I think those disclaimers are a fig leaf in this case. At best.
Its like having people sign a waiver that they understand "Gravity is a powerful force that pulls you downward" before you enter the pit zone. I don't think psychological "nudges" are actually a real thing, honestly.
To me, a 'guardrail' is something that physically prevents you from falling in. Unless you climb over it. In this case that may be something like a restriction on your bank account that prevents you from depositing money into an app or withdrawing cash at a Casino after a certain period of time or above a certain amount.
There's a (strong) case that banks shouldn't be peeking over their clients' shoulders and judging what they use money on, so I'm really trying to think of ways to put something TANGIBLE in place that might allow someone to slide right up to the point of absolute ruin, but stop at the edge and have a chance to retreat, or at least think over the implications before jumping in.
And of course, degenerate gamblers will just borrow money from 'friends' or loan sharks if their bank cuts them off, so there are no 'foolproof' solutions.
faceh
11d ago
Yep. Physical barriers to harmful behaviors are a pretty decent brake to keep them from proliferating throughout a society. Low agency people are more susceptible to those behaviors, but also probably less likely to go to the trouble of accessing them if its difficult enough.
In Florida, most gambling was relegated to Seminole Tribe casinos, so they necessarily couldn't proliferate beyond the boundaries of the reservations. Florida has a deal with them where they pay up a chunk of the revenue and the state bans gambling elsewhere in its territory. It in theory keeps gambling minimized in the rest of the state and makes it easier to supervise and regulate the places where it does occur.
Now, the Seminoles have worked to make it maximally enticing to come out to the Casinos, and maximally difficult to leave once you're there, but at least it required you to physically drive there, and at some point you'd have to go home. So in a sense it beat, and still beats having a mini-casino on every street corner, which is harder to regulate and will probably ruin more people.
Las Vegas does this on a much grander scale, of course.
Digitizing the casinos... man. Its the rough equivalent of hooking up a pipeline to everyone's house that could dispense heroin, meth, and/or crack cocaine on demand. If you don't have to venture into the seedier parts of town and risk getting mugged to get your fix, I'm sure more people will partake.
One involves cognition, but that doesn’t alter the addictiveness.
The argument perhaps goes that you can mentally train yourself to resist the effects of a given stimuli when the source of the neurological effect is entirely local to your own brain. End of the day, you can make a 'choice' to stop pushing the button.
But there's no training yourself to resist the introduction of exogenous drugs.
That’s because the choice is not actually free. It’s either coerced by an illusion or coerced by an animalistic instinct.
I'd object to the use of the term 'coerced' here, but otherwise mostly agree. I think its mostly based on the idea that they are not psychologically or philosophically prepared to give 'informed consent' to behaviors that have complex long-term implications. They literally cannot comprehend the effects, so while they can 'agree' to the terms, the consent lacks the actual 'comprehension' which is necessary for someone to truly consent to and accept the risks of a given transaction.
And the world has only gotten more complex, not less, so normal legal standards around 'age of consent' are, arguably, entirely outmoded for addressing this issue.
I think the most palatable change would be something akin to banning those under age 16 from having social media accounts. Maybe a step further, banning them from possessing smartphones altogether (yes, enforcement would be a bear. No arguments there). Give them a basically functional blackberry-esque device that can send and receive messages and has GPS functionality and bluetooth, and no app store.
I think there has been vastly insufficient discussion of superstimuli and policies that address the proliferation of ways one can completely wreck their life in short order. Just like drugs are more potent than they were 50 years ago, marketing companies are much, much better at their jobs and barely-legal scams are more efficiently predatory than ever before. And meanwhile, humans are, if anything, a little dumber on average.
Like, I am libertarian as fuck when it comes to social issues, but I've experienced the rush that gambling brings and my sincere belief is that we HAVE to provide some 'friction' in place to prevent people from slipping into deep, DEEP holes from which there is no escape, or at least they'll be stuck climbing out for years.
Consider if you owned a property with an extremely deep sinkhole on it, that was surrounded by smooth, polished rock with low friction coefficient on a 20 degree slope, so that anyone who wants to approach the edge of the pit would find it very difficult to climb back out without special equipment, and some % of people are going to slip and fall into the pit. If you're charging admission to view the pit, I argue we can reasonably say you're being extremely negligent (and therefore at least partially responsible) if you didn't provide people with adequate warnings, safety equipment, and AT LEAST a guardrail around the edge to keep people from sliding in.
ESPECIALLY if you were enticing people to come view the pit with the promise that some small number of guests would get fabulously wealthy, and the closer they get to the edge of the pit, the more they could possibly win.
Even my deepest belief in personal freedom doesn't require that the pit must be tolerated as-is, in its maximally dangerous state.
But metaphorically speaking, we're apparently allowing thousands of these sorts of pits to dot the psychological landscape, with bright flashing advertisements drawing in patrons and no mechanisms in place to 'rescue' those who fall in.
It is bad enough for adults who get sucked in, kids whose entire development was awash in these stimuli might not even develop basic defenses, since this is what they would consider 'normal.' The kids these days have gambling mechanics in ALL their video games, they've already made and lost minor fortunes in Crypto, they can gamble on literally any sports event they want, and they grew up watching influencers shilling them on the most harebrained of get-rich-quick schemes.
And meanwhile, financial literacy is barely ever taught.
Also, it is patently absurd that the rules as they exist allow anyone over 18 or 21 to throw money away gambling, but if they want to invest in early-stage startups they have to have a certain amount of wealth built up already.
The 'problem' such as it is, if we start investigating and making rules for those who have addictive personalities, or are easily manipulated, or simply don't understand odds/statistics and restrict their ability to use their own money in ways they wish. Maybe they have restricted bank accounts that limit them to, say $500/day withdrawals. Maybe they're not allowed to take on long-term debt, or we legally cap the amount of debt they can take to some specific % of their net worth. Or require them to pass an annual financial audit to exercise certain rights...
Because if we don't, there's a certainty that many of them will blow up the entirety of their savings and becomes a burden on the rest of us later on. And thus we can only do our best to mitigate this externality.
Well, we're essentially carving out a different class of citizens with reduced individual rights due to their vulnerabilities. What's the justification for letting such people vote? Or have a bank account at all? Or have kids?
faceh
11d ago
Probably a lot, if they are pursuing actual promising ideas and not spending time on crypto scam #4192.
Real question is how many people, if they weren't trying to "live life while they're young" would actually be able to switch into hardcore productivity mode for that long.
I think part of the reason Johnson is able to do such absurd things to regain youth is because he's already the type of person with the ability to commit to very hard, very uncomfortable, almost psychotically meticulous projects.
THAT'S the part that will stump most people.
faceh
12d ago
I think it presents an interesting calculation though.
It makes it more palatable to sacrifice your 20's and 30's in the pursuit of wealth (rather than social life, sex, etc. etc.) and then, once you achieve amazing wealth, spend some portion of that to get yourself back to the vitality of your 20's (or close to it) and make up for your lost time, with a LOT more money than you'd usually have.
If money can buy back some time and health, it makes it much more palatable to sacrifice those earlier on.
faceh
12d ago
ALLEGEDLY it helps clear out toxins, heavy metals, and other 'forever' chemicals that the body can't otherwise process.
I believe it.
Also supposed to help with blood pressure, which anecdotally seems to be the case for me (I give blood, sometimes double red, on a very regular basis).
faceh
12d ago
There seems to be a rapid shutdown mode where the body calls it quits and nothing can reverse this.
My rough model is that you can do a lot of interventions that will improve general health, and if you can stave off cancer you WILL live longer on average... but once some major subsystem in the body starts to go, the knock-on effects will lead to rapid deterioration across the board. A complex system will run smoothly until something important fails... then you see a rapid cascade of failures which looks like 'sudden' onset of death.
I.e., maybe you have the skin, liver, heart, and lungs of a 50 year old, but if your kidneys give out then that will barely matter, it'll all start to go unless you do a drastic intervention. Which subsystem fails is somewhat of a diceroll.
So yeah, you can gain a few extra healthy years on average via good habits and preventative care, but its still a question of which of your internal organs will be the first to betray you.
I am actually a little bit unsettled that certain interventions that do seem to preserve youthfulness, such as sleeping a lot, avoiding the sun (and other radiation), reducing your metabolism/body temp, and consuming the blood of virgins really resembles vampire behavior.
faceh
12d ago
Jesse Singal is a little more... earnest than the others but you begin to notice that he critiques the left but never actually takes the obvious implications of all those critiques.
faceh
12d ago
Johnson is notable insofar as he spent his 20s and 30s sacrificing his health to make a bunch of money. And now he's burning that money to regain health and youth and is, through absurd amounts of effort, at least partially successful.
The other current respectable Anti-aging Guru Dr. David Sinclair, also looks younger than his actual age (55).
Which lends credence to the claim that his interventions improve SOMETHING.
BUT I kind of hate that we live in an era where makeup, plastic surgery, and other cosmetic technologies are mature enough that it is easy to fake youthfulness so we can't rely on our own eyes to judge.
I do wonder at the fact that various Hollywood Stars (Keanu, Tom Cruise, Sylvester Stallone, to name a few) can stay active and fit well past the age that normally people start falling apart slowly.
Hmmm...
I think that there's a group of 'public intellectuals' that includes Hanania, Matt Yglesias, Noah Smith, Jesse Singal, and a few others, who have crammed themselves into a microniche of the influencer ecosystem where they play the same ragebait game as everyone else, but have the wherewithal to couch it in enough rhetorical flourish and data that they can maintain reputation as 'serious' intellectuals who are worth listening to even among the more respectable circles of discourse. They're basically squeezed in right beneath The Atlantic but above, say, Vice covering angles that are a bit too speculative for real news but never so lowbrow that they can't be discussed in polite company.
Their persona is basically "haha I agree with 95% of what [ideology] says, but on these specific issues I vehemently disagree and will vigorously bang the drum of dissent, bet you never expected that!" (Being FAIR, Ben Shapiro was also like this, but he's made the big time so he doesn't have to rely on this any more)
Hanania is very much a right-leaning mirror of Yglesias. He has high verbal IQ and is versed in the esoteric and counterintuitive arguments that were born from the neoreactionary movement, but makes himself out to be the moderate and rational alternative to said neoreactionaries.
I also think he doesn't have much interesting to say. His shtick seems to be "here's some piece of data or a study result that seems to contradict a particular right wing narrative, I hereby declare that narrative debunked!" Here's an example. "Haha, I found some data that vaguely disagrees with your point! How's it feel to be WRONG?" Then he gets dunked on but he achieved his goal of gaining attention.
And he isolates that data from almost any and all surrounding context so that the interlocutor is forced to introduce the necessary informational context which he can either ignore, or attack narrowly "that doesn't refute MY data!" even though the whole issue is HIS data, in context, doesn't really refute anything. Or, if he wishes, put on a layer of irony and claim he wasn't making his claim seriously anyway, you rube.
In short, they all like to pull 'micro' motte-baileys where they never make any serious claim that can be pinned down and destroyed, they stick their toe in the Bailey enough to garner some outrage but no so far that they can't defend the claim with some artful rhetoric.
I think their grift mode is to state some superficially fallacious contrarian argument, then claim that they'll address all critiques and counterarguments in their longer substack essay, which once you pay to access it and read it, you realize it is just a wordier version of the same arguments but then they have your money.
So they're just selling newsletters via particularly skilled trolling, if you will.
Side note, just to add to my earlier gripes about Noah Smith, here's him botching another prediction/analysis about topics he really doesn't grasp.
faceh
12d ago
It still suffers from the problem of not having much you can do with it aside store it for the long term.
And ultimately that's why I'm pulling out, I got other things I want to do with the money.
faceh
12d ago
I had money on Ted Cruz winning, and I otherwise decided to let things ride, which has paid off too thus far.
But I'm also selling off the last of my Crypto holdings for the time being because I STRONGLY suspect the current leap is overoptimistic, and it'll correct by or before January. For reference, I originally bought a (small) position in Bitcoin in 2014.
Ultimately yeah. I avoid reacting to any one event. But there are still times when I wish I had been bolder on certain moves.
faceh
12d ago
I'm KICKING myself that I didn't think to slide more money into $TSLA in the leadup to the election.
It was obvious that a Trump win would benefit Elon directly and bounce Tesla higher. It's up over 40% since the election.
My policy right now is I'm giving EVERYONE a week-long pass/reprieve where they can grieve and/or celebrate. So one more day.
After that, anyone still acting unhinged OR still spiking the football rather than working on their goals for the future is getting muted. If they antagonize me directly, they're getting blocked, at least for a while.
I did learn from the past 8 years that my own personal mental health is better preserved when I'm not exposed too much to the screeching insanity from either side. Hence why I spend my time here rather than Reddit.
I've already started the process of muting all the most intolerable of the pundits and influencers. They will keep doing their shtick regardless, and its no longer amusing to have to hear the same doomsday prognostications, or useless chest-thumping. These are not serious people.
My goal for the next four years: Just fucking build stuff. The uncertainty of the election is gone, the Red Tribe is ascendant, the left is going to act in a very predictable way going forward. No reason to let them alter my plans and actions one iota.
faceh
13d ago
It would be a bit funny if they design a machine that is provably a 1:1 simulation of a human brain, switch it on, and get an error message to the effect of "Cannot Execute Commands: This unit is not ensouled."
LLMs aren't going to replace humans because the set of all data is miniscule to the set of all potential patterns in the world.
I mean, you can say LLMs aren't going to replace humans...but the 'potential patterns in the world' are all reducible to data in one way or another.
So some Machine trained on language AND physics data AND biology AND etc. etc. is still a potential contender, no?
faceh
15d ago
Literally as I read this comment I am listening to a reggae-fied cover of the Gorillaz song Punk.
The "Laika come Home" Album is pretty damn good.
I've also spent a good portion of this year searching up Metal or Hard rock covers of popular older songs and finding that this has been a burgeoning area/genre, and there is a lot to choose from!
Mostly for my gym playlist. But there's covers of songs like Running up that Hill and "Lose Yourself" that are just GREAT MUSIC on their own merits, because they are remade by talented artists who can maintain the basic structure of the original but give it a distinct feel and play around with the architecture. That is to say, not just slapping on a new paint job.
Feels like this is an ample vein to mine, to get distinct sound out of well-known songs by converting them to a differing genre.
I'm reminded of how The Animals created a massive hit out of their cover of a folk song "The House of the Rising Sun" back in 1964.
Writing 'new' songs is probably overrated, since you're just adding a few footnotes to an insanely large library of material. But talented artists don't need to be entirely novel to make great works! Fork off an existing property, make it their own, and it could be a hit too.
Also, I genuinely believe that we've mostly 'tapped out' the possible genres of songs that can actually become popular, there doesn't seem to be much room left for any distinctly novel style of music that has heretofore been untapped. I'd blame the rise of electronic music for rapidly squeezing out the entire space of 'sounds it is possible to produce' and so even if we haven't tapped the entirety of all musicspace we're going to have a harder time finding ones that have mass appeal.
faceh
18d ago
A) A lot of people moving here/retirees from Blue states that increase the Republican voteshare.
B) Desantis is a terrifyingly competent governor, from day 1. Even Dems notice that he keeps the state in tiptop shape.
C) As part of B), Desantis cleaned up the problem counties when it came to voting, which probably eliminated whatever fraud there was.
I explain here.
faceh
18d ago
As a Floridian, I could have warned him.
Its not just that the Dems are outnumbered now, they're UTTERLY DEMORALIZED so even if they show up in polls, they might not bother voting.
faceh
18d ago
If there was a broad-scale strategic mistake the left made, 'letting' the GOP turn trans issues into the most central culture war flashpoint has to be it.
faceh
18d ago
Jesus Christ its insane.
"Wow I heard an insightful point on [podcast or 1 hour documentary]"
"Where can I find it?"
"Somewhere around the 45 minute mark, and then they go on a tangent about cat-squirrel hybrids for a bit, then they come back to the point."
In the current era we should be able to cite to any given piece of written/typed data nigh instantly, instead the content has evolved to make it more resistant to easy search.
Ah, regression to the mean, the eternal enemy of miracle cures and performance enhancing supplements.
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