felis-parenthesis
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User ID: 660
felis-parenthesis
10d ago
You are right to press me on whether my corruption scenario has ever actually happened. My gut feeling is no, never. But the past few years have wrecked my world view, and I fear that I am old and have been left behind while the world changes.
Back in March 2021 I had the Astra-Zenaca mRNA vaccine for COVID. How dangerous could it be? I knew that the messenger RNA would cause my cells to produce the protein that the snippet coded for. Scary! But I knew that that is what happens in a viral infection, and what happens when you take a "weakened" vaccine. Indeed Edward Jenner's original cowpox vaccination for smallpox is doing the same thing; spoiling the host for the smallpox virus by getting host cells to produce a shared protein and getting the host to produce anti-bodies to it. I was a science enthusiast and marveled at the invention of mRNA vaccines.
I saw public health as a nerdy area, and took it for granted that traditional standards of safety and efficacy would be upheld. I was disappointed. The https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths dynamic had played out while I wasn't paying attention. The blot clots and myocarditis problems would have lead to the swift withdrawal of the vaccines when I was young; but the world had moved on.
My current understanding of how the world works goes something like this:
It is year N and Mr Blackpill has noticed that the incentives tend towards corruption. He claims that year N is already corrupt. It isn't. Mr Blackpill is undaunted; he claims that dynamics created by the incentives are fast acting and predicts that year N+10 will be corrupt. Nope. Mr Blackpill has complete faith in his reasoning and in human avarice. Year N+20 will definitely see a corruption scandal. Mr Blackpill is wrong again.
Eventually year N+30 arrives and with it a big corruption scandal. Mr Blackpill was right in the end. Worse, it turns out that the corruption is entrenched and hard to root out. It has been going on for fifteen years. Mr Blackpill was right about N+20. There are a variety of forces that tend to hide scandals and when they break out into the mainstream it turns out those in the know had been complaining, correctly, for many years.
Returning to adding versus topping up. I see the language here as one of those forces that tend to hide scandals. Ecbatic not telic. I don't know whether we are in year N, year N+10, or year N+20. Mostly I don't know because I'm not in the business. But I cannot know by reading the newspapers. People complain about fluoride being added to the water supply and I'm left to guess that they mean topping up. If there was a scandal of the kind that I speculate about, adding, not topping up the news reports would say much the same and the I wouldn't be any the wiser. It would be the year N+20 situation, where there is corruption but still ten years to go before the facts break into mainstream news.
At the end of the day, my guess is that there just isn't enough money in water treatment to attract the avaracious, and the potential for corruption goes unrealized. But the clumsy language, that stands ready to hide it if it ever happens, still give me the ick.
the claim that we "add" fluoride to the water supply is a lie.
And this is an extraordinarily bad idea.
I'm aware that I completely lack the common touch, so it is best that I defer to your expertise here. I would be interested if you had any ideas on how to push back against the confusion of adding and topping up.
felis-parenthesis
12d ago
But the language of "adding" rather than "topping up" has erased the concept of already has enough fluoride in it naturally. The idea is missing from the discourse. Lots of ordinary people have naturally occurring fluoride in their drinking water and have no idea that it has always been like that. Dr Nerd's third attempt at making his point will make not make sense to those people and they will ignore him.
We can tell that the idea of already has enough fluoride in it naturally has been erased from the discourse, simply by listening out for the missing follow-up questions. When some-one is on the media, arguing against fluoridation on the grounds that the recommended level is a health hazard, the interviewer questions them. The obvious line of questioning is "What about places with naturally occurring fluoridation? Do you advocate removing it? How? Are the health problems actually showing up? There have been multiple life times for them to appear!" But the obvious questions don't occur to the interviewer. The concepts have somehow gotten erased :-(
felis-parenthesis
12d ago
In the particular case of fluoridating water, the ruling elite had a good story. Scientists knew that naturally occurring levels of fluoride varied from place to place. Did it matter? They did the epidemiology thing and decided that less than one part per million made tooth decay noticeably worse. More than four parts per million caused dental fluorosis, but nothing else showed up strongly with natural levels of fluoridation. So topping up fluoride to bring low fluoride water up to one part per million seemed super safe; lots of people were already living with 1ppm. And had been for their entire lives. It was a rare case where we have data (albeit epidemiological) on all cause mortality, due to pre-existing "natural experiments".
... without facing widespread riots or resistance is just insane ...
Your confusion is the result of a garbled account of events. That is bad in itself, but I want to make the case that it is important to say that "topping up" and "adding" are different and that the claim that we "add" fluoride to the water supply is a lie.
First I will offer paradigms of "topping up" and "adding" and then make my case that things can go horribly wrong if we tolerate people confusing them.
Topping up Measure the level. If it comes in at 0.5 ppm, add enough to increase the level by 0.5 ppm. Measure again. If it is in the range 0.9 to 1.1 ppm declare victory. If outside that range, find out why, and adjust appropriately.
Adding Don't bother measuring, or if some-else has measured, just ignore it. Add enough to increase the level by 1 ppm. Continue to fail at measuring and be smug that the level is at least 1 ppm because our addition guarantees that out-come.
Now picture a town debating water fluoridation. Why? Well, Mr Bad Guy hopes to get kick backs from the contracts for fluoridation equipment and chemicals. He persuades his fellow citizens to top up fluoride levels at public expense. They vote for it. Mr Bad Guy sets it in motion. The measured natural level turns out to be 1.3 ppm. There is nothing to be done. No contracts, no kick backs. Mr Bad Guy looks around and notices that nobody is watching. He arranges contracts for equipment and chemicals to add enough fluoride to increase the levels by 1 ppm. He pockets his bribe money. Fluoride levels increase to 2.3 ppm. Mr Bad Guy feels safe. No-one will notice 2.3 ppm and if he falls under suspicion for corruption, he can always say that he misunderstood.
Later Dr Nerd measures the fluoride and checks the records of the old measurements. Dr Nerd is unhappy about the waste of public money, or about the dangers of fluoride, take your pick. He tries to "blow the whistle". But what language does he speak? If he uses the vernacular he complains that we are adding fluoride to the water supply and we shouldn't be doing that, we should instead be adding fluoride to the water supply [sic]. Nobody understands his point. So he switches to Nerd-speak and complains that we are adding fluoride to the water supply when we should be topping up; very different. Topping up is free! But the towns-folk don't speak Nerd-speak, so Dr Nerd still fails to make himself understood.
Talking about topping up fluoride levels using the word adding is bad. It covers up corruption and is why we cannot have nice things.
felis-parenthesis
14d ago
I enjoyed that rant. It was very horseshoe. Douglas Mcgregor is right wing, and he also says that we are ruled by the donor class.
felis-parenthesis
15d ago
felis-parenthesis
23d ago
I find the claim that Trump is antisemitic confusing. I try to visit enough different forums that I get an idea of the breadth of opinion. The places that approve of Hitler often call Trump the Zion Don and think that he is owned by Jews. For example: https://communities.win/c/ConsumeProduct/p/199OTqPFyM/why-havent-you-voted-for-zion-do/c
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
If a young Englishman scores highly on IQ tests they will likely be admitted to a three year degree program and complete it successfully. Sitting their final exams, they will be recalling material learned at the beginning of their course, three years earlier: success depends on having a retentive memory. Retentive for years. But the IQ test only took an hour or two; no chance to probe multi-year memory retention. How does that work?
One idea is that IQ tests are probing for a healthy brain and a low mutational load. It is still a little unclear why the genes that help with rapidly solving little puzzles should be the same ones that boost memory.
I could imagine that sustained selection based on IQ test will eventually break the correlation of test performance and long term memory. In a dozen generations, say 2323 or 2384, there may be a crisis in University admissions. Too many students are really sharp mentally, but they forget their course work after 6 months and end up failing.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
I fed "desublimated higher culture" into Google and found this conversation, Marcuse's book and
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 5 already displayed.
Trying Bing.com
There are no results for "desublimated higher culture"
Check your spelling or try different keywords
Typing
"the pleasure
into Google gets me various autocompletions
The pleasure principle Geometrie De La Mort TV series
The pleasure principle Studio album by Gary Numan
Clearly the phrase once had cultural cachet.
It gets worse. Wikipedia has articles on Pleasure principle and Reality principle. I want to be one of the cool intellectuals, who is down with these sophisticated concepts. How can I do that when Wikipedia puts their vapid triviality on public display :-(
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
Singapore and Hong Kong. Small, densely populated islands of prosperity.
Maybe also where a huge number of people want to live in the center of a special city, so Washington or London.
Perhaps New York (meaning Manhattan Island) ticks both boxes.
But maybe Washington, London, and New York combine natural housing crises with manufactured housing crises based on rent controls and restrictive planning laws.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
The issue is that there are two distinct dangers in play, and to emphasize the differences I'll use a concrete example for the first danger instead of talking abstractly.
First danger: we replace judges with GTP17. There are real advantages. The averaging implicit in large scale statistics makes GPT17 less flaky than human judges. GPT17 doesn't take take bribes. But clever lawyers find how to bamboozle it, leading to extreme errors, different in kind to the errors that humans make. The necessary response is to unplug GPT17 and rehire human judges. This proves difficult because those who benefit from bamboozling GPT17 have gained wealth and power and want to preserve the flawed system because of the flaws. But GPT17 doesn't defend itself; the Artificial Intelligence side of the unplugging is easy.
Second danger: we build a superhuman intelligence whose only flaw is that it doesn't really grasp the "don't monkey paw us!" thing. It starts to accidentally monkey paw us. We pull the plug. But it has already arraigned a back up power supply. Being genuinely superhuman it easily outwits our attempts to turn it off, and we get turned into paper clips.
The conflict is that talking about the second danger tends to persuade people that GPT17 will be genuinely intelligent, and that in its role as RoboJudge it will not be making large, inhuman errors. This tendency is due to the emphasis on Artificial Intelligence being so intelligent that it outwits our attempts to unplug it.
I see the first danger as imminent. I see the second danger as real, but well over the horizon.
I base the previous paragraph on noticing the human reaction to Large Language Models. LLMs are slapping us in the face with non-unitary nature of intelligence. They are beating us with clue-sticks labelled "Human-intelligence and LLM-intelligence are different" and we are just not getting the message.
Here is a bad take; you are invited to notice that it is seductive: LLMs learn to say what an ordinary person would say. Human researchers have created synthetic midwit normies. But that was never the goal of AI. We already know that humans are stupid. The point of AI was to create genuine intelligence which can then save us from ourselves. Midwit normies are the problem and creating additional synthetic ones makes the problem worse.
There is some truth in the previous paragraph, but LLMs are more fluent and more plausible than midwit normies. There is an obvious sense that Artificial Intelligence has been achieved and it ready for prime time; roll on RoboJudge. But I claim that this is misleading because we are judging AI by human standards. Judging AI by human standards contains a hidden assumption: intelligence is unitary. We rely on our axiom that intelligence is unitary to justify taking the rules of thumb that we use for judging human intelligence and using them to judge LLMs.
Think about the law firm that got into trouble by asking an LLM to write its brief. The model did a plausible job, except that the cases it cited didn't exist. The LLM made up plausible citations, but was unaware of the existence of an external world and the need for the cases to have actually happened in that external world. A mistake, and a mistake beyond human comprehension. So we don't comprehend. We laugh it off. Or we call it a "hallucination". Anything to avoid recognizing the astonishing discovery that there are different forms of intelligence with wildly different failure modes.
All the AI's that we create in the foreseeable future will have alarming failure modes, that offer this consolation: we can use them to unplug the AI if it is misbehaving. An undefeatable AI is over the horizon.
The issue for the short term is that humans are refusing to see that intelligence is a heterogeneous concept and we are are going to have to learn new ways of assessing intelligence before we install RoboJudges. We are heading for disasters where we rely on AI's that go on to manifest new kinds of stupidity and make incomprehensible errors. Fretting over the second kind of danger focuses on intelligence and takes us away from starting to comprehend the new kinds of stupidity that are manifest by new kinds of intelligence.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
Democrats are the real racists = Democrats R the Real Racists = DRRR = DR^3 = DR3
Wait, you might not be asking how the weird abbreviation works. You might be asking why people believe that Democrats are racist.
I think that the change that has happened in my life time starts from the position that Black underperformance is due to anti-black racism from whites. End racism, replacing it with meritocracy and Blacks will thrive and do just as well as Whites.
After forty years of disappointment, the new-Democrat anti-racist position is that blacks are inferior, so meritocracy condemns them to an inferior position in society. Therefore meritocracy is bad and must be rejected in favor of racial quotas to ensure that blacks are given equal outcomes to whites. new-Democrats don't word it like that. DR3 is that claim that that is what they mean and it is really racist and bad.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
It would be more focused to target buy-borrow-die by expanding the definition of realization to include using the asset as collateral for a loan. Buy for $100, take out loan for $90 secured on asset, no tax liability. Notice that the asset is now more valuable. Convince lender that the increase in value is durable. Take out another $90 loan secured on the asset. Now you have realized $180 so a $80 gain becomes taxable, and you have money (the loan) to pay it without having to sell the asset.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
The significance of your observation depends on your causal model. Usually the fall into tyranny is treated as exogenous: it is just as likely when the civilians have guns as when they are disarmed. Eventually it happens, and if the civilians have guns we get to see if they can shoot their way back to freedom.
I prefer to add two upstream stages. Before you can have a coup or a tyrant, you need that kind of person in politics. Once in politics they scheme and calculate. Perhaps the civilians have been disarmed by a well meaning predecessor. Now the would be tyrant's calculation is whether the police and the army will kill on his behalf. Perhaps the civilians have guns. How the calculation is whether the police and the army will take incoming fire. Some will die. Dying is a bigger ask than killing, and I anticipate the would be tyrant biding his time, waiting for a better opportunity that never comes.
But upstream of that is the question: does the would be tyrant even go into politics? Some-one who grows up in a disarmed country may see his fellow country men as sheep to be sheared and enters politics hoping to transcend electoral politics and become Lord Protector. Some-one else, growing up where civilians have guns sees less chance of grabbing ultimate power and probably ends up following a different path through life. Perhaps he aims to become very rich, by up newspapers, and then to half-rule from the shadows, using the media to shape public opinion, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but never at risk of being shot.
Perhaps the lack of organized insurgency shows that the second amendment is pointless because the guns never get used. I think that the lack of organized insurgency shows that the second amendment works better than expected, shaping who goes into politics. The guns are never used because those with ambitions to be tyrants find others paths through life.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
There is a maxim for writers: show, don't tell
show: I rushed over and helped myself.
The reader learns from the hurry that the person was hungry, just as though the reader had seen the unseemly haste himself and inferred the hunger.
tell: I was hungry as heck.
Aaargh! Don't "show then tell"
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
There are important conversations to be had about whether drug addiction is more of a choice or more of a disease.
The situation is darker and bleaker than that because of the third option: social contagion.
In Scotland, drug overdose deaths have soared to over a thousand a year in a country/(region of the UK) of merely five million. There is a big concentration of deaths in Dundee. The dynamics are rather like a contagious disease. How does social contagion mimic the in-person spread of an infection disease in the internet age? Junkies in Dundee are not going to Glasgow to buy their drugs; it is friend of a friend stuff with-in Dundee. The need to pass physical drugs from hand to hand creates geographically local dynamics.
But I'm old. I'm already familiar with the heroin cycle. Heroin is really cool. The fluffy cloud happiness of the high. The don't-give-a-fuck charisma of the users. The bodies piling up. And piling up. The rising part of the heroin cycle doesn't last. You don't introduce any-one younger to heroin use after your own funeral. And the occasion itself puts a damper on the whole scene. Soon heroin gains the evil reputation that recreational use deserves. "Nobody" uses any more. But every year, Mr Nobody grows a year older. Eventually the young people, who won't touch the stuff because they saw what it did to those ten years their senior, are no longer young enough to be at risk of starting. Those young enough to start, look to those a little older and see neither use nor warning signs. Some of them work out for themselves that heroin is fun. They tell their friends. The cycle closes and heroin in cool again.
I came of age during a low point of the heroin cycle, so I never tried it. But the micro-foundations of the cycle were evident in parallel matters. Things spread by word of mouth and from hand to hand. Friends warn against some things and endorse other things.
He was 35. Which brings my comment to the edge of the abyss. Back when needle sharing made Glasgow the AIDS capital of Europe, the prognosis for a heroin addicted was to become addicted around 20. Use for ten years. 50% die. 50% hit rock bottom (or just age out) and quit. 35 is old for an addict. Now that AIDS is treatable, the prognosis is probably better. Now that fentanyl is on the scene the prognosis is probably worse. I'm not keeping up with the statistics and don't know how it balances out. When some-one dies of drug addiction, we bury an "innocent victim". His "friends" in the drug scene play the role of his personal angels of death. And walking my comment over the edge of the abyss: did he take his curse to the grave with him, or did he manage to pass it on before he died?
I suspect that there is a missing demographic on the Motte: married with children. They are too busy to comment here. But I'm guessing that they want the junkies gone. They want the junkies gone before their children grow up and reach the age to be at risk. They don't want that to coincide with a high point of the heroin cycle. The stakes are much higher than a friend having plumbing gear stolen out of his truck.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
Is it as complicated and impractical as introducing technology and organizational systems from the West, or is there hope?
Fixed that for you. Deirdre McCloskey has a trilogy on why the industrial revolution happened in the West rather than elsewhere.
I've only read the reviews but have got that impression that in her telling it is all about subtle stuff, like Bourgeois Dignity. There are lots of other theories, but it seems very common to admit that things came together in a way we don't understand and which only transfer to other countries, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, now China, for other reasons that we don't understand, and with their own distinctive twists, which also will not transfer.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
The positives have to be weighed against the negatives.
The anti-immigration position starts with endorsing the claim that when Chopin moved from Warsaw to Paris, that benefited the French, and when Marc Isambard Brunel fled France and ended up in England, that benefited England. What makes it the anti position is the additional claim that you can tell whether Chopin can play the piano; you don't have to admit half the population of Warsaw to get the musician. And you can tell that Brunel knew about civil engineering; you don't have to admit any Jacobins to get your tunnel under the Thames.
So no, you don't have to weigh positives and negatives. Let the positives in, keep the negatives out.
The core of the pro-immigration position is "You cannot tell whether Chopin can play the piano. If you want the positives, you have to accept the negatives, so weigh them and choose."
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
It may be called hyperbole, but it isn't. Look at how it works
Contrast the example from up thread
I've mostly gone from being a pedant to finding great amusement in deliberately provoking pedants and watching their heads literally explode.
with this alternative
I've mostly gone from being a pedant to finding great amusement in deliberately provoking pedants and watching them become literally annoyed.
It doesn't work as emphasis because "annoyed" is not itself hyperbole so asserting the literal truth of it falls flat. Had one written hyperbolically
I've mostly gone from being a pedant to finding great amusement in deliberately provoking pedants and watching their heads explode.
then one can add shock value with literally, until your listener realizes that you are piling hyperbole on top of hyperbole, literally double hyperbole. Eventually listeners identify the figurative use of the word "literally" as a double hyperbole. Then they think the figurative use is like telling a joke, and then when nobody laughs, repeating it, but louder.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
One of the dank failure modes of social media obsession is reading and re-reading one's own comments.
- comments that are up voted generate feelings of being valued and understood
- comments that are down voted generate feelings of superiority: those poor fools are not on my level!
- all comments generate a reassuring feeling that at least one person on social media is writing sane comments
Picture the scene in a weeks time when Whining Coil succumbs to the temptation to re-read his own comments. Soon he reaches a big post about how bad all this is for his health. That gives him the opportunity to turn off his computer and play with his dog. That is in line with his goals:-)
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
Your Section 174 link was fascinating. I feel that it underplayed the back story. It was sketched very briefly, but appears to go like this:
There are fiscal responsibility rules. If the US government passes a tax cut, the law should also include a tax increase in the future to balance the budget over the longer term. Legislators game this by writing a future tax increase that is stupid. Yes, it is in the law, but there is a nudge and wink that it will be repealed before it takes effect. This time the repeal never happened, so the deliberately stupid tax increase goes into effect.
This compounding disfunction bodes ill for the future of the US.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
This was bad when the left was doing it. It's bad when the right is doing it
You've got two its there. The point of my comment https://www.themotte.org/post/1077/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/230745?context=8#context is that, in context, the two its are referring to different things.
Watch out for double its. I think that you will find that many of the comments that you disagree with have double its and the source of the disagreement is that that author of the original comment assumes that it is both obvious what it is, and obvious that both its are talking about the same thing.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
Here is how I try to make the concept of Free Speech coherent, at least for this narrow topic. Free Speech needs to be a graded concept, with levels of speech.
Let us set up a little context. Mr Red-one exercises his first level right to free speech. Mr Blue-two beats up Mr Red-one and boasts about it. Mr Red-one decides to stay quiet. That is a clear infringement of Mr Red-one's right to free speech.
Mr Red-three exercises his first level right to free speech. Mr Blue-four says "You had better shut your trap, or you will get a beating, like Mr Red-one." This is second level speech. Is it covered and protected by the concept of free speech? Mr Red-five makes a public fuss about what Mr Blue-four said, trying to persuade Mr Blue-four's employer to dismiss him. This is third level speech. First level is political policy discussion. Second level is using speech to deprive others of their first level speech rights. Third level is using speech to deprive others of their second level speech rights.
I think it is coherent to say
- First level good
- Second level bad
- Third level good again
Could we say that the first and second level are both good? I see this as the incoherence that @FCfromSSC is concerned about. Some people think that free speech absolutism requires us to uphold second level speech. But that has it backwards. Since second level speech rights trash first level speech rights, upholding second level rights is going soft on free speech. There is a real conflict, but we have to uphold the first level and therefore we must disparage the second level.
What of the complication of saying that the third level is back to being good again? It really is a complication. It might be neater superficially to say that the third level is also bad. But that is to make the mistake of the lazy school teacher who doesn't make the effort to find out who is the bully and who is the victim that hit back. The first level is the one that we are trying to defend, so we object to the second level, but consistency leads to a ripple effect, with the third level good again, least we go soft on our objection to the second level, and end up weak in our defense of the first level.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
There are different kinds of weirdness. There is sincere weirdness. For example, some-one might believe that women punch just as hard as men, put their opinion on the internet, and be upset when other people reply with insults. There is trickster weirdness. For example, some-one (call them Tricky) might create a fake account that posts the claim that women punch just as hard as men. Later, when some-one else (call them Gully) thinks that the fake account is real, Tricky will enjoy using his real account to call out Gully for being gullible for thinking the fake account was real.
One might discover sincere weirdness on the internet and spend a merry year or two shining a light on it. Only later does one discover that trickster weirdness exists, and realize that one was in fact Gully from the paragraph above, and had blundered into being Tricky's lolcow.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
Traditional pronouns align with biological sex. Preferred pronouns may not, leading to a surprise when "she" turns out to be a man in a dress.
Human social lives are vicious. Watch your back. Alice has a dishy boyfriend Bob. Carol is jealous. Carol goes 4B and tells Alice how wonderful 4B is. Alice gets persuaded to break up with Bob. Bob is back on the dating market. Carol hooks Bob while maintaining the 4B charade around Alice.
Yikes! I've swallowed too many black pills. Any-one know the antidote?
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