing’s rank was higher than that of the Generals of the Army (Marshall, Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Hap Arnold). This was eventually settled in the affirmative, retroactively reinterpreting Pershing’s rank as a six-star rank.
If George had had to restore order with his forces, would that Field Marshal Marshall martial law? And if on another planet, Field Marshal Marshall Martian martial law?
You could ctrl+f search for ~new~ which is in even new message since you last visited.
oh no, now your comment will come up every time! That’s how I do it, though.
Now I see your comment every time I search. Can’t you add a space or something?
I can’t, sorry! Seems like it’s too late to edit.
Then go forth and sine new more.
Every few months, this happens:
1. Someone asks “how do I search for new”?
2. Someone responds like this.
3. Other people point out the problem with #2.
4. A bunch of people point out “I never knew I could do that!”
The person who does #2 does mess up, but the benefit to the community for all the people in #4 is worth it.
And I was just thinking last weekend “it’s been a while since we had that discussion.”
search for “m ~new~”, without the “”
Of course, now that string is going to get stuck on *your* comment.
I am properly ashamed.
That does suggest two further methods, which together will get all instances, but which I will not mention, due to the interesting phenomenon that any solution that is mentioned will not work. I guess this is a type of anti-induction?
It is not too large to fit in the margin?
Is the “new comments since” box in the top right not working for you? I see a box with a + sign–if I click the + sign, it gives me a clickable list of the new comments.
I won’t do this every open thread, but my ongoing history of the May 18 Gwangju Uprising has reached the outbreak of the uprising itself. Regrettably this is highly topical, as there is a lot of police brutality, and brief mention of sexual violence, so content warning to people sensitive to that. I tried not to dwell on it, but also didn’t want to shy away.
There’s a widget here that will autocollapse any thread that doesn’t have new comments, which makes it *way* easier to read.
Thanks, that’s a big help!
Do you want to watch an amateur film about a survivor of the Spanish Armada shipwrecked on the west coast of Ireland?
Well, here is your opportunity! (I don’t know if it’s available from the US, try the link and see). It’s 27 minutes of pulse-pounding excitement (ahem) and based on this source document. Proceeds will go towards the development of the Spanish Armada Visitor Centre.
What would happen if every virus on Earth vanished? Anything bad?
A bunch of retroviruses are currently dormant, written into the genomes of various organisms.
They’d be back.
(Weirdly, about 5% of human DNA seems to be bits of old retrovirus)
Wait, are they waiting for certain viruses to be gone so they can come back? How do they know when it’s time?
After reading Lambert’s comment, I read about retroviruses. They alter the infected cell’s DNA, causing the cell to produce more viruses. I think Lambert meant that, even if all viruses vanished, those compromised cells would continue to produce more viruses.
I was just wondering that the other day!
I’m reasonably sure I’ve read that most viruses affect bacteria, not larger organisms like us. There are even plans to use bacteria-targeting viruses as an alternative to antibiotics.
So the balance of bacteria vs other living things would probably readjust itself in favor of bacteria, if all viruses suddenly vanished.
I know that despite my hatred for bugs, removing them entirely would take away the food source of many animals. Relatedly, are there organisms that depend on consuming viruses?
worth it in the case of mosquitoes though
Never before seen Borges used as a NEGATIVE reference!
Damn it, I love Borges!
Any way of finding the deleted Borges references I never tracked down?
Web.archive.org
Not sure if you are one of today’s 10 000 or it was less obvious solution than I think