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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2733 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 12, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Andrew was born on 1896-07-26, he celebrated his 7th birthday on 1903-07-26, when he was 2555 days old.

Bob was born on 1904-01-19, he celebrated his 7th birthday on 1911-01-19, when he was 2557 days old.

Charlie was born 1904-01-19, he celebrated his 1st birthday on 1905-01-19, when he was 366 days old.

David was born on 1904-07-26, he celebrated his 1st birthday on 1905-07-26, when he was 365 days old.

Did I make any mistakes?

That would depend.

Old style or new?

Checks out in lubridate, which I'm very confident works back until at least Friday 15 October 1582. I think it might even work before that, but would have to do a bunch of digging to be 100% sure what the first epoch it can check is.

You also picked the golden era where the Gregorian calendar reformations were locked in, but you don't even have to deal with leap seconds, UT1, UTC, ... etc if you want periods down to the second.

Given that you didn't correct me, I assume you think I am right. Thank you for taking the time, but precision to the day and dates in the 20th century is all I need.

Any reason why we don't use laughing gas for executions? All you need it hermetically sealed chamber, throw the convicted inside, throw couple of whipping cream cannisters - like two or three gallons. Open them remotely. And it is anesthetic. Easy to procure and cheap.

Gas chambers got a bad rep. Also it's clownish and unbefitting.

More seriously, executions aren't complicated. It's pre-bronze age social technology. There's nothing in practical terms that makes it difficult or costly, it's a political and social construct to make them slow and expensive. Other people have different social constructs.

See what they do in Taiwan:

Executions are carried out by shooting using a handgun aimed at the heart from the back, or aimed at the brain stem under the ear if the prisoner had consented to organ donation prior to the withdrawal of legal death row organ donation.[27] The execution time used to be 5:00 a.m., but was changed to 9:00 p.m. in 1995 to reduce officials' workload. It was changed again to 7:30 p.m. in 2010.[28] Executions are performed in secret: nobody is informed beforehand, including the condemned. The condemned is brought to the execution range and the officers may pay respect to the statue of Ksitigarbha located outside the range before entering. Before the execution, the prisoner's identity is confirmed by a special court next to the execution range and chooses to record any last words. The prisoner is then brought to the execution range and served a last meal (which usually includes a bottle of kaoliang wine).[28] The condemned prisoner is then injected with strong anaesthetic to cause unconsciousness, laid flat on the ground, face down, and shot. The executioner then burns a votive bank note for the deceased before carrying away the corpse.[28] It is tradition for the condemned to place a NT$500 or 1000 banknote in his leg irons as a tip for the executioners.[28]

I was so disbelieving I checked the wikipedia source, apparently they really do tip the executioner (specifically the guys who take the shackles off the body after the shooting).

This is extremely based, although I maintain my preference for public executions for at least the more heinous class of crimes.

Hlynka-watch. Multi-agent environment.

There are at least two other relevant players exerting agency here. First is the group of folks who are simply opposed to any sort of death penalty on principle. One strategy they've taken is, instead of letting the argument be directly about the principle of the death penalty, focusing everyone into arguing about methods of execution. That you are even asking this question is a testament to their success on this goal.

Now, once they've gotten the focus onto methods of execution, they can focus on any extreme outliers. If there's even a 0.01% chance that someone will have an adverse reaction to something in some way, feel any anxiety or pain above the typical level, they latch onto it. They treat it like it's "possibly" the rule rather than the exception. They don't ever directly claim that it is such; they just say that perhaps sometimes things go poorly and hope the reader imagines statistics that aren't really plausible. See also arguments about unarmed black men being killed by police, abortion due to rape, or the focus on complications in the operating room preventing medical providers from providing prices.

The other relevant players are the executees. They don't want to die; this is only human. If they are aware that it is coming, they likely will have some amount of anxiety or negative psychological affect, and this may naturally lead them to struggle in any way possible in what may or may not be a vain hope that someone will make it stop.

Now back to the folks who are against the death penalty in principle. It takes no effort at all for them to interpret any outward sign of struggle as pain or whathaveyou. When Alabama used nitrogen hypoxia, a method that is used in Canada for doctor-assisted suicide specifically because it is so gentle, peaceful, and low risk1, you saw it all on display. An executee didn't want to die and knew he was going to die, so he struggled. Onlookers who don't like the death penalty can interpret that as something going wrong, pain, or whatever. So they write about how terrible it was and how everything must have gone so wrong compared to what they expected.

So unless you can win the argument of, "Yes, people may choose to struggle against their execution, even when there is no pain being imposed, and everyone just has to accept that and shut up about it," this is the problem that pro-death-penalty people have to solve. Unfortunately, the typical solutions to that are actually pretty ugly. See also ISIS, who would perform many mock executions that they wouldn't go through with, so that the executees would simply lose the will to put up a struggle every time, and hopefully they wouldn't realize which one was the real one in time to turn it back on. (Also heavy drugs; they definitely used heavy drugs which wouldn't be acceptable in the US.)

There are other ways to get around this, modifying your own protocol. Put someone in a room where you control the air content. They can even know that this is "the death room". Maybe they'll jump around and scream and put on a show, but your task would be to be able to clearly demonstrate to observers that during that time, they are absolutely receiving 100% pure, regular air, so that it is only a show, not any sort of 'execution gone wrong'. Then, when they've given up or maybe even gone to sleep or something, you turn on invisible, odorless gas, letting people observe that nothing wildly obviously painful occurred. Even if you did this, it is almost assured that the anti-death-penalty people would yet again move the goalposts, saying that it's not about the pain, it's about the psychological effects of however long they're in the room before they die, knowing that they're going to die in that room. There will always be a new set of goalposts and always a new impossible 'problem' that one has to solve.

It really is one of those, "JUST FUCKING TELL US HOW WE'RE ALLOWED TO EXECUTE PEOPLE." In a bizarro but hilarious world, the "King" would round up all of the most ardent opponents, lock them in a room, and say, "You're not allowed to come out until you tell us which method is the best method according to you. 'No method' is not an answer."

1 - You can see an example of the typical affects of hypoxia here. People report feeling perfectly fine and capable. My understanding is that even after the event, if you ask them to reflect on it, they think that everything was just fine and that they were perfectly fine; it's only when they go back and look at their own video that they're like, "WOW! I had no idea that it affected me like that!"

I personally am opposed to death penalty, except maybe in very exceptional circumstances like Nazi war criminals (where the process is kinda outside regular judicial system anyway) - but the situation right now is indeed ridiculous. That said, if I weren't - I would wonder why anybody needs to be able to observe the execution at all. I mean, I realize for example the victims may derive some feeling of closure from it, but I think if they want the guy (it'll be a guy, only one woman had been executed since 1953 in the US) dead, then they'd prefer that done unseen rather than not done at all. And, for better or worse, something that is not on TV (or now youtube) is something pretty much nobody cares about. I mean, horrible things may happen in prisons, but they are mostly undocumented, so people ignore it or make jokes about it (prison rape is one of the favorite targets). Not that I am endorsing any of it or am happy about it, but looking objectively it'd probably make it easier for people to accept.

Somebody has to confirm the process happened as intended- the law was followed, the person(and the right person) actually died, etc.

That happens anyway - prison medics confirm the death, prison guards ensure it goes as planned, etc. I am talking about involvement of people who aren't prison personnel that deals with the technology of it.

Are you suggesting that surviving relatives of a murder victim are legally required to view the murderer's execution? Because I would be surprised if that were the case. If you're simply questioning why these people would be granted the choice to view an execution, I think you've answered that by suggesting the right to be granted "closure," or, if not that, a sense of finality, or justice served--something they can see with their own eyes.

I think you've answered that by suggesting the right to be granted "closure,"

It's not a "right". At least not in any of the existing legal frameworks on the West. There are other frameworks where the kin of the victim had various rights as to prosecuting the murderer - from wergeld to vendetta, but in our Western tradition there's no "rights" with regard to that. It may be a custom, but customs can be changed. If the criminal is sentenced to prison, the victims do not get 24/7 video feed to his prison cell to enjoy his suffering, and do not get to control any details of his imprisonment except possibly in the parole hearing, so there's nothing that demands that this specific custom should be followed forever. I think for the proponents of the capital punishment it is an own goal to insist on keeping this custom.

In an bizarro but hilarious world, the "King" would round up all of the most ardent opponents, lock them in a room, and say, "You're not allowed to come out until you tell us which method is the best method according to you. 'No method' is not an answer."

After the words “round up” I thought this was going somewhere else, along the lines “You all will be executed by the method you yourself choose. The most voted for method gets adopted as the official standard.” Maybe pardon the subgroup who voted for the winning method? Need to game-theory this.

This will immediately be classified as a cruel and unusual punishment.

I can imagine a failure mode in that they could all discuss amongst themselves and agree to vote unanimously in favor of a painless method that creates gruesome results, in order to further discredit death penalty.

I'd say tell them that half of the people rounded up will be executed by the top method and the other half with the runner up. Do the executions one at a time, forcing the whole group to watch, alternating methods. After each two execution, have every one vote which one seemed to be the best, telling them that if either method gets a clear lead over the other (over 2/3 votes after at least 3 rounds / 6 executions), then everyone will get executed all at once with that method. Once that clear lead criteria is achieved, pardon everyone left.

The usual answer is that it’s easy to kill people cheaply and humanely in all sorts of ways, but most people don’t want to sell stuff for the purposes of executing people and the ones who are willing to get boycotted.

It's this.

Anesthesiologists know exactly how to kill someone reasonably cheaply and in a painless and not distressing way, it's why they have such a high suicide rate.

But finding people to sell the stuff required (and getting requisite professional staff to assist) is hard.

Then you add on the "finger on the trigger" problem (who wants to be the specific person who killed someone on purpose? Nobody you want doing it).

All this adds up to the weird dance we have.

In Utah, the condemned is offered the choice of execution methods(from a small number). All of them choose the firing squad, and firing squad executions are carried out by four volunteers from the police force, one of whom shoots a blank.

This seems like a way around both of these problems.

Huh. That's fascinating.

I wonder behind the psychology of that - wanting to stare death in the eyes?

Mormonism requires the shedding of blood to atone for murder; I’m doubting that these death row convicts were practicing Mormons prior to conviction, but we can probably expect the condemned to engage in religious bet hedging.

ah, makes sense

What are the other methods?

Lethal injection authorized by law, probably hanging on a technicality. It's worth noting that executions in Utah are very infrequent, due to a low crime rate.

Then you add on the "finger on the trigger" problem (who wants to be the specific person who killed someone on purpose? Nobody you want doing it).

This specifically has a known solution, though: you take a citizen draft of say, 10 people, and you set things up so that they all have to take an action (pressing a button for example). Only one of the buttons actually works and it’s random every time.

It’s how they used to do firing squads: most of the rifles are loaded with blanks so nobody knows who the real killer is.

you take a citizen draft of say, 10 people, and you set things up so that they all have to take an action

Why not make the jury that condemned the person do this?

I’m recalling a story of how they used to do it in Utah. I imagine because they want juries to deliver the correct verdict without worrying about having to carry out the execution.

Got it reversed- firing squads have one blank among several rifles.

Right, I think it works well for firing squads but as soon as you have ten people pushing buttons and only one of them work.....it just kind of looks stupid. Since the whole issue here is optics I'm not sure how to make that shake out.

Aesthetic reasons? Executions are srs bsns: it'd be undignified, and maybe a bit grotesque to carry them out with laughing gas.

Agreed. I favour long-drop hanging or firing squads (I would also include the guillotine, except that it's French) on the basis that they kill cleanly and reliably, avoid excessive pain, and make abundantly clear that what we are seeing is authorised violence, which it is.

Capital punishment is not a medical procedure and you shouldn't make it look like one. Capital punishment sometimes is a show, but it shouldn't be optimised for entertainment value.

Capital punishment is not a medical procedure and you shouldn't make it look like one.

Why not? When guillotine was invented, execution of the enemies of the state was a public spectacle that was explicitly designed to terrify and intimidate the population (and, to some measure, entertain it, with the idea that however bad you've got it, at least it's better than that guy). I think the government has since improved to a point where it has much more widespread and efficient methods to terrify and intimidate the population, and does not limit itself to the worst of the worst of the criminals anymore. So there's no point in spectacle, why not get rid of it and get to the end point of it with minimal amount of hassle?

I said this last time, but the main reason for executions requiring injuries "incompatible with life" delivered while conscious is to prove to the observers that a) it's really him, and b) he's really dead.
That's why even when hanging breaks the neck they wait ten+ minutes for the heartbeat to stop, then leave him a bit longer until everyone goes "yeah, he's not coming back from that."

I also suspect it's why beheading was a thing for the nobility. No conspiracy theories about how he paid the executioner to fake his death when you hold the head up afterwards.

a) it's really him, and b) he's really dead.

A body can be easily identified using DNA test. And the death can be established by any half-competent medic. If the victims are suspicious, they can get their own medic to check the body. Neither requires contemporaneous observation by any third party.

No conspiracy theories about how he paid the executioner to fake his death when you hold the head up afterwards.

Sure, it was tougher when you couldn't establish the identity easily. Any random asshole could declare himself miraculously rescued king X, and create a lot of mess. But now we can identify people. It's a solved problem.

Can people suggest a good way to learn the ropes of finance and playing markets? I am shamefully un-learned in these things. I would like to learn about how modern finance, investments, banking, markets, financial regulations, etc. all work. More from a pragmatic than from a theoretical motivation (I want to start being more of a capitalist and less of a wagie), but theory is good too.

You should read books.

I recommend Peter Lynch (One Up on Wall Street, amusing as well as informative) and Howard Marks (Mastering the Market Cycle) for starters.

Others have hopefully properly warned you off from becoming a day trader, YOLOing on 0days and HODLing TVIX. As for "modern finance, investments, banking, markets, financial regulations," a couple things I would recommend are Matt Levine's Money Stuff column in Bloomberg and Patrick McKenzie's Bits about Money. They're not what you would get if you pounded the textbooks, but they cover a pretty wide array of random happenings, at which point, they dig in enough for you to get a sense for how such folks think. Then, if there are any particular areas you're interested in, you at least have some of the right terminology to help you dive in more. They're also both hilarious.

Ah, the days of TVIX. One of my most interesting experiences in finance was the presentation by the risk manager who had stopped my then-employer from offering a TVIX-equivalent explaining just how XIV and TVIX died.

a couple things I would recommend are Matt Levine's Money Stuff column in Bloomberg and Patrick McKenzie's Bits about Money.

I second this recommendation, and add Byrne Hobart's The Diff.

There are various "stock market games" you can play online where you make investments with fake money and software tracks how you're doing. You'll quickly realize how quickly your money disappears when you put it in the market expecting quick returns. Unless you're looking to put your money into traditional investments and wait decades for it to grow, you might as well start playing ponies since they're about as predictable.

I don't think this is totally true. Unless you go full degenerate, the modal outcome of self-directed investment is lower returns while having wasted a bunch of time, or a level of outperformance so low that doesn't justify the amount of time invested, not ruin.

you might as well start playing ponies since they're about as predictable

As the old saying goes, if you want to bankrupt yourself, horse bets are the quickest way, women are the nicest and agriculture is the surest.

In the words of Sam Altman "you can just do stuff".

Of course, in the words of another sage "experience is a dear school", so don't expect the lessons to come cheap.

Playing the markets is probably negative EV, so I'd advice you to read "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" before getting started.

So this is the opposite of a small-scale question, but similar to what I posted below, I’ve been going through somewhat of an existential crisis about mortality and the purpose of human life.

I want to hear all of your beliefs about the big mysterious questions. For my entire life until now I have been the hardest of hard materialist/physicalist atheists. Surprise surprise that at 32 that doesn’t fill the god-shaped hole in my heart anymore.

I’m currently just thinking about how weird all of this is. Is the universe an eternal thing? Is it a simulation? How do you actually handle the hard problem of consciousness? The Fermi paradox?

Something that has been tempting me is Michael Huemer’s argument about infinite reincarnation, very similar to nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. Essentially the bastardized argument is that if the universe is infinite in both temporal directions and you already were plucked from nothingness and given consciousness once, it will happen again even if the probability is infinitesimally small (because if time is infinite it’s bound to happen).

So what do you all think? What gives you comfort when pondering mortality?

As I see it, materialism is just confusing the map for the territory. Technically, everything is connected, so everything is one, and you cannot talk about anything in isolation (the thing-in-itself does not exist, it can't).

The concept "truth" only means reality (and this reality cannot be spoken about) or else it means the value "True" in logic, and all such truth values are just tautologies, and these tautologies follow from assumptions. In other words, you have a closed loop, the only kind of logic which exists is circular logic, it has no connection to reality, it's self-contained, which also means that it adds up to zero.

The only thing which actually exists is experience itself. It's not that our senses deceive while rationality helps us live in reality. What's the actual case is that everything comes from human senses, and that we made up rationality.

I've realize these things, and a bunch of similar things, so all the worries you have are syntax errors to me. There's no problems to solve, and all the questions are wrong. There's only a reality of which we cannot speak, but that's not even a problem. Millions of species have existed even before intelligent beings came to exist, so intelligence is clearly not needed in the first place. I think that wanting answers to questions is a symptom of anxiety, which results in a desire for certainty. It's easier to learn how to accept uncertainty than it is to bother yourself with impossible questions that even the most intelligent people in the world have struggled with. I don't even think you struggle with mortality, but rather with the idea of mortality or a perspective which is so zoomed out that it makes you appear small and meaningless (in which case, I recommend going back to experiencing life from your own body, with yourself as the center)

Edit: Also, aesthetics is enough for me, beauty gives me meaning. And if I'm not happy about life, I consider that a psychological problem and not a philosophical one. Existential questions are the symptoms and not the causes, I think.

For whatever reason, I never struggled with these questions as much as others seemed to, but I eventually settled into a Daoist sort of framework of "the world just is the way it is and what can we know about it?" Whether things are pre-determined by physical laws or whether I have a soul with free will or whether there are infinite copies of me out there someplace has no bearing on how I live my life or get on in my little corner of the universe. Or, as the Bard put it: "All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances." Maybe some find it sad that there's no great cosmic destiny in store for them (but hey, I'm sure someone out there will be be the lucky one), but I never harbored any such delusions of grandeur.

That being said, if you truly want to feel a connection with the Way or God or whatever you want to call it, there are options such as meditation (the hardcore monastic kind where you fast and don't speak to anyone for days) or doing psychedelic drugs, but I can't tell you what sorts of answers you'll get or if they'll do you any good.

In 1921 Wittgenstein wrote a nearly incomprehensible book that, if i understood it correctly, puts forth the idea that trying to find definitive answers to questions like 'what is truth?' and 'what is justice?' is stupid. We might come up with a definition that we find personally amenable, but in creating this definition we have not made a discovery about the world itself. In rat-speak Wittgenstein might have said that trying to find answers to big mysterious questions is trying to map an unseen territory. My personal answer to the big questions is that the questions are stupid.

Despite this Wittgenstein did believe in God, and passionately, but rejected intellectual proofs. Whether that's enough really depends on what it is precisely that you're grappling with. Do you want assurances of immortality? Comfort in mortality? Belief that what you do matters?

In my opinion, it's relatively easy to "debunk" materialism. I'd recommend watching Bernardo Kastrup's playlist, he's the leading proponent of Idealism these days. In his version, which he calls Analytic Idealism, consciousness is essentially all there is, and matter is a phenomenon of consciousness instead of the other way around. This is the view I subscribe to now. Some version of this view has popped up throughout human history and across cultures, it's arguably the mainstream view amongst the more philosophical strands of Hinduism (like Advaita Vedanta), Kabbalah has some overlap, the German Idealists mostly believed this (especially Schopenhauer who wrote clearly enough to remove any doubt about the content of his beliefs). Unsure how respected Kastrup is in academia, but he's definitely the person responsible for popularizing it in the last 10 years. Philip Goff is another recommended watch, his interview on Alex O'Connor's channel makes his case for panpsychism, a slightly different view that is essentially physicalism but with the caveat that consciousness is an inherent property of matter and not an emergent property of the interactions between certain sorts of matter. I think this view requires more assumptions than analytic idealism so I don't subscribe to it. That being said, it does address some of the major problems with materialism.

The basic case for Analytic Idealism goes a bit like this (this is far from a rigorous philosophical proof but it will suffice for now, will try to answer any questions about it):

  1. We should prefer monism to dualism because it requires strictly fewer assumptions. Any dualist ontology has to explain how two fundamentally different substances interact with each other according to a set of laws, which suggests they might actually be the same substance.
  2. That leads us to the question of what the fundamental substance of the universe is, for which matter/energy and consciousness/spirit are the two leading candidates, where one has to be a phenomenon of the other
  3. The mainstream scientific view is materialism, the view that matter is the fundamental substance (FS), and consciousness is a phenomenon of matter. This leads to the Hard Problem of Consciousness as you mentioned. As I'll explain, I don't think the Hard Problem of Consciousness is a real problem that humans need to solve, just a problem for Materialism as a worldview. It's like saying "the Hard Problem of Geocentrism is explaining why Mercury is in retrograde if the Sun revolves around the Earth". The answer is that the assumption is wrong, the sun does not revolve around the Earth.
  4. The main problem with materialism is that epiphenomenalism, one of its corollaries, doesn't have any good explanation for it. Epiphenomenalism is the view that physical events produce consciousness, but because physical events are all that occur (under materialism), consciousness itself has no impact on physical events. But if consciousness doesn't "do" anything, there doesn't seem to be any reason why we should be conscious. If seeing a tiger produces a feeling of fear, and the fear triggers a response (us running away), then it makes perfect evolutionary sense why we're conscious (to experience fear, for example). But if the process of the photons bouncing off a tiger, hitting our eyes, triggering an electrochemical response that leads to our leg muscle fibers twitching is sufficient, the fear we experience is just there for no reason. This is where physicalists tend to disagree with me. They are content to say that the electrochemical response in the brain that eventually leads to us running away simply is the felt sense of fear. Why should this particular physical process also be a qualia whereas, say, a clock ticking isn't? It's not even clear what in principle we could discover that would explain this sudden appearance of 1st-personness from 3rd person phenomena.
  5. If Analytic Idealism, the monist view that consciousness is all there is, and matter is a phenomenon of consciousness, doesn't have an equivalently hard-to-explain problem, we should prefer it to materialism. The Idealist equivalent to the hard problem of consciousness is the Hard Problem of Matter: if reality is fundamentally consciousness, shouldn't there only be a single "self" and not seemingly separate selves? This is nowhere nearly as problematic because we have an example of a single field of consciousness segmenting itself already: dreams. In your dreams, a single field of consciousness (your mind) localizes a "self" within itself that experiences phenomena as being external to it. We can extrapolate that it's possible for a universal field of consciousness to segment itself into selves that perceive themselves as separate from each other.
  6. Therefore, the most likely ontology is Analytic Idealism

Something else worth considering are theories of personal identity. Who are you really? And what makes you you as opposed to anyone else? This link does a great job of summarizing the three primary categories of views: Closed Individualism (CI), Empty Individualism (EI), and Open Individualism (OI). The last of which I subscribe to now. OI takes the position that there is a single self. Every experience in the universe is experienced by this Universal Subject. It should be worth noting that these views are ontology-agnostic. This video by the late Mario Montano makes the case that Open Individualism should be the default perspective under physicalism as well as Idealism. Practically what this means is that "you", that is, your deepest identity and not just the one associated with the human reading this now, will never die. But you should live as if everyone is you, that is, the difference between you and your father and a dog and your worst enemy isn't meaningfully different than the difference between you on your last birthday and you on your next birthday. Torturing your worst enemy is the moral equivalent of torturing your future self.

I'll second @Magusoflight 's suggestion that you look into NDEs. In particular, I can recommend the book Why An Afterlife Obviously Exists by Jens Amberts. It makes the case that NDEs are evidence of an afterlife because:

  1. Hundreds of millions of people have had them
  2. Pretty much everyone who has had one comes to believe in an afterlife
  3. No religious group is more likely to experience them
  4. There is a lot of overlap in their phenomenology and semantic content

One thing that stands out is just how profoundly meaningfully they feel. Just as your friends feel more "real" than the characters you meet in your dreams, the entities people meet in NDEs feel like the closest, most intimate friends, that they've known for an eternity. If the primary purpose of the brain isn't to produce consciousness, but to sustain the ego in attachment to our bodies, then it seem plausible that NDEs, which occur during periods of extremely low brain activity, are peaks at what the afterlife.

As to what I believe, there's things I'm sure of and others that are more speculative. I'm 100% sure consciousness does not end at death. Reincarnation in the traditional Hindu sense, I think, is plausible but unlikely (20%). But what really inspires me is the evolution of humanity. It seems implausible that one species of mammals can so dramatically develop their understanding of the universe that they can bend the world to their will and improve their lives by leaps and bounds without being somehow divinely ordained. So if I had to integrate all of these observations into a single belief system, it might look something like this: We are all God in potential. The purpose of life and history, the telos of the universe, is for God to develop a fuller understanding of itself to reach increasingly more intense, wonderful states of being. To approach what Plato called The Form Of The Good. Everything we do is, in some twisted sense, in service of this goal. Failure in this life can be a temporary setback. But with intelligence and perseverance, and a deeper understanding of our shared being, all will eventually taste the fruits of heaven.

I’m a Catholic. These kinds of metaphysical questions don’t keep me up at night; they’re answered. And I don’t need to explain the answers on my own, either- the saints explained them well enough.

I suggest you do the same. There is a niggling doubt because your heart it restless until it rests in God.

I mean, I work for Odin. Dude hung himself from Yggdrasil for nine days and nights, for $Diety's sake. I totally respect your search for wisdom, and I'm sure the Boss Man would approve in his own right, but me? I've got waaaaaaay too much personal experience to take to the materialist/atheist viewpoint, though I would point you towards Good Omens (the book, don't bother with the show, not because it's necessarily bad but because it doesn't really get into the metaphysical like the book does) or, if you're even more of a Pratchett man, Small Gods for your answers.

Yes, it's turtles all the way down. You knew that before you hovered over this, didn't you?

When ancient humans encountered something like lightning, they probably thought the same thing about mundane phenomena. "We have no explanation for this sudden bolt of energy... so it must be Zeus!" We know they were obviously wrong now. We know what lightning is, after science has advanced sufficiently to explain it.

The metaphysics questions you asked are mostly like that, to the extent they're falsifiable at all. The only correct answer is to say "we don't have enough information right now to know". You're not a truth-seeker if you just default to "it must be proof of God" when you encounter any difficult question.

Regardless of the numbers we plug into Fermi's equations, the best evidence that we have no competitor civilizations contesting the observable universe is the fact that most stars still shine, instead of glowing dull in infrared after every available erg of power has been used and reused. Or the fact that we're around to ask that question, instead of Sol being munched on by Von-Neumann replicators. If there's pond scum out there, what of it? It would be even more unlikely that we do have near-peers out there, since the window for a civilization to not have noticeable impact on the wider world is narrow in geological time scales.

As for questions of being in a simulation, or a Boltzmann Brain, our decision theories are simply not up to the task of handling such infinities and infinitesimals. As far as I can tell, in such epistemic uncertainty, the way to act in a manner that minimizes hindsight regret is to act as if our existence is as real as it gets.

If the universe is an illusion, then so am I, hence it is Real enough for me

This is, of course, more applicable at the individual rather than civilizational level. A sufficiently advanced civ should absolutely do everything they can to poke at the universe and see what happens, but that's not your concern today, or mine.

If this approach seems unsatisfactory, I can only apologize sincerely. A god-shaped hole is one of many human design flaws we have yet to fix. Cheer up nonetheless, we're busy making entities that may end up to us as we are the butterfly is to the dreamer, and they might have answers. May said answers be within our ability to grasp. Perhaps making our own Gods can fill that hole instead? I'd rather not worship them myself, but each to their own.

RE: infinite reincarnation, it's just plainly, mathematically untrue that infinite time guarantees the that infinitesimally small probabilities must occur, much less that they must occur infinity times. You can demonstrate this using a simple mathematical model (see "AI slop" below), but it should be a natural conclusion given the increase in entropy over time. Our current configuration has a certain value of entropy and saying that we should see that value of entropy (followed by the same characteristic increase we observe today) violates thermodynamics. And frankly, I don't find "when you're dead you're dead" to be a big hit against pure materialism. If anything, it's a bit motivating.

###Claude chat###

User: Consider two objects that each have a position on the integer number line. At t=0, both objects are at position=0. At each discrete time step, object 1 has a 90% chance to increase its position by 1, and 10% chance to decrease its position by 1. Conversely, object 2 has a 90% chance to decrease its position by 1 and a 10% chance to increase its position by 1. Give a function of discrete time, t>0, that describes the probability that object 1 and object 2 have the same position.

Claude: Let me solve this step by step.

  1. First, let's understand what needs to happen for the objects to be at the same position:

    • Given their movement probabilities, Object 1 tends to move right while Object 2 tends to move left
    • To be at the same position at time t, they must have made the same net movement

  2. For any time t, let's consider:

    • Let X₁ be the net movement of Object 1 (positive = right)
    • Let X₂ be the net movement of Object 2 (positive = right)
    • We want P(X₁ = X₂)

  3. For them to have the same position:

    • The number of right moves minus left moves must be equal for both objects
    • Given that they start at the same position (0)

  4. Key insights:

    • At each step, Object 1 has p₁ = 0.9 for +1 and q₁ = 0.1 for -1
    • Object 2 has p₂ = 0.1 for +1 and q₂ = 0.9 for -1
    • This means Object 2's movement is the negative of Object 1's distribution
    • Therefore, X₂ has the same distribution as -X₁

  5. For time t:

    • X₁ follows a binomial distribution with parameter p₁ = 0.9, scaled to ±1 movements
    • X₂ follows a binomial distribution with parameter p₂ = 0.1, scaled to ±1 movements
    • The probability we want is P(X₁ = X₂)

  6. For the objects to be at the same position:

    • The total number of rightward moves (k) for both objects must be equal
    • Given time t, k must satisfy: 0 ≤ k ≤ t

Therefore, the probability at time t is:

P(same position at t) = Σₖ P(Object 1 makes k right moves) × P(Object 2 makes k right moves)

This can be written as:

P(t) = Σₖ₌₀ᵗ (t choose k)(0.9)ᵏ(0.1)ᵗ⁻ᵏ × (t choose k)(0.1)ᵏ(0.9)ᵗ⁻ᵏ

Simplifying:

P(t) = Σₖ₌₀ᵗ (t choose k)² (0.09)ᵏ(0.09)ᵗ⁻ᵏ = (0.09)ᵗ × Σₖ₌₀ᵗ (t choose k)²

This is the exact formula for the probability that the objects are at the same position at time t.

As t increases, this probability approaches 0, which makes intuitive sense as Object 1 tends to move right while Object 2 tends to move left, making their meeting increasingly unlikely.

User: What is the mean number of times object 1 and object 2 will have the same position integrated from t=1 to infinity?

Claude:Let me solve this step by step.

  1. This is asking us to find E[number of meetings] = Σₜ₌₁^∞ P(meeting at time t)

  2. From our previous derivation: P(meeting at t) = (0.09)ᵗ × Σₖ₌₀ᵗ (t choose k)²

  3. A key insight: this sum is equivalent to counting the expected total number of times the objects will ever meet.

  4. This is related to a classic probability problem. When two random walks with different drift eventually separate (one going mostly right, one going mostly left), the expected number of meetings has a closed form solution.

  5. For simple random walks with transition probabilities p and 1-p, the expected number of meetings is: E[meetings] = p(1-p)/(p² + (1-p)² - 2p(1-p)) = p(1-p)/(2p² - 2p + 1)

  6. In our case:

    • For Object 1: p₁ = 0.9
    • For Object 2: p₂ = 0.1 = 1 - p₁

  7. Plugging into the formula: E[meetings] = 0.9 × 0.1 / (2 × 0.9² - 2 × 0.9 + 1) = 0.09 / (1.62 - 1.8 + 1) = 0.09 / 0.82 = 0.1097... ≈ 1/9

Therefore, the mean number of times the objects will meet after t=0 is approximately 0.1097 or roughly 1/9.

This makes intuitive sense because:

  • The objects start together at t=0 (not counted in our sum)
  • They have strong tendencies to move apart (0.9 vs 0.1 probabilities)
  • Once they separate by a few positions, the probability of meeting again becomes very small
  • The geometric decay of meeting probabilities ensures the infinite sum converges

###End chat###

I find Claude's answer pretty satisfactory. I know there's a lot of criticism here about the use of LLMs for checking your intuition about things, but my feeling is that it does quite well as long as you want reasoning rather than pure factual recall and you know how to prompt it well.

A simple example:

A random walk in 1D and 2D space is recurrent, and the odds of returning to the origin over an infinite amount of time approaches 1.

On the other hand, a random walk in 3D space converges to a finite, <1 value. The space of possible outcomes expands faster than you can explore it.

"A drunk man will find his way home, but a drunk bird may get lost forever."

I don't, however, think this is a rebuttal of a Boltzmann Brain. For any given volume of space-time, there is a finite set of distinct structures it can take, and over an infinite amount of time, the odds of instantiating one approaches 1. The key difference here is that we are concerned with finite volumes with a finite number of potential arrangements over infinite time, as opposed to an infinite volume in the case of random walks in three dimensions.

( @faul_sname , if you're still around, care to comment?)

A random walk in 1D and 2D space is recurrent, and the odds of returning to the origin over an infinite amount of time approaches 1.

An unbiased random walk (where each direction is equally likely) in 1D and 2D space is recurrent.

Take a look into quantum mechanics and accept the many worlds interpretation as probably correct.

Take a hard Look into evolution and realise that natural selection is not enough to explain how we (humans) came to be in our current form.

Practice "pure" semen retention for 6-12 months and note down all the stuff that happens to you that's atypical. Check out /r/semenretention.

I'm not asking you to believe anything you read there I'm just asking you to self experiment. Use that sub to have an idea on what to look for.

You are kind of trapped in a materialist/physicalist box. So it's hard to break you out of it. I've given you stuff that you can research yourself that doesn't seem too outlandish from a materialist point of view.

There is a lot of discussion about the universe that is not materialist but it's happening in spaces, YouTube channels and websites that you probably don't respect.

All I can say is if you're truly after the truth you must question if you have any biases. You must question every single belief that you have. You must ask yourself "How do I know this to be true?". "Do I believe this because I did the research myself or am I just parroting something I heard from someone with higher status than me?"

GL

Take a hard Look into evolution and realise that natural selection is not enough to explain how we (humans) came to be in our current form.

Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.

It doesn’t seem like a particularly partisan and inflammatory claim, though- the partisan and inflammatory claim of that would be ‘the scientific establishment is suppressing biblical truths because they’re godless commies’. It’s certainly an unpopular claim here, but so it ‘anti black racism is a problem in American society’.

Everything else aside, on the semen retention: what stops you having nocturnal ejaculation? Is there an equivalent mode for non-semen-makers? Are women constantly enjoying the fruits of semen retention?

Everything else aside, on the semen retention: what stops you having nocturnal ejaculation?

Clearly, the only solution here is to epoxy your penis shut. Only then can you reach your true seminal potential.

Not a final solution until you master your cummy innards perhaps.

Semen has potent energy, and there are reliable reports from eg several West African nations of semen autonomously teleporting itself to places it's not supposed to be. Much mischief is created this way. So for this reason alone I wouldn't recommend superglue on one's member.

Can the semen even escape the bonds of JB Weld? I didn't think such a thing was possible!

Electron tunnelling. We’re going quantum, boys!

Practice "pure" semen retention for 6-12 months and note down all the stuff that happens to you that's atypical. Check out /r/semenretention.

How are you supposed to do this with a wife/gf?

Don't have sex with your wife. Don't ejaculate when you have sex.

I'm not in that position sorry.

Ask for it back . "I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence."

Do the benefits still apply if you drink flouridated tap water or filtered alcoholic beverages? Ripper only drank spring water and pure grain alcohol.

If you have convincing evidence that humans, despite several millions of years of fossil evidence demonstrating likely intermediate ancestors, couldn't have possibly arisen naturally, pray tell. You could get a Noble or three out of it!

Semen retention? C'mon dawg. If being sexually frustrated is a strict necessity for your third eye to open, it's a rather perverse one.

Why don't you lay out your arguments instead of vaguely waving in their general direction?

Why don't you lay out your arguments instead of vaguely waving in their general direction?

I was a materialist until recently and the transition was not a straightforward path. All the atheist vs theist arguments in the world had no effect on me, my worldview was set.

Until certain things happened in my life and a little bit of randomness/luck I began to start thinking differently.

I don't think its a good use of time and mental energy to get into the weeds of things because I experienced being a materialist and I had an answer for everything. It's going to sound cliché but the search for truth is a personal one and so arguing back and forth is not going to be productive for anyone. We both won't budge. There's literally no point.

However OP mentioned that he feels there is something missing in his model of reality. He mentioned that he was a materialist and so I made some assumptions and gave him some pointers on where he can continue his search for truth.

My comment was meant for OP who seems open to alternative ways of seeing reality. Not for you a somewhat unknown entity clearly ready for an argument.

You are almost certainly correct that we're not going to change each other's minds. That is not an excuse for not even sharing even the barest shreds of a coherent argument beyond "look at the amazingly counterintuitive outcomes if X was true, which this margin is not large enough to contain."

The Motte isn't so full of itself that we expect even well-intentioned and earnest people to consistently achieve consensus from reasoned debate. We achieve that more often than most of the Internet does (an admittedly low bar), but that is a surprising outcome, one only maintained through blood, sweat and effort on the part of its posters. (And a strict moderation framework and moderators to enforce it). You're defecting, since you had the time to type up 5 paragraphs of text but not even give a bullet list or TLDR of why you hold the beliefs you do.

I rarely open our volunteer janny page these days, but I did so today, and was happy to mark @coffee_enjoyer 's comment below as being high quality. That's despite it being frankly alien in some important ways to me, and somewhat painful to boot, not in the sense that it's unintelligible or poorly reasoned, but because he and I are both intelligent, earnest humans who can't see eye to eye and disagree on the basic axioms required to do so. At the very least, he articulated his standpoint and doesn't rely on obfuscation or mysticism. Your comment, not that it requires moderation, is awful in comparison and dodges all attempts at explaining itself.

Evidently something turned you from a materialist to.. a semen-retentionalist. You even resort to hinting at materialistic reasons for that conversion, or at least materialist arguments that you must be correct, but I don't think that change could possibly have been for the better, and your inability to defend it does you no favors. I hold this belief for much the same reason that I look at people who fry their brains with psychedelics or were one-shotted by ayahuasca with pity, though I have no idea what could have led to you to where you are now.

I'm not the person you were responding to, but I have to agree with him.

I don't think anyone knows why they hold the beliefs they do, they just fabricate a reason afterwards which sounds socially acceptable and like it might be true. And whatever the truth is, is simply the truth, so it's silly to demand an explanation, for it assumes that reality needs to justify itself. He changed his belief, and that's more true than any argument could ever be.

If you're building your own worldview, you have no need for something like a consensus, and a consensus is not necessarily true, it's merely a form of coherence. In the first place, I don't even believe that "truth" is very valuable, nor that people are inherently interested in it. And to me, it seems like "truth", in the form where it matters, is context-dependent, and therefore finite, meaning that nothing can be universally true.

You can try "semen-rentention", I can't think of any reasons for how it could be dangerous. Maybe you will experience something amazing, in which case, that would be interesting. The experiment seems worth doing. And now that I think about it, the search for truth is fun, isn't it? Maybe spoiling the answer would be bad taste.

I agree that coffee_enjoyers comment is good, though. It says something similar, but in a more engaging way which is more likely to cause a long-term influence on a person. If you were to argue "If you give the correct answer, don't do so in a way which makes it unappealing", I'd have to agree with you

I don't think anyone knows why they hold the beliefs they do, they just fabricate a reason afterwards which sounds socially acceptable and like it might be true.

I believe the chair I'm sitting on in real because I haven't toppled over and landed on my ass. Or, to gussy that up, concordance between my priors and ongoing sensory input.

You are correct that some beliefs are fundamentally unjustified by further reasoning, but those are far fewer in number than the beliefs that are contingent on more load bearing ones.

Someone might be a Communist not just because they believe in equality, but because they genuinely believed that it was a more economically productive regime. The numbers of those who weren't True Believers in the innate glory of communism fell drastically with the wall.

He changed his belief, and that's more true than any argument could ever be.

I have met, just today, someone who is convinced he's a deep cover MI5 agent and someone who believes their mother is alive and in urgent need of their help (despite being 95 years old themselves). My profession has me running into people who hold all kinds of deeply seated beliefs that can't be dispersed by abundant evidence. They're delusional, and usually legally detained by the time I see them.

Someone holding something to be true is often a terrible argument in favor of those beliefs being true.

While the person we're discussing isn't insane by DSM-5 criteria, that's mostly because his beliefs are benign enough that I presume he's a functioning member of society.

You can try "semen-rentention", I can't think of any reasons for how it could be dangerous. Maybe you will experience something amazing, in which case, that would be interesting. The experiment seems worth doing. And now that I think about it, the search for truth is fun, isn't it? Maybe spoiling the answer would be bad taste.

Maybe doing jumping jacks for an hour while blindfolded would lead to instant enlightenment. Doesn't seem dangerous if you take proper precautions. The experiment seems worth doing for a few months for the cardiovascular benefits.

As our rules gently suggest, it's good form to affirmatively produce evidence for your claims in proportion to how controversial or inflammatory they are. Semen retention is a kooky idea, and the bare minimum downsides, not getting laid or going on a date with Rosie Palm and her five sisters, requires quite a bit of justification.

I believe the chair I'm sitting on in real

You're sitting on something, but there is no such thing as a "chair". Luckily, this doesn't seem to matter. Communism seems to be positive associations with sharing. Even an animal can recognize somebody who is willing to share with them vs somebody who does not, and to dislike the latter in the same way that a communist would dislike a capitalist. So neither of these concepts exist, nor do they need to exist. There's also no need for logic and reasoning, unless we just assume that even animals are capable of reasoning, and that 'thinking' itself means something like 'to reason'.

While the person we're discussing isn't insane by DSM-5 criteria, that's mostly because his beliefs are benign enough that I presume he's a functioning member of society.

If somebody stops masturbating and feels better as a result - it's true that they feel better, even if that doesn't make any sense. If one were to say "That's nonsense, they should go back to feeling bad", then that would imply that reality has to conform to our theory, which is backwards. If our theories of reality does not explain reality, then our theory needs to update.

The experiment seems worth doing for a few months for the cardiovascular benefits.

If there was 100s of people online who had tried this and had positive effects (by which I mean ones which sound like enlightenment, and not just cardiovascular benefits), I'd actually give it a go.

When I watch less porn, I personally feel better in general. Here, feeling better is reality (something true to me), but any explanation I come up with will be guesswork, and therefore weaker than my experiences. Saying "It's probably because of a spike in testosterone" will make me look sane again, but I think it's weaker evidence than raw experience since it comes after. That said, experiencing that a family member needs your help is not solid evidence that they need your help, but the experience is just as real as if somebody did need your help.

The rules are useful, but the more pragmatic you get, the less true any statement is. If you keep going you will find that the world is absurd, that you can't know anything, that every model is wrong, and so on (you're probably even familiar with these ideas). But how can I say for certain that nothing can be said? I can only arrive at a contradiction and cancel out everything, which brings me to zero/nothingness.

Anyway, I think that, as you become enlightened, you stop caring about things like proof. Just like you might cure anxiety and find that you don't really care what philosophers are saying about the meaning of life, or that you might fall in love and have no time to waste on people trying to explain to you how love is just chemicals and therefore not real. Finally, I don't think coffee enjoyer's comment provided evidence or proof (though I don't remember exactly). It was just a likable comment for human reasons?

Actually, I once almost screwed myself over with my mental models. My mood got really good, and then I remembered that I had no reason to feel good, but before that made me stop, I luckily recognized that I didn't need a reason to feel good. I also realized that if you don't need a reason, the reason can never be taken away from you, meaning you've "won". You won't need validation ever again. And since at least one person can live without needing a reason, it proves that the idea that we need reasons to live is wrong, that it's a fabricated limitation, it only exists in the territory and not in the map. The problem is the idea that there is a problem. If living required meaning, then life must be meaningful already, or else we wouldn't be alive to ponder the meaning of existence. Of course, I still argue and use logic even now, but the sheer amount of troubles which goes away when you think like this is so incredible that I, a former "intellectual", dare to throw it away and to call former self silly for taking concepts like truth seriously. (I do get your point though)

My comment was meant for OP who seems open to alternative ways of seeing reality. Not for you a somewhat unknown entity clearly ready for an argument.

Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

I don't think that's what the rule means. When there's nothing you could say to someone that will change their mind, it's better not to engage. It would be as unwise as wasting time trying to prove the Holocaust really happened to certain Motteposters. They believe that it didn't, they know that it didn't, and they have a humongous army of soldier-arguments they're willing to throw at you. They will never believe it happened. Does this mean we should never have discussions that start with the assumption that the Holocaust happened?

The vast majority of posters here (and everywhere) aren't willing to change their mind about anything they have strong pre-existing convictions on. Discussions are still worth having regardless.

Does this mean we should never have discussions that start with the assumption that the Holocaust happened?

I feel there should be more affordance for orthodox ideas to skip debate on some of the assumptions than for heterodox ideas. Otherwise we could end up with situations like the following:

"I believe elites are all pedophiles who rape children in the basement of a certain pizza parlor. I'm not willing to debate this. This discussion is only for people who agree with me on this point. With that said, how do we stop these evil elites from doing this???"

I suspect it's going to be hard to convince the entire Nobel committee to practice semen retention before they make the call.

Especially the women. It would involve a lot of clenching.

Haha!

Take a hard Look into evolution and realise that natural selection is not enough to explain how we (humans) came to be in our current form. I'm curious. Do you have specific problems, questions in mind?

All of those questions are absolutely and infinitely beyond human comprehension. A human can no more understand the nature of the universe or consciousness than a genetically engineered worm can understand the human mind. This “answers” the difficult question. It’s like if someone with down syndrome asked you about the nature of financial markets — the correct answer is the most beneficial answer. What answer promotes the holistic good in his life? Whatever answer gives him comfort and motivation, and which turns him away from investing time or money into something beyond his understanding. Even if high-powered AI provided we mortals with a definitive answer, some long equation stretching five miles wide when written, this wouldn’t do anything to satisfy our need for an answer, because the answers we are looking for are human-digestible answers just like we look for human-digestible food. The way science is going, material developments on the universe are going to require so much training and intelligence that no one will understand it holistically; it will be specialists working alongside some holistic AI.

Now, once we confess “I am not high-minded”, and declare to ourselves, “I do not exercise myself in great matters which are too high for me”, we can begin our real song of ascent, and “quiet and calm our soul, as a child is weaned from his mother”. You are a designed organism, whether you are a creationist or an evolutionist. This is why you have a need for purpose and clarity. But your need for purpose and clarity is not for things beyond your understanding, because that is not its design. Its design is to obtain the Good, which is evident by results, consequences. This Good can only be obtained in your sphere of concern. Our instinct for broad purpose is to align ourselves with a collective, and our instinct for clarity is to ensure that the path ahead of us will provide a good life.

Surely this is the real answer you are looking for, because imagine if God gave you, and only you, the definitive answer to the universe and consciousness. After a few days that will cease to be interesting, and your instincts will rear their restless head and you will once again be left with an interest for more purpose and more meaning and more clarity. “Okay, I’m happy I have understood the whole purpose in life and science, but now I really have to understand why my boss is mad at me and why my stomach is acting up and why my character’s build isn’t working as I thought…” The answer will not be satisfying. What you want isn’t an answer to this particular question, but to enjoy some designed pattern of life which routinely provides satisfaction and interest, more than other possible life patterns.

Putting it one more way, imagine you sacrifice everything in your life to understand the universe. You understand it, then die. You arrive in some heavenly place but the gate doesn’t open for a few hours, so you sit alongside some Hadzabe hunter from undeveloped Tasmania. You tell about all your suffering and toil and then the answer you found, and he is momentarily interested in the answer (he figured it had to do with the sun god). But then he tells you about his life: the wild hunts of animals, how he met his wife, the feuding tribes and the taste of raw honey, the ways in which he pleased the sun God. Who is really more satisfied? Where did your answers get you? Was it not vanity of vanities?

So IMHO the answer people should be looking for is, “what belief and answer winds up optimizing my life for value”, and this value is in an evolutionary sense, the joys which all of us are evolved to favor: safety, interest, paternal love, friends, helping others, healing the world, and fulfilling our biological role. The optimization of our evolution is something religion-like, because it allows us to perceive the vastness of the cosmos as the expression and handiwork of your loving Father’s glory, and not a dark cold alienating backdrop to a confusing life upon a floating rock. We want an Edenic walled garden. Let the scientists continue working and in 4,000 years perhaps they will find some interesting material answers which can take us to a new earth. But even the scientists when they are off the job should have their walled edenic worldview, as (if what they value most is maximizing scientific knowledge) the stress-reduction and purpose-maxxing and honesty-enhancing benefits of belief will enhance the quality of their output.

As a last note, really, look at how our atheistic age spends their time without religion, and you see that it’s just as fantastical and delusional if not more — playing fantastical video games where they are the hero who must heal a fallen world, reading fantastical mangas and erotica, listening to rappers extol a life of abject hedonism, over-concerning themselves with political drama — but it lacks all of the invisible benefits of religion. This tells us something about what we crave as humans. There’s no use in being “scientifically accurate” if we wind up wasting even more time on stranger fantasies without reaping any benefits. I lied, I have one last note: do you really want a world where every human has long periods of existential dread and confusion? How inefficient, yet this is any world without irrational dogma. Irrational dogma is good! Which dogma most efficiently promotes scientifically-evident good behaviors and feelings?

Exceptional comment.

I'm not worried about death. That's inevitable.

Post-pandemic worried me. I heard a lot of stories about how people were profoundly affected by COVID & the lockdown. I...wasn't especially. I worked, I shopped with a mask on, I went home.

If my lifestyle was such that a national state of emergency barely affected my weekly routine...what parts of society have I missing out on all this time?

Dying? It sucks, but it's not a problem. Living on a pandemic-proof autopilot? Problem.

This may not answer your question about the Big Stuff. But hopefully this will help answer why I'm not especially interested in Big Stuff questions.

I don't remember whether I've seen the infinite reincarnation somewhere or arrived to it myself, but I have also been thinking about it for a few years.

Have you looked much into NDEs? That’s probably the best proof of an afterlife, science really has a hard time explaining whatever this phenomenon is (there are explanations but in my opinion they are pretty weak)

As you might have found out I ended up converting to Christianity. I’m more of a mystical Christian though so I do still contemplate these questions.

I believe God didn’t give us answers because He wants us to wonder.

He wants us to wonder.

If you would, during the next prayer, do use your psychic link to relay to God that Exotic_cetacean from the motte dot org is having a rather bad time with the wondering!

Doesn’t work that way. But I can pray for you if you want to DM me your name.

Huemer’s argument about infinite reincarnation

I didn’t know that Huemer had written about this, but this same exact thought occurred to me independently. It seems somewhat obvious and I’m surprised that more atheists/materialists don’t bring this up when discussing the possibility of life after death.

If it happened once, it can happen again. Very simple argument.

I’m currently just thinking about how weird all of this is.

This here, this is a great place to be. When the world feels weird, that's a palpable sign that something is the matter with my internal model of the world. And that's as it should be! If my internal model of the world is so snug and secure that I feel not a twinge of discomfort, of puzzle, of wonder, that's when I am most in danger in getting blindsided when that internal model falls short of reality. And the plain fact is that my internal model of the world will always fall short of reality. So the best I can do is to hold my model lightly, play with it, and always be willing to adjust it as new information arises.

As to a story that places my consciousness into the grand scheme of things, I am quite partial to the one from "The Elephant in the Brain". The "I" -- that feeling of consciousness -- is not the captain of this mind/body, is not even the team leader, but is rather the spokesman--the spokesman of a generally disorganized cabal pretending to be a well-organized administration. The cabal does something, and "I" stand in front of the members of the press and spin it as best as "I" can.

I like this story because, paradoxically, it gives me agency.

"I" can't compel the cabal against the cabal's wishes. "I" am not even directly privy to the inner politics of the cabal: "I" don't really know why the cabal did what it did. But "I" do have influence on the cabal, because the cabal cares about self-image and public-image, and "I" am the one who goes in front of the members of the press and spins those stories. So if, as part of a story about "myself" (especially to actual other people), "I" commit myself to some action in the future (an action not immediately salient so as to not step on any of the cabal's current sore points, and one that's not too difficult), then the cabal is incentivized in following through that commitment to avoid negative publicity.

I got into the habit of daily jogging this way.

It's not easy to start jogging. The inertia of habit is against you, and the activity isn't rewarding. If you aren't already used to it, sustained cardiovascular exercise feels bad. You are out of breath, you feel nauseous, and (at least for me jogging) you feel distracted by the jagged vision produced by the bouncing eyeballs. That's quite a barrier to overcome.

So "I" spun it, and "I" spun it hard. "I" told stories of heroic effort, of commitment, of taking on the unpleasant hard tasks for the greater good. "I" advertised my intentions to my spouse and my friends, and "I" updated them on my progress and setbacks. Two months it took me to stop hating the actual act of jogging (though even then I felt great afterwards). After another two months, jogging got kind of enjoyable. Now, it's a habit, and I get the jogging itch if I skip a day.

I felt the same way at about 25. After thinking about things a bit, and reading some of the history of materialist thought and argument through the last couple of centuries, it became clearer to me that physicalism is limited. It doesn't explain where the universe came from, and it assumes away the possibility of non-material, super-natural entities or phenomena as an axiom rather than proving that such things don't exist. Likewise the behaviourists 'solved' the hard problem of consciousness fifty years ago by decreeing that consciousness didn't exist - since it was not scientifically measurable, it would be presumed not to exist by fiat.

The materialism that we grew up with is a set of assumptions, axioms. Occam's razor, Betrand Russel's teapot. As a belief system it's perfectly acceptable, it holds together, but it's one among many and cannot be proved to be true, nor disprove its rivals. Believing in physicalism, in materialism, is a choice not an inevitability. And once I realised that I had the ability to make that choice, I decided to use it. I cannot prove that Christianity is true, but I decided to hope that it was, and to act as if it was.

Now, I don't know if that gives me the comfort that you're looking for. It is very difficult, maybe impossible, to grow up a materialist, and live in a materialist society, and not have the tenets of materialism burned into you at a fundamental level. I know perfectly well that I can't prove my current beliefs any more than I can prove materialism, and they may well be wrong. But I choose to try and believe, and I find it helps a bit.

Why would you waste time pondering the imponderables? You know you are never going to think your way to an answer to these questions.

Anatta gives me comfort re: mortality. It's never personal.

As a neurotic, the best thing is to figure out some way of not thinking about this kind of stuff. I really think this is the key to TMI style Buddhism, the deep metaphysics are irrelevant, the real benefit is in anatta, in detachment, in meditation, in letting go. The happiest people don’t care about this stuff. (You could say the same about political debate forums, but I’d (a) disagree and (b) think some kind of intellectual stimulation is important).

This is a depressing answer, but as the hardest of hard materialist/physicalist atheists, I don't have anything to soften the blow. I can't convince myself of there being any observable meaning or purpose to human life, some metaphysical telos behind everything that would impart order onto it all. I think life is pure, unadulterated chaos, a blur of noise and fury that mindlessly hammers away at you until it all finally stops. My death will have meant nothing at all when it happens, and the world will go on without me.

How I find comfort in my inevitable death is the fact that I already feel tired, even at the age of 23. Somehow I have become ridiculously jaded, and I don't particularly find a lot of value in things that make other people happy. I've become deeply cynical of the idea of effecting any meaningful change on the world, which is part of the reason for my slow withdrawal from political discussion on TheMotte and elsewhere. So much is out of your control, and things that once were cause for joy begin to lose meaning as you go on. Celebrations, for example. Birthdays feel... annoying, frankly. Christmas and New Year and every other holiday custom are chores to participate in. Days repeat, over and over and over again, you're anchored down by a million life obligations that keep you in some mildly uncomfortable local minima that requires a lot of activation energy to escape, and regardless of how much you try to take comfort in the small things you can't avoid the fact that your life is running on an endless loop.

It's not that there's absolutely nothing to feel grateful about. But the longer you live, the more fed up you get with the entire thing. Sometimes I look at photos of myself as a kid, running down a hill or feeding koi in a pond, and that doesn’t even feel like me anymore. It almost feels like a memory from another life, one where the days were longer and the sun was brighter. These days already seem impossibly distant and out of reach, and I wonder what would happen if I added 1000 years on to that. Every finite physical system has information-storage limits (see: Bekenstein bounds), and the limits of memory exist far below that. How long would it take for me to forget my childhood completely? How tired and jaded would I get seeing empires rise and fall, people slipping into the same failure-modes over and over again; what happens when I experience everything there is to experience?

This isn't to say that death is a desirable condition - for most people, it's unwanted and it comes far too soon. But at the same time endless life would be an interminable, inescapable hell, and I can't think of any condition where that wouldn't be the case unless I, myself, changed via genetic modification or augmentation sometime far in the hypothetical future - at which point, I would have been thoroughly ship-of-theuseused, and I wouldn't be me anymore. Somehow, that makes me feel better about eventually not existing someday.

Others have commented advice and armchair diagnoses. I would agree, and suggest you stay talking here even if you're not slinging it out in the political threads.

Your ennui is familiar to me and appears in cycles. The difference (perhaps) is I have spent another decade investigating what can pop me out of it. I have a suite of activities and people that are reliable sources of semi-religious joy, and have mentally exercised enough to silence or survive the yawn of the god-shaped hole when it appears.

Put another way, it could get better. Even if it involves some lame bullshit like medication or therapy! I'll echo self_made_human and say it's worth a shot.

I agree with @Corvos that this is a clear ringer for clinical depression. I'd know, I'm clinically depressed and a psychiatry resident.

The facts are facts, but the implications can vary widely. Do you want to spend your life feeling like a clock slowly coming unwound, as the world blurs into a grey smear around you? I don't.

The world lacking "objective" meaning is all the excuse I need to make my subjective one all that matters to me. Even if the universe cools and congeals till each hydrogen atom is alone in the observable universe alongside dying photons redshifted till eternity, I want my time in the sun to have mattered. To me.

It doesn't have to be this way. I can't force you to seek help, but I can recommend it. What have you really got to lose?

[...] I already feel deeply tired, even at the age of 23. [...] I don't particularly find a lot of value in things that make other people happy. [...]. So much is out of your control, and things that once were cause for joy begin to lose meaning as you go on. [...] Christmas and New Year and every other holiday custom are chores to participate in. Days repeat, over and over and over again, [...]

It's not that there's absolutely nothing to feel grateful about. But the longer you live, the more fed up you get with the entire thing. Sometimes I look at photos of myself as a kid, running down a hill or feeding koi in a pond, and that doesn’t even feel like me anymore. It almost feels like a memory from another life, one where the days were longer and the sun was brighter. These days seem impossibly distant and out of reach

I'm going to be presumptuous and intrusive, but this sounds a lot like depression to me. Especially coming from someone who's 23. I get where you're coming from, of course: I feel that way sometimes and I think that everyone does, but if you're feeling that way the majority of the time I think this is a problem which can and should be fixed.

What gives you comfort when pondering mortality?

That I will not be there to regret that I died.

There's also the fact that the universe might be infinite in size.

Let's take take the size of the observable universe. According to holographic theory (not 100% accepted) the maximum amount of information in an area of space is proportional to its surface area, with 1 bit per plank area.

Assuming randomly distributed universes, the median expected distance to the nearest exact copy of our observable universe is 10^10^122 meters away. (Source: Brian Greene). There are infinite yous, not just temporally but spatially as well. Furthermore, if this is true, any version of you that can exist does exist.

Honestly, I find most atheists pretty basic and incurious (just like most religious people). Science is amazing but it hasn't answered a lot of the big questions. It might never be able to. For example, do mathematics exist independently of human thought? Or, more obviously, how can we explain the existence of the universe without causality? Why is there something and not nothing?

What three historical figures would you bring back to do the talk show/podcast circuit? Assume they disappear after their last interview.

I’d pick Timothy Dexter, because entertainment value at least would be guaranteed. I’d also go with Frederick William of Prussia- he seems like the sort to throw out some left field ideas we just might could need. Finally I’d pick the Venerable Bede, because sometimes obsessive categorization can reveal an obvious truth we’ve all missed.

For semi-historical, Mohammed, Jesus and Confucius.

For 100% historical, Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis (Richelieu), Cardinal Jules Mazarin and Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord.

I didn’t know russians had a thing for french men of the cloth. Longing for a historical counter-weight to the autocrat, perhaps?

I’d take Hannibal, Leo, and Lavoisier.

Longing for a historical counter-weight to the autocrat, perhaps?

All three of them advanced the goals of French autocrats, so not really. I could've picked three English statesmen, but I didn't know who to add to Pitt the Younger and Churchill.

Talleyrand supposedly served France, not any one man or crown. Can't think of any influential russian clergymen, but that's probably on me - o wait, rasputin, lover of the russian queen! I need to switch one of my podcast choices!

Can't think of any influential russian clergymen, but that's probably on me

Patriarch Nikon. Patriarch Filaret. His great-grandson, Peter I, subordinated the church to the state, which explains the absence of eminent figures after that.

He wasn't a clergyman, though.

In Tsarist Russia, the cloth makes the man.

I'll restrict myself to people who can speak modern English.

How about Henry VIII, Abraham Lincoln, and Friedrich Hayek. (I was also considering Oliver Cromwell or James I/VI in place of Henry.)

I think for the purposes of this hypothetical, we can assume that whoever you pick has a universal translator.

Hitler, Michael Jackson, Jesus.

Of course, when Jesus comes back, we've hit the end times, so you have to price that in.

Can I bring back semi-historical figures? Because I would love to bring back Saul of Tarsus (aka Saint Paul), Judas Iscariot, and Jesus of Nazareth, and have them simultaneously do the talk-show/podcast circuit to promote their various new books:

  • "The Art of Sacred Sass"
  • "Kiss & Tell"
  • "Loaves and Fishes: a Cook Book"

Why would they not just be historical figures? Do you think they didn't exist?

Let's say that for two out of the three of these figures, there is a lack of evidence outside of biblical literary traditions, which could well be apocryphal.

Which two? Judas obviously, but are you saying that there's external evidence for Paul, or Jesus?

Anyway, it's pretty implausible to me that Jesus or Paul would just be made up.

I'm fine with accepting that Saul of Tarsus is not only a historical figure, but that the legends about him are sufficiently close to what happened to that figure in reality (+/- miracles). I am fine with having a high likelihood of a historical Jesus, and that this man was an object of a cult following, though I find it unlikely that the historical Jesus would match the Jesus of Christian mythology to any reasonable degree. I doubt the existence of a historical Judas, he's too convenient as a one-stop-scapegoat literary character.

For the purposes of the game hydroacetylene proposed, I am primarily interested in the literary characters of Jesus, Paul, and Judas, and I would consider their historicity only because it makes the read-the-Bible-as-if-it-has-unreliable-narrator more plausible. They can then write some "tell it like it really was" books.

The historical figures I would most like to see on Rogan are William the Marshal (the first GOAT candidate in combat sports) and Casanova (for obvious bro-shit-shooting reasons).

More generally, I think seeing any of the pre-1800 pioneering scientists and industrialists' reaction to the society they created would be fascinating.

Because of their polymathic tendencies, Frederick the Great and Napoleon would be the most interesting former world leaders.

Thoughts on Fellini's Casanova?

The first one that comes to mind is François de La Rochefoucauld, whose discomfiting aphorisms about the human condition seem just as relevant in the social media era as ever:

We often pride ourselves on our passions, even the most criminal ones; but envy is a timid, shamefaced passion, which we never dare to acknowledge.

If we had no faults, we would not derive so much pleasure from noting those of other people.

It seems that nature, which has so wisely arranged the organs of our body for our happiness, has also given us pride to spare us the pain of knowing our deficiencies.

To gain status in the world, we do all we can to appear as if we had already gained it.

Nothing is less sincere than the procedure of asking for advice and giving it. The asker seems to display a respectful deference for his friend’s feelings—though his only thought is to get approval for his own, and to make the other person answerable for his conduct.

Will reply when I think of two more.

Basic bitch choice, but Orwell, in large part because so many of his essays have aged so gracefully. "Politics and the English Language" and "Notes on Nationalism" should be required reading for anyone interested in history, politics or journalism.

Carl Panzram and dealers choice twice.

"hurry up and bring on your electric chair I want to leave here and take a nose-dive into the next world just to see if that one is as lousy as is this ball of mud and meanness. I am sorry for only two things. These two things are I am sorry that I have mistreated some few animals in my life-time and I am sorry that I am unable to murder the whole damned human race. "

Have these LA fires ended any hope of Gavin Newsom becoming president? I honestly don't see how he can survive this one, even if it isn't his fault.

Also, what do you think the rebuilding process will be like in LA? Will they try to build more multi-family dwellings or just rebuild the mansions? Since this is West LA, a lot of rich people have a lot on the line, but this is also a one time opportunity to build LA in a more efficient manner.

Nope. He is fucking lucky. By 2028 will be forgotten. It can't be used in the primaries against him because the woke mismangement of California is something all of his adversaries will also be guilty of in their responsive states/institutions.

The only way is for Democrats to have rising star hell bent on draining the woke swamp. Possible but not terribly probable.

And in general election it won't matter. Democrats ran a zombie and then a brat in 2024 and you could see how they rewired their brains in real time to be sincerely convinced it is the greatest thing ever.

I don't see why Newsom would be impacted that much by the fires. Most people understand state governors aren't absolute dictators that are responsible for everything that goes wrong. I checked here and he's still one of the most likely candidates for the D nomination in 2028. There's not a lot of history so I can't see if it's moved much recently, but I doubt it has.

Will they try to build more multi-family dwellings or just rebuild the mansions?

They'll try to build more multi-family dwellings, because density pays off when you start out with some of the most valuable land on Earth, and in the end they'll just rebuild the mansions, because the thumb is pushing hard on the scale for that.

From Newsome's executive order suspending CEQA and Coastal Commission review for rebuilding:

\2. Paragraph 1 shall apply only to properties and facilities that are in substantially the same location as, and do not exceed 110% of the footprint and height of, properties and facilities that were legally established and existed immediately before this emergency.

So anything except replacing the McMansions is de facto illegal.

The same executive order extends anti-price-gouging rules on building materials through to January 2026, which may mean that any rebuilding at all turns out to be de facto illegal. But even red state governors do that - the fault is with the voters, not the politicians.

NIMBY lobby is too powerful as a function of democratic politics in a capitalist society, because rich and powerful people disproportionately live in large single-family homes in locales whose character would be damaged by large-scale construction that would also be loud and annoying for existing residents.

The only solution is removing local elites to the greatest extent possible from planning and zoning decisions. This is why in the UK I have long advocated for the establishment of some remote central planning permission authority, perhaps somewhere in a small town in Wales or Scotland, which would approve all construction in Britain and wave everything through over the gnashing of local councils in London or the green belt. In the US the federal system, unfortunately, makes this even more difficult.

I say this over and over again, but specific infrastructure aside, we don't need to build more in the UK! The population is essentially stable, barring immigration which we could stop at any time. The green belt was a good idea that failed because we allowed people to build commuter towns on the other side of the belt; we don't need more sprawl, we need more cities, and I suspect we could do that if we really wanted to. Bristol, Oxford and Cambridge are popular basically because they're like London but more expensive: let people spill further and further into cheaper communities. Fund good city centres. Clean up the charity shops. I really believe we could achieve at least some of that if we had the will.

If nothing else, let's build better. So much planning resistance comes because everybody knows that new-builds will be ugly; if they didn't damage the locale then a lot fo people would be a lot easier on them.

The UK absolutely needs to build more even if immigration drops to 0. The UK has ancient housing stock that desperately needs replacing and the so called Green Belt is strangling the country. New builds should be beautiful yes but what counts as beauty should not be up to people living locally because they're personally incentivised to veto construction that's beneficial for the country. More density would be good but barring that more houses anywhere is good as well. If you don't want density you should absolutely hate the Green Belt because it forces dense building in cities by raising land values on buildable land to the point where the only thing that makes economic sense is apartments.

We do need to build more, because the UK has the smallest, ugliest houses (barring some good stock inhabited by some rich people and/or pre-1920ish in construction) in the West. We need to be razing entire neighborhoods of shitty 1930s-1970s semi detached streets and replacing them with much larger, better homes, which will require more land.

Since that kind of demolition is going to get blocked on environmentalist grounds, the best option is just to build more and better in the hope that these ugly places collapse in value and homeowners lobby the government to be allowed to demolish and replace them.

The UK has the most retarded wall design that it needs to abandon first, though. Cavity walls suck, because you're sandwiching the insulation layer between two layers of masonry. You'll want to replace the insulation in a couple of decades and this means you'll have to dismantle the façade to get the old insulation out.

Either make the inner leaf warm enough that you don't need additional insulation (AAC or good honeycomb bricks) or replace the outer leaf with stucco or a thin façade of brick-shaped tiles that hangs off the inner leaf.

Forgive me, I thought you were arguing for density. Partly from pattern recognition, partly because you appeared to be expecting resistance from people who 'live in large single-family homes in locales whose character would be damaged by large-scale construction'.

I don't think I've ever seen people arguing for less density, or for replacing awful postwar buildings. I always thought this kind of thing didn't happen because left-wingers are pro-density on principle and builders are pro-density on profit grounds. I think that people in general would be more keen on this, and would be more keen to suspend environmental concerns if the results looked good.

Yeah, specifically worded to ban multi-family units, typical.

I don't think Gavin Newsom ever really had a shot at becoming president. It would take a political genius of the highest order to thread the needle of a road to Damascus style conversion on the issues of urban dysfunction and public order in California to neutralize that angle of attack, while preventing defections from his existing base of support, so unless he can somehow turn San Francisco into Singapore in the next 3 years all his opponents need to do is show live footage of open-air drug markets and homeless encampments in the streets to end his campaign before it begins.

As far as LA is concerned, the fires are only nibbling away at the edges of the city and not reducing downtown to ash, so not much rebuilding is even necessary. I think a large earthquake would provide more opportunities for that type of renewal, as it would damage or destroy buildings over a much larger area. Not that I hope such a thing happens, but it seems inevitable that one of the major west coast cities will be hit by one within the next decade or two.

Does anyone have thoughts about the potential link between childhood fluoride exposure and lower IQ? Alternatively, links to reasonable discussion?

In particular, I'm narrowly interested in what the science says about (1) whether fluoride exposure at levels to which Americans were occasionally exposed causes IQ decreases and (2) if so, what kinds of threshold effects might exist.

For what it's worth, I (along with many of my friends) took daily 1 mg fluoride tablets (supplements) as a kid on the recommendation of our pediatrician, and I have mild dental fluorosis to show for it (although I've never had a cavity in my life). The idea that this may also have cost me a few IQ points is distressing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/health/fluoride-children-iq.html

We talked about about this a few weeks ago. It seems that the amount of fluoride in the water is pretty low generally so it's probably not something to worry about.

That said, flouride in the water is not great. The benefits of fluoride are limited. Supposedly, places that fluoridate their water see a 25% reduction in cavities. You can probably get all the benefits by just brushing with fluoridated toothpaste.

For what it's worth, I (along with many of my friends) took daily 1 mg fluoride tablets (supplements) as a kid on the recommendation of our pediatrician, and I have mild dental fluorosis to show for it (although I've never had a cavity in my life). The idea that this may also have cost me a few IQ points is distressing.

Unfortunately, if you had fluorosis as a child, it's definitely possible you were subjected to a high enough concentration to lower IQ.

Scott linked to a few studies a few years ago. Getting fluoride out of your water ranked at his 3rd tier of "obscure pregnancy interventions" to raise IQ, with very mixed evidence.

1mg/day is what you get from 1.5 liters of typical fluoridated water, so it was a significant exposure increase but not an order of magnitude or anything.

So, what are you reading?

I'm trying to finish Alan Watt's The Wisdom of Insecurity. I wasn't impressed the first time I tried it, but his work on Zen changed my image of him in a positive way. Still slowly going through my backlog.

Just finished In the Land of Israel by Amos Oz I found this in a Free Little Library in Baltimore where I live and picked it up because I lived in Israel in 2019 and heard good things about the author, Amos Oz who is a famous fiction writer in Israel. This isn't your usual Amos Oz book, or even a work of fiction. Rather, it is a group of roughly transcribed interviews of Jews and Arabs across the territory of Israel, including the occupied West Bank, in the aftermath of the 1982 Lebanon War, and the phalangist massacre of Palestinian refugees in Beirut (for more on this war I would recommend the Israeli film Waltz with Bashir: I have never seen an animation style like it, and it also follows a similar interview format to this book).

These interviews serve to highlight the diversity of opinion and culture among the Jews and Arabs of Israel and the occupied territories. The book opens with a description of the ultra-orthodox demographic takeover of the old city of Jerusalem, follows a winding route through the newly occupied West Bank (where Jewish settlements have already sprung up), the Galilee, and endsin the city of Ashdod on the Medditerranean Sea. Oz is an anti-nationalist former Labour Party member who favors a two (and eventually one) state solution, but he honors the opinions of all the people he interviews (even the crazy, unnamed Z who advocates for explicit genocide against all Arabs, not just the ones in Palestine) by transcribing their words truthfully, and not distorting their arguments with his own judgements. Everyone, including the afformentioned Z, came off as rational under the strokes of Oz’s pen, and at least somewhat sympathetic.

This book should shatter your conceptions of the entirety of Israel or the Jewish people as some kind of elite mastermind class controlling global events or a people who want to take over the entire Middle East. There are certainly some Jews who advocate for that: the citizens of the newly minted Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, as well as Z, certainly do so. Others, like the Ultra-Orthdox in Jerusalem have no interest in such worldly things, or frankly anything other than studying Torah. Kibbutzniks, like Oz and the “Cosmic Jew” he interviews in the last chapter of the book, are more distraught about the influence of American money and weapons on destroying the original agrarian character of the Zionist movement, while still others, many who live in Tel Aviv, basically just want to party and be secular Westerners.

In the 40 years since this book was written, many things have changed. There is now a wall between Israel and the West Bank, settlements have sprung up all over Judea and Samaria, and slowly but surely all the people of Gaza are all being killed. Yet the same divisions exist in Israeli society (or did in 2019 when I was there), and none of these fundamental problems are any closer to being solved. This, I think would sadden Oz. It certainly saddens me: Israel is a beautiful country, and its seems like the biggest threat to its continued existence is not Hamas or other Arab countries, but civil war.

Now I'm reading Solaris (or really listening to it) by Stanislaw Lem. One of the most genuinly creepy science fictions stories I've read. It's about a research station on a sentient planet where the planet communicates with the researchers by reflecting their worst memories back at them in a manner that's impossible to avoid. In Spanish I'm reading Las Palabras Rotas by Luis Garcia Montero. It's a mixture of poetry and prose that's reflecting on how certain words have become corrupted by our politics and needed to be reclaimed personally, if not on a societal level.

Now I'm reading Solaris (or really listening to it) by Stanislaw Lem. One of the most genuinly creepy science fictions stories I've read.

Have you read the other three "foreign intelligence" novels of his?

No this is the first Lem book I've read. Would you recommend?

Return from the Stars was my favourite, though it has been a decade.

This sounds like Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora which I have been meaning to read for a while.

Well, Eden, The Invincible and Fiasco to complete the quadrilogy.

Robots Trurl and Klapaucius and Ijon Tichy are fan favorites.

But Pirx the Pilot is my personal favourite.

slowly but surely all the people of Gaza are all being killed

Ahem.

I have never seen an animation style like it

You may like Waking Life by Richard Linklater. He used a similar style for his adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly, but Waking Life is vastly superior.

Finished Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. Curiously, it did actually end only a few dozen pages after I was like, wait, where is this book going for the next half. I guess it does actually have a massive amount of footnotes and citations etc.

Now reading Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles. This one focuses more on the internal workings of the British Army and how they (mis)handled the situation. It calls out more directly how they failed to respond to Loyalist terrorism.

This book raises one other point so far that I found very interesting and hadn't actually read anywhere else. They claim that the early Provisional IRA, prior to Bloody Sunday, the Falls Road Curfew and other notable incidents, when the membership was still very low and public support in the Catholic community for them much more slim, did actually undertake operations to deliberately provoke the British Army into more heavy-handed responses in the hopes of creating those sorts of incidents in order to increase public support for their tactics and goals and grow their own membership. That's not exactly something you read much about in accounts more sympathetic to the PIRA, and I'm curious to see what if any evidence they have for this.

This isn't direct evidence but the IRA were definitely aware of the propaganda potential of reprisals from government forces. From the Handbook for Volunteers of the Irish Republican Army - Notes on Guerrilla Warfare 1956 version:

The strategy of guerrilla warfare is to build up resistance centres throughout the occupied area and confine the enemy to the larger towns by restricting his movements and communications. In time the resistance centres are knitted together into one liberated area. After that the job is to drive him out of his supposedly safe base: and thus out of the country.
The essence of all strategy is to bring, by the use of surprise and mobility-or a combination of both-the greatest possible strength to bear at a chosen time and place. It must be ensured that the enemy does not-or is not able to-assemble Mi* strength at that point. This holds true also of guerrilla warfare. But it involves clever manoeuvre and here the skill of the commander, the organisation of his forces and his mobility, play an important role.
The guerrilla attempts to do three things:

(1) Drain the enemy's manpower and resources.
(2) Lead the resistance of the people to enemy occupation.
(3) Break down the enemy's administration.

He achieves the first by the very fact of his existence and his constant harassment of the enemy. He remembers that his own task is not to hold ground but to ensure that in time the enemy will not hold any either.
He achieves the second by remembering that the people will bear the brunt of the enemy's reprisal tactics and by inspiring them with aims of the movement. In this way they will be made tenacious and strong for in the long run it is the people who can stop the enemy: by their backing of the national movement.
And he achieves three when the enemy imposes martial law and thus recognises he can no longer rule that area in the old way. In effect he is recognising that the people no longer want him.

*Typo in the original PDF document.

The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker (1998). The main premise is that if you have a negative gut feeling about a person or situation, go ahead and follow it out of the situation, don't try to come up with a bunch of justifications for why things are actually alright, there's no reason to worry. There probably is a reason to worry, you're picking up on something, even when you aren't able to articulate what or why in the moment. He says he's spent a lot of time interviewing victims, or close misses after violent incidents, and they usually eventually tell him details that explain some of the signals that made them nervous after the fact, and sometimes do manage to get out before the going gets bad -- for instance a man who asked into a convenience store, and then immediately out again shortly before a shooting.

It seems plausible enough. I've never been in a really bad situation, but every time I haven't liked someone immediately, tried to make up excuses for them in my head, thought and thought about it, tried to like them, it turned out that, no, we actually could not live or work together. Probably most people, most of the time, do really have reasonable instinctive boundaries.

Read it, enjoyed it, bought a copy for the daughter of a friend of mine who was leaving Japan for university on the east coast of the US. She left it on the shelf. But apparently her uncle in the US also got her a copy. No idea if she ever read it.

Notably for those responding doubtfully, de Becker by no means limits his focus to females. I found it a good read, and its basic message of "be aware of your surroundings/trust your instincts" invaluable.

I wasn't very far in and probably haven't described it very well. Maybe I'll try again next week when I've read more of it.

There's a risk of conflating serious danger with personal discomfort and using the first to justify the second, and also a parallel risk of using the second to dismiss the first.

In the first case you end up avoiding everything that isn't immediately pleasant and personally gratifying, and in the second case you fail to avoid a dangerous situation because you haven't given it the chance to prove your intuitions wrong right.

It's not without merit but I think the advice to "trust your fear instinct" is another one of those messages that is more likely to appeal to and reach the wrong audience and reinforce their fearfulness rather than attenuating their fearlessness.

I really liked Scott's Different Worlds post, and wish that he (or someone) would investigate that further.

De Becker seems to think there are people who are always being stalked, and have to be super cautious all the time, and may often be in dangerous situations. He worked with celebrities and abuse victims, so maybe that's true for them.

I'm not that far in, but de Becker just mentioned that if someone is jogging in the park and gets an uncomfortable feeling, they shouldn't try to use peripheral vision, they should take their headphones off, stop for a second, turn, and make eye contact with anyone looking at them. I'm not subtle at all, and probably give off that vibe anyway.

every time I haven't liked someone immediately, tried to make up excuses for them in my head, thought and thought about it, tried to like them, it turned out that, no, we actually could not live or work together.

I would encourage you to decouple "person I dislike" from "person who could pose a threat to me personally", for the reasons I outlined here. I agree with you that when you take an instinctive snap dislike to someone, no amount of "evidence" is likely to dissuade you from said judgement. But I don't think that instinctive snap judgement offers much useful guidance on whether they're likely to pose a threat to you or bring you harm. There are people I consider morally upstanding individuals who I happen to personally dislike for reasons that have nothing to do with their moral character. Conversely, there is no shortage of people who are likeable on an interpersonal level but completely lacking in moral fibre (e.g. charming con artists who'll butter you up before absconding with your life savings).

I'm reminded of an article I read on Cracked years ago, in which one of their staff writers made a list of five concepts for which no word currently exists in the English language, but for which a word is required. He describes a scenario in which you meet someone and take an instant dislike to them for some trivial reason (annoying laugh, inability to correctly pronounce the word "specifically"), but you're aware that this is kind of silly. But then some time later, you learn something about them that proves they're a shitty person (cheated on his wife, assaulted someone), and you feel vindicated that your instinctive snap judgement of them steered you so well.

I must stress that I don't often find myself in a situation in which I would have a need for this word: to reiterate, there are plenty of people to whom I took an immediate dislike who have yet to give any indication of being anything other than honest, decent people. I think decoupling "I like him" and "he's a good guy" (and by extension, "he poses no threat to my wellbeing") is a sorely underpractised skill, and one which just about everyone would do well to better interrogate.

I'm reminded of an article I read on Cracked years ago, in which one of their staff writers made a list of five concepts for which no word currently exists in the English language, but for which a word is required.

You should read The Meaning of Liff. It's the oldest exercise of this kind that I know of.

There are definitely people that I don't particularly like or get along with, who seem to be doing the best they can, and them and I clashing is not due to anything nefarious on their part. I might use words like annoyed, irritated, clashing, or something but not afraid, apprehensive, or nervous.

Conversely, there is no shortage of people who are likable on an interpersonal level but completely lacking in moral fibre (e.g. charming con artists who'll butter you up before absconding with your life savings).

I think de Becker agrees with this, to some extent. He talks about people who are trying to get something their mark doesn't want to give, and describes various strategies of being extra nice, offering unsolicited help, using "we" a lot, and being generally nice and charming. The main difference is that he says that people feel apprehensive anyway, but try to explain it away because "he's so nice and helpful." I'm not sure how to evaluate that claim, he seems to be mostly be making it based on his own experience and interviews.

The main difference is that he says that people feel apprehensive anyway, but try to explain it away because "he's so nice and helpful." I'm not sure how to evaluate that claim, he seems to be mostly be making it based on his own experience and interviews.

Yeah, this is a difficult one to square. I definitely think the basic thesis (that people should be more willing to trust their gut and not "rationally" explain away their instinctive discomfort or apprehension) is sound. But I also suspect that if I surveyed a bunch of people who'd been scammed by a con artist (or whose romantic partners were unfaithful to them or otherwise suffered some kind of betrayal), there would be a significant number of people who insisted that they never suspected a thing, that they trusted the person in question completely and were wholly blindsided by their betrayal.

He says he's spent a lot of time interviewing victims, or close misses after violent incidents, and they usually eventually tell him details that explain some of the signals that made them nervous after the fact,

That seems...very prone to hindsight bias. Obviously after a terrible thing happens, you're going to sort through events and find a bunch of things that seem like potential red flags in full context. But that's very different from saying that every time you have a negative feeling about someone or something, you should believe it. It may well be true, at least for well-calibrated people. But I think you would need more complex experimental techniques to be sure: perhaps you could mix in fictional testimonies with the real ones and see whether third parties can pick out the real from the fake, or something.

every time I haven't liked someone immediately, tried to make up excuses for them in my head, thought and thought about it, tried to like them, it turned out that, no, we actually could not live or work together

Mostly, if I don't like someone fairly quickly I'll stay not liking them. But there are definitely people I've disliked and then got closer to as I got to know them better, or people who improved over time.

I would guess that some people have very different baseline tendencies to be generous to strangers; some people are far too prone to ignoring danger signals and need to be more careful and listen to their gut. But 'when you're nervous about somebody, probably there's something wrong with them' sounds very close to other causes of misery in the past like 'if you have a bad relationship with your father, probably he raped you and you suppressed the memory' or 'any young man who expresses interest in you and doesn't pick up the subtle signs that you're not interested is a potential stalker or rapist'.

Obviously I have a dog in this fight: as a young and well-mannered but unfortunately incel-ish man, female paranoia (I can't think of a less charged term, sorry) is something I'm nervous about encouraging.

I'm probably misrepresenting him somewhat, since I had read less than a quarter of the book at that point (and still less than half). Not dealing with fake "repressed" memories does seem like a weakness -- what if they just made some of the details up subconsciously? I haven't read far enough to know if he deals with this.

He says things like: if you are a woman putting groceries in your car or something, and a man comes up to help you, and you feel even a little bit uncomfortable about it, stand up, face him, and say "no" definitively and forcefully. If he's a decent guy, his feelings will be a bit hurt, and you will get no help. If he isn't, he'll keep testing your boundaries, be very firm about them, insisting and not just going away is a sign that he's up to no good. There's probably someone who needs to hear that? I don't really have opinions about it, but am a bit curious to see where he's going.

I think all this is fair. Scott’s essay on how some people need to hear diametrically opposite advice always struck me as one of his more insightful essays.

I finished Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion. When starting it I wrote:

The title is hilariously "standard" for a history book, but I'm very into it so far. At one time as a child, I had an abject fascination with the California gold rush after getting a basic book about it from my San Franciscan cousins. Anyone living in the Bay Area probably considers it played out, but for a guy in the Southeast, it was exciting stuff. Reading about it with the level of fidelity a book like this provides (just in the first 25 superdense pages) is a treat. I'll wait to recommend it, but so far, it's been good.

The middle of the book slumped a little bit for me. At the end of the day, this is still a modern history book. There are land acknowledgments at the beginning. There's definitely a major tendency to minimize native-on-white violence. The language shifts are subtler than your average twitter thread, but it's all still there and super annoying.

Another disappointment is that because it is such a rigorously researched book, 100 pages are eaten by citations and footnotes. It's a dense typeface but I bought a physical copy, and so there was a bit of a let down when a big fraction of the pages were not pure content. (The footnotes were still entertaining).

Probably the worst sin is that the last chapter read like a high school essay - a summarization of the sections before it. Unskippable because there were also great vignettes interspersed throughout that were one of the strengths of the book.

The bottom line is that it is still well-researched book, and entertaining for many reasons. The author does an extremely effective job of using facts and figures to underscore how the age of expansion/the gilded age was. I find the 19th century fascinating across the board, and the effects of the telegram, rail, steam power, and cheap firearm rifling on the world are a hell of a combination. I'd give the book a 4/5.

For those who want to get to some of the meat without reading (Spoiler tags do not work I believe):

  • One thing the author underscored convincingly is that the West was devoid of slaves not because they wouldn't be useful but because of the social movement of "Free labor." This same philosophy factored into why the Chinese or factory workers on the east coast were hated so broadly. I find it fascinating that the Chinese effectively came to the country, sending almost exclusively men and a couple of prostitutes, panned for gold, built a railroad, and then left, all without meaningfully assimilating at all.
  • The amount of violence in the West was staggering. The author seemed to take the approach of giving simple numbers for violence and alcoholism to let you draw your conclusions, so it's pretty easy to conjure up how unbelievably rough it would be as an individual.
  • The final non-summary chapter digs extensively (heh) into the physical and financial technology required to support mining, and effectively describes the magnitude of environmental damage that happened as a result. A great example is the pumps required to pull water out of the Comstock Lode - One of the most powerful had a flywheel that was a quarter million pounds.
  • It does take the opportunity to show nuance where appropriate. The killers of buffalo were rightfully scorned as opportunistic monsters (demand for their hides surged after production of hides from Argentina slowed, and hunters would typically target pregnant cows), many aspects of Indian policy were at least compassionate in intent, and defenders of the West's natural beauty were not a put-upon minority.

In any case, it made me more eager to take on The GDMBR at some point before I die, or at least get out west again. I've gotten to visit CA, CO, and NM quite a bit and still find most of the region very romantic.

I'm about to dig into Different Seasons, four novellas by Stephen King. I'm not a fan of the person he's become, but I've typically very much enjoyed his writing. A friend got me a used physical copy, which I thought was a remarkable gesture. I hate the waste of buying new-print books since I saw thousands constantly being destroyed after not selling while working at a bookstore chain. It's just too durable of a good to throw away. I'll admit I'm dreading having to keep my bedside light on while my wife tries to sleep a little bit. I'm used to the convenience of a Kindle and the ability to read any book (regardless of size) anywhere without disturbing anyone else.

The Shawshank Redemption, one of the novellas in Different Seasons, is one of the rare cases in which I think the film adaptation of a book is vastly superior to the source material. It's remarkable how the two works use almost all of the same raw materials, but the effects produced could hardly be more different: the book is a disposable, vaguely trashy potboiler, while the film is justly acclaimed as one of the most powerful and moving dramas ever to come out of Hollywood.

King's prose was always wasted on me. The Stand, for all its admittedly gripping story and plotting, was unnecessarily vulgar in parts. Not even the story, just the metaphors. That probably sounds prissy of me but I remember thinking damn dude, did you have to use that image there? Exceptions for me are his early story collections, and maybe Salem's Lot. He's a great yarn-spinner though, and certainly prolific.

I feel the same way. One of the many ways the film adaptation of Shawshank improved on its source material was omitting the novella's repeated descriptions of inmates smuggling things in or out of prison by inserting them into their rectums. Some things are better left to the imagination. Early on in IT (which I never finished and don't intend to), the narrator recites an anecdote about a man whose car was washed away in a flood, and when they recovered his corpse his penis had been bitten off by fish. Even as a child I was just like, why did you have to specify that? Just being gross for the sake of being gross.

Earlier this week I finished Tony Tulathimutte's second book Rejection. I have thoughts on it, and this seems like as good a place as any for a "review".

I first became aware of Tulathimutte when someone on the Motte (back in the Reddit era) shared his short story "The Feminist", which I loved and shared with everyone I knew. My sister bought me his first novel Private Citizens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Citizens_(novel)) for my birthday that year, which I adored, tearing through it in two days (unusually fast for me) and have repeatedly recommended. Naturally I was very excited for his second book, which is a collection of seven loosely connected short stories/novellas, of which (to bring it full circle) "The Feminist" is the first.

When I started reading it, I was glad that my eager anticipation wasn't misplaced: "The Feminist" was just as good on a second (or fourth or fifth, most likely) read, although it's been lightly edited from its original publication, namely by extending out the description of the protagonist's Tinder bio. This felt a bit like over-egging the pudding a smidge, but hardly a fatal misstep. The second story is even better, a masterpiece of cringe comedy drama which I found almost physically painful to read as its hapless protagonist digs herself into ever deeper holes, and was by far the strongest in the collection. It was the third story where I started to have some doubts. Its opening is very strong, with a sympathetic portrayal of the kind of private hell experienced by a man whose fetishes are so warped that they are not merely difficult but physically impossible to accomplish (I've never felt more grateful to be so vanilla in my appetites) and a description of the difference between embarrassment and shame that stopped me in my tracks. Unfortunately, it concludes with an extended sequence of gross-out humour which is, without exaggeration, the most disgusted I've felt reading a work of fiction since either American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis or (a much less flattering comparison) Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. There were a few gross bits in Private Citizens, but they were used in moderation for context and flavour in a largely funny, perceptive and empathetic novel, and didn't outstay their welcome (such that I didn't feel uncomfortable lending the book to my mum). But this sequence goes on far longer than needed for the joke to land, and just felt like Tulathimutte trying to be shocking and puerile for no good reason. It could have been half as long (or one quarter) and lost nothing.

The fourth story is framed as an Am I the Asshole? post on Reddit and is narrated by a tech bro protagonist who, like Tulathimutte, spends far too much time online, communicating entirely through a dizzying range of Internet slang - not for nothing does the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rejection_(short_story_collection)) refer to it as a "terminally online... brainrot" novel (although people in glass houses: the fact that I was able to understand the entire thing without once consulting Urban Dictionary is probably a red flag that I need to cut down on my social media consumption). It's an amusing once-off gag, but I couldn't help but feel that it disrupted the verisimilitude: the protagonist just feels like too broad a parody to exist in the same universe as the other more grounded characters, and the story's dénouement too overtly farcical. (As Chris Jesu Lee pointed out, in 2024, a satirical joke story taking aim at tech bros for being cod-visionary and obliviously sociopathic seems a bit behind the times - by this stage we're practically drowning in arrogant, deluded Elon Musk expies.) The rest of the book consists largely of meta postmodern navel-gazing, culminating in a final chapter which is framed as an excessively detailed rejection (ha ha) letter from a publisher for the book you are currently reading. Here, the fictional publisher deconstructs the creepy subtext for all of the preceding stories, bluntly asserting that Tulathimutte's attempts to mask his own neuroses, paraphilias and worldview by putting them in the mouths of fictional characters who are unlike him on one or more identity axes is blindingly transparent and fooling no one. This chapter essentially comes off as Tulathimutte attempting to head off criticism about the book, to which the reader might reasonably ask - if you know it's bad, why are you doing it?

It's still a good book, primarily on the strength of the first two-and-a-half stories, and like Private Citizens I read the whole thing in two days, but I do think it's a step down from the debut. One thing I found particularly disconcerting about the book was its Bukowski-esque disgust for human bodies and the corporeal form, its "relaxed contempt for the flesh" (to quote Gibson). Offhand I can think of only one actual character in the whole book who isn't described as being in some way physically repulsive, unclean or similar - so of course she's a superficial airheaded bimbo who comes in for ire for misspelling and misusing the word "négligée". It doesn't surprise me at all that Tulathimutte is an outspoken advocate for trans rights - he doesn't merely believe that some people are born in the wrong bodies, but that everyone is born in the wrong body: the wrong body is any human body which actually exists, and the Internet, porn and video games are wonderful inventions in large part because they enable us to distract ourselves from the horrific reality of being embodied within these nauseating mechanistic flesh prisons. This is one of the most Gnostic books I've ever read without even trying to be.

Hand in hand with this is the book's profound, omnidirectional misanthropy. I don't believe that every novel needs to have likeable and/or morally upstanding characters: there have been good books in which every character was amoral, unlikeable or both. But the sheer visceral contempt for everyone evinced by Rejection is quite unsettling, leaving an acrid taste in one's mouth, and it's conspicuous by its novelty relative to Private Citizens. No matter how scathing, satirical and acerbic that book was, Tulathimutte's affection for his characters was palpable on every page, and we shared in it even when they made mistakes or behaved shittily - and some of those characters weren't just likeable jerks, but actually did come off as well-meaning people sincerely trying to do their best. Meanwhile, Rejection is not a book about misanthropy, but a misanthropic book - essentially every character is a shitty, unlikeable, narcissistic, pretentious, emotionally manipulative asshole. (Offhand I can only think of one major character who seems even a little bit likeable and basically decent, and they aren't the protagonist of any of the stories.) Given that most of them are so similar along other axes too (generally lonely, too online, never exercise, physically unattractive and know it), the colour and variety from Private Citizens is also rather lacking. It's not a monotonous read, but pentatonic where Private Citizens was chromatic and modal.

Here's what I took from it. However he might try to ironize and joke about his lifestyle and shortcomings, I sincerely believe the following:

  1. Tulathimutte agrees with every word The Feminist says, although he'd never admit it. When The Feminist went on a rant about how women have stolen incels' lives by selfishly defecting from the social contract, Tulathimutte was not bravely delving into the psychology of a character with whom he disagreed, attempting to express what that character thinks in such a way that it would pass the intellectual Turing test: he was simply using a fictional character as a mouthpiece for his own opinions. The event which concludes "The Feminist" is intended as plausible deniability for Tulathimutte by having his unsettlingly reasonable-seeming character jump off the slippery slope.
  2. Repeated romantic rejection has hardened Tulathimutte's spirit, filling him with rage and bitterness towards anyone and everyone, but especially the happily coupled. This misanthropic streak was detectable as subtext in Private Citizens but kept somewhat in check (there's nothing particularly unusual about being unmarried in your early thirties, as he was at the time of publication); but having entered his fourth decade still going stag, Tulathimutte has essentially gone mad from the isolation, and lonely people are the bitterest of all (to quote Nick Hornby).
  3. Asian women who date white men fill Tulathimutte with murderous rage, which he knows is wrong and yet cannot even begin to suppress or talk himself out of: there's a near-constant subtext that said women are contemptible, duplicitous and lacking in self-respect for some reason that Tulathimutte refuses to explicitly articulate, not even by using one of his numerous unsympathetic characters as a mouthpiece for it. (The closest we get is a white character who, after being rejected by a white man in favour of an Asian woman, cattily accuses him of racial fetishism, for which she is widely criticised; the fact that she gets so much pushback struck me as a bit of a fig leaf.) I've read two reviews of this book by Asian-American men who barely touched on this aspect of the book, and I strongly suspect it's because they feel the same way but, like Tulathimutte, are perceptive enough to realise it's not polite to just come out and say so. If I was an Asian woman who'd dated one or more white men, I imagine I'd find this already intentionally discomfiting book even more uncomfortable than the average reader would - but then Jia Tolentino loved it, so what do I know.
  4. Many years of excessive porn consumption have imbued Tulathimutte with unrealistic expectations about sex (to put it mildly): a set of fetishes no human woman could ever hope to meet. His ideal woman has a neotonous face, impossibly large breasts, impossibly smooth skin, not a single follicle of hair below the eyelashes, never talks back, is always on hand to fulfil any sexual demand he might make of her (without being too slutty about things), and never farts, belches, menstruates, pees or poos. He's spent so long in the virtual world of Bang Bros that even perfectly normal women (even women who are above average in attractiveness) probably fill him with disgust and loathing.

If you liked Private Citizens, pick it up. If you haven't read anything by him, please read Private Citizens first, as it's superior in every way that matters.

With all that off my chest, to directly answer the original question - I'm currently about a third of the way through Magda Szabo's novel Katalin Street, which I went into more or less blind. For some reason I'm having far more difficulty keeping track of which character is which than any other novel I've read in the past few years. Seems decent so far.

I do agree that story #2 was an achievement. The entire bit with the raven filled me with such dread that it took me 3 attempts to get through those last pages. I disagree on #3, the escalation of depravity was funny throughout for me. The juxtaposition between the fictional protagonist dominating the porn star and the obsequious caveats about managing said porn shoot was perfect. And that it expressed a new angle on the themes of identity-as-prison... Also, you can’t tell me you didn’t chuckle at the global warming solution.

I like these longer book reviews that turn into a kind of discussion about the meta-themes and the authors themselves. Thank you.

Transgressive and satirical fiction is always a double mind fuck - even moreso if its good. I read American Psycho and was blown away by how perceptive Ellis was as an author. Then, I looked up his bio and had an "oh shit, is this dude ok?" moment.

According to my quick search on Tulathimutte, he has a double Stanford degree in something called symbolic systems. He appears to have been a tech bro who became disillusioned with tech bro'ing and so started writing. That you tell us a lot of his writing is about misanthropic tech bro stuff (and, you know, porn) makes so much sense as to be a second-hand "oh shit, is this dude ok?" moment for me.

EDIT: Further research has revealed that a lot of the most loathsome Haute Literarti magazines really like this guy Tulathimutte. My concern for him has waned considerably.

Then, I looked up his bio and had an "oh shit, is this dude ok?" moment.

What specifically about Ellis's background?

Further research has revealed that a lot of the most loathsome Haute Literarti magazines really like this guy Tulathimutte.

It amazes me that he hasn't been declared persona non grata over his opinions. Sure, he's trying to hide his power level, but I don't think he's doing that good a job, and the last chapter seems to be him coming as close as he's going to get to laying his cards on the table and admitting that he's exactly as Problematic as you probably suspect. I follow him on Instagram and his Instagram stories are pretty much a nonstop stream of "man, Israel is just the worst huh?" (with an occasional "trans rights are human rights", for flavour), which maybe helps him to blend in.

Thank you, just downloaded Private Citizens to check out!

Imperial Wizard 4: The Southern Alliance by J. Parsons. The premise of the series is that an ancient wizard emerges from a long (I think over a millenium long) time in stasis to discover a greatly changed world that has forgotten his craft. I've found that I'm a sucker for "setting things right" types of novels and series, and this series is one of those. Thanks, Nathan Lowell!

There's modest consensus around here that Vivek & Elon firing half of the government would be a good thing, and that most of those workers are largely vestigial parasites/culture warriors who don't productively contribute to society.

What would the practical effects be of Trump pulling a Xi and dropping the hammer of god on wall street and hedge funds, HFT outfits, etc.? Say you can keep venture capital and bank loans to businesses and all the other stuff, but the 'quants' who make a living with options, trading commodities and the like? I'll leave it to someone better versed in that world to carve out precisely what should or shouldn't be banned, or try to convince me that this is a mistake.

The friends I have in that space freely admit that they don't believe that they contribute meaningfully to society. They have advanced degrees in physics, math and CS; wouldn't society be better off pushing them towards engineering, manufacturing, company creation? And redistributing capital from the non-STEM people at these places who contribute nothing of value to society?

There's modest consensus around here that Vivek & Elon firing half of the government would be a good thing

Elon and Vivike can't fire anyone directly because DOGE isn't an official government department, so all they can do is make budget recommendations to Congress.

Most HFT shops are mostly doing market making. Market making (i.e. quoting bid and ask prices and making a profit when other people cross your spread) is essential for well-functioning markets, and computers do it better than humans (and have done since shortly after 2000). The problem is the sheer amount of elite human capital going into a competition for speed which is now effectively zero sum because computers are placing and cancelling orders faster than a real-money investor can make decisions. To fix this without chasing away the market makers the markets rely on to function, you would need microstructure-level reform carried out by someone who knows what they are doing.

The most interesting proposals I have seen are:

  • All orders entering the market place are held until the end of the second, and then orders arriving in the same second are processed in a random order
  • Allow pricing in units of 1/10th of a cent per share (for trades which are not a multiple of 10 shares, the total price is rounded to the nearest cent in favour of the market maker) - this makes it an order of magnitude easier for a later order to outbid an earlier one on price, reducing the incentive to compete on speed.

Thank you for having tactical answers to this question. From the basic research I've done, it seems like the primary way to fix this stuff is to slow things down.

The only convincing steelmen I've heard for keeping things "as fast as possible" is:

  • Sub-second trading helps prevent more massive price swings
  • If US markets artificially slowed trading or rounded prices, activity would move to other countries

Any others you can think of?

The steel man for keeping things as fast as possible is that anything artificial we impose might be worse and fucking up market making would be a pretty big deal. So much money hinges on that a regulator really cannot afford some dumb solution that benefits a single arbitrary party or is open to abuse. It's not an unsolveable problem, but just letting people compete on speed does solve it pretty well, so there's not a ton of incentive to fuck with what currently works.

Crypto is trying a bunch of different things to solve their version of this (They refer to it as MEV, basically the problem of block producers reordering transactions to extract value by front-running), and solving it algorithimically at the protocol level in a way that doesn't have some sort of drawback is currently proving really difficult.

"vast majority of parasites" is a massive overstatement, even though I largely agree that many could probably be fired. Most are nice, pretty normal people who work in a social context that does not properly reward - often even punishes - hard work and efficiency, so they don't. And because that's how people are, they have some clearly (to me, at least) self-serving believes why their work can't be made significantly easier.

Primarily imo government work needs to be re-structured significantly, and while doing that you can fire many, which is part of the reason why they resist efforts to change (why do you want to take away my nice & safe job?). But if you just fire them without changing the culture, you get the problem Scott described in his latest essay.

On your question for wall street, I'm still an ordoliberalist at heart; So while I think that correct pricing is very valuable, the degree to which some capital companies are both central and arcane is enough to allow substantial abuse, especially if they introduce ever-more mystic instruments. There probably is some way to limit them without hurting the overall economy in practical terms and as you say redirect their tremendous human capital to better endeavours. But at least for the time being, I don't really trust any current western government to not fuck this up massively, and any practical consequences are impossible to predict without knowing the details of any such plan.

if you are interested in some defenses of HFT's social value, here it is, from the horse' mouth. and even if you don't buy any of that, realize that it's a very small industry. the number of particle physicists being stolen away is absolutely miniscule.

hedge funds and commodity trading are a quite different thing - efficient price discovery is good, actually.

I would be all for this. Some amount of financial sophistication is needed to make sure that markets work properly, loans are available etc. but things have long since switched to a place where the vast majority of the work seems to be intra-financial ‘bigger fool’ games where the market is just betting on the market and value isn’t created but shuffled round and disguised. That expertise could be used to produce value instead.

The proper pricing of commodities and equities is actually of great value to society. The Physics Ph.D in a Manhattan office building high-frequency trading corn futures doesn't see anything except numbers on a screen, but corn farmers in Iowa (and consumers of corn like chicken farmers) benefit greatly from accurate and liquid futures markets in corn.

In order to consistantly make money in trading, one has to buy low and sell high. This inherently provides a price-stabilizing effect. Buying when prices are low causes prices to rise; selling when prices are high causes prices to fall.

The Physics Ph.D in a Manhattan office building high-frequency trading corn futures doesn't see anything except numbers on a screen, but corn farmers in Iowa (and consumers of corn like chicken farmers) benefit greatly from accurate and liquid futures markets in corn.

You can have extremely accurate and liquid corn futures without high frequency trading, and without sucking thousands of man-years of the highest human capital down the drain. We're not arguing about banning future markets, but I'm pretty sure corn farmers still can grow corn if you take away synthetic collateralized debt obligations and other modern financial vehicles.

There is also great value in market depth and liquidity, which these actors also provide.

Intuitively it does seem like there's some point past which there isn't any more "real" value being added (like the difference between transaction in a second vs a quarter of a second, or whatever), but the processes which get to that point are what enable all the good stuff that came before it.

I feel similarly about LBOs: they seem like a stupid legal trick, but all the conditions that allow them to happen are things you want your economy to have.

A good thought experiment I heard from Russ Roberts to help think about the tradeoffs involved is to consider the extreme possibilities. On one end, we could extend open market/active trading hours to be 24/7/365. On the other end, we could just have one market at one moment each day, say, everyone brings their orders at exactly noon every day, all the orders that can get filled, do, and then they go home until the next day. I don't really have all that much of a personal opinion, but it helps one think about possible tradeoffs.

A tool here would be to look at how this worked in the past, before HFT was enabled. Were things better or worse in terms of pricing?

I think the markets not functioning as effectively on weekends is pretty garbage, for instance, but we've long passed the point where HFT software can lead to major failures, not to mention the thousands of smaller ones that bugs can introduce. The capabilities of AI to analyze and make decisions with HFT capabilities is only going to make things worse.

Maybe I'm just latching onto it for the heck of it, but the fidelity of time a second provides should be slow enough to keep a human in the loop and reduce the iterations for software failure.

As I talk through it, though, I'm still unconvinced that this sort of regulation is possible. With the time horizon of a second, I have little-to-no doubt that shadow markets would develop between traders, even if explicitly outlawed.

I'm actually largely with you that the minute optimizations that these guys build in "The Market" are generally pretty worthless, and probably outstripped by the other perverse incentives and distortions they create.

I view them as an inevitable side effect of capitalism, and I don't think anyone's smart enough to carve out what should be banned and enforce it. I think China would more effectively compete with us overall if Xi didn't treat their economy the way he does.

It is always satisfying, though, to read about what China does occasionally to stomp on corruption or other frivolously antisocial bullshit like this. No pussyfooting around with fines: people go to prison, get tortured, or executed. The second order effects suck I think but my paternalistic/animalistic monkey brain loves it.

There’s something instinctual about hating people who make lots of money off of not highly visible or hard work things. We love NFL players and moviestars, we hate investment bankers.

In the historical record, we see merchants being hated and nobles being loved. Granted, this is partly because nobles are writing things down. But noblemen seem to also have been genuinely more popular among the commoners than merchants. Every society replicates the distinction in rich people between nobles, who are wealthy for visible, high status reasons, guild masters who are wealthy for visibly working hard(even if the hard work is mostly someone else’s- think titans of industry that build companies), and merchants, who are wealthy for moving value around. As a general rule the commoners love the nobles, admire the guild masters, and hate the merchants. And, obviously, stewards code as a subset of merchants; making a living off of managing somebody else’s money or property is- well, it’s not yours, it’s gotta be at least mildly dishonest.

Today we see that Elon and Trump had popular fanbases before their political turn; Wall Street types never do. There are villain professional athletes, but in equal measure there are those beloved by the public. I think this explains a lot of todays political divides that confuse the PMC(is there any definition for that word?). But it’s a deeper thing. The peasants think, and always have, that the stewards and merchants are there to screw them for personal gain and if the nobles and guild masters knew they’d stop it.

Like yes, cultural affinity explains some of the Republican gains with the working class, but can you imagine Trump driving a pickup truck? Democrats used to get this- they had union reps that worked their way up from the shop floor campaigning for them, not professional managers. No amount of hunting photo shoots can get around the issue there.

I'm with you, but I don't know for how long he can keep evading assassinations.

I'm going to be in Manhattan for a week on a business trip. What should I do/see outside of working hours?

The Met. The Frick. The Morgan Library and Museum. The Neue Galerie. The American Folk Art Museum. It will be hard to get into some of them, though, as they close at 6pm.

Depends a ton on what sort of things you're interested in. IMO, most of the usual tourist stuff is kind of overrated, and there's advice from a million places on that anyways.

Like music? You can probably find a few concerts of any genre you find interesting. There's also a bazillion comedy clubs, and broadway theaters. Restaurants of any type of food you might be interested in trying. Irish bars staffed by actual Irish people. Politics? The Democrat party may own the city, but there's still a surprising amount of activity from any political position you can come up with. Trump Tower is still open to the public, you can just go in and eat at the restaurant or drink at the bar or gawk at the merchandise on sale. Some places like Washington Square Park are usually full of odd people doing odd things if you find that sort of thing interesting.

Bill's Supper Club on 54th, trust me on that one!

New York Italian food, I have heard, is better than elsewhere.

Italians all over the world will claim that their own specific variation of Italian food is the best one (also the best food, period).

Think of some cuisines you've rarely/never had. With few exceptions (Mexican probably the most notable one), the best available in the US will likely be somewhere in NYC.

You could do the standard sightseeing, but if you're limited to outside normal working hours anything outdoors will be dark and cold and really not all that impressive. If you're into art, you could hit the museums.

If you have any specific hobbies, there are a lot of specialty stores for them that might have eclectic offerings.

Otherwise, the US is sufficiently homogenized that there isn't too much that you could only find in NYC.

What do people think about the idea of longevity escape velocity happening in our lifetimes? (I’m 32)

I confess thoughts of my mortality have hit me pretty hard recently and this idea has given me some hope. It seems like it could be cope but there’s also huge amounts of money in this space (like Altos Labs) and it seems to have come a long way in terms of legitimacy and talent recruitment from a decade ago.

Combining that with AI improvements it doesn’t seem so unreasonable to me that we could conceivably see some wild advances in the next 2-3 decades.

I mean even 15 years ago immunotherapy for cancer was not noteworthy enough to be included in a popular overview book “The Emperor of All Maladies” and now it’s a treatment that’s used all over the place, albeit with varying success rates.

Hmm.. While I do expect that in a "business as usual" universe, without transformative AGI, we would still achieve LEV in about 15-30 years, we don't seem to exist in that universe.

I think aging needs to be tackled from a dozen different angles. The odds of dying from a myriad of causes that can loosely be lumped into "old age" rise exponentially with age, according to the Gompertz–Makeham law.

It's not just that things go wrong - it's that when things go wrong, they make other things go wrong faster. Your immune system falters, so you get more infections and malignant cells, which stress your body, which damages your immune system further. Your cells' repair mechanisms slow down, leading to more damage, leading to even slower repairs. It's a death spiral in the most literal sense.

I consider aging to be a very difficult problem to solve. Difficult is very much not the same thing as impossible, given that we have existence proofs of macroscopic organisms with negligible senescence, but I think you're looking at several hundred billions of dollars and a decade or two of research to achieve LEV, in the absence of AGI. We seem to have about an OOM less funding and close to an OOM more time IRL, which I naively would expect to be very roughly equivalent (once again, no AGI).

It would easier to simply replace the body wholesale. If the heart fails, install a cybernetic heart. If the lungs give out, transplant a new, artificially grown organ. The one place where we wouldn't even know where to begin making this work is the brain. I'm still less than totally pessimistic there, because we can regenerate some neuronal tissue, as has been demonstrated with healing damage to the spinal cord.

In the extreme case, we could do destructive brain-scanning, preferably post-mortem, but that would be extremely expensive and slow with current technology, and we can't read the equivalent of the 'weights' in our biological neural network while scanning them, just the connections. That's why we have neural connectomes for some small organisms like C. elegans, but can't truly emulate them yet.

Still, if the average person on this server is 35 years old, we're still looking at 50 years to solve this problem given a reasonable life expectancy today. That is a long time, and I would absolutely not bet against it happening even in the absence of AGI. If I were forced to put up odds, I'd say >70% for LEV in 50 years in the absence of AGI.

Fortunately, or not, we don't seem to live in a world where AGI isn't imminent. That makes me far more bullish on every bit of technology that isn't categorically forbidden by the laws of physics as we know them. At the bare minimum, even if AGI doesn't end up OOMs smarter than us, it still holds the potential to grossly accelerate cognitive and industrial output, giving us more money and resources to throw at the problem. I'm far less peeved these days about {The World} not spending said hundreds of billions at a minimum (I'd prefer trillions) on solving aging, because we are in fact spending comparable sums on achieving AGI, which should speed up the process considerably.

Not that we don't spend much more money on healthcare as a whole, but we go about it in an ass-backwards manner. The GM law tells us that trying to solve the diseases of aging after aging has taken place is closing the stable door after the horses have bolted. If you cure an 80 year old's cancer, then his heart is going to give out in a few more years. Cure that, and his brain will pickle, 'age-related atrophy' being the catch-all phrase when you can't point to a more specific disease like Alzheimer's. You would ideally do much more preventive maintenance, and not change the upholstery and engine oil in an old beater that's on its last legs.

TLDR: I don't worry about dying of old age all that much, even if AI doesn't go FOOM. Our current expenditure on SENS is grossly inadequate, but we would still have 50 years to figure it out for the modal Mottizen. And that's before accounting for us immanetizing the eschaton with superintelligence. Oh, and take ozempic, at this rate it'll probably turn out to cure aging too, and not just obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer's and gambling addictions (this is only 75% a joke).

For a good overview of the state of anti-aging as it currently stands:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dWAmkSqLE4YMQRuhj/a-primer-on-the-current-state-of-longevity-research

I have to disagree. All of this is ridiculous optimism. You can’t describe the mechanisms, the technology, the research routes. “AI will figure it out”. We’re yet to even figure out whether AI trained on human reasoning can get much smarter than us (collectively). AI could automate 95% of human labor and still not even come close to reasonably extending the lifespan of affluent people in rich countries (presumably automated abundance would have a larger impact on the global lifespan, but I’m not talking about that). This is a particularly strange form of AI hyperoptimism (which even I, someone pretty e/acc, balk at) wherein the technology is essentially magic and all we need is a sufficiently advanced LLM and it will literally be able to derive, deduct and synthesize the sum of human knowledge to suddenly find mountains of undiscovered low hanging fruit that no human being or team of researchers, scientists or capitalists ever even imagined, that will likely turn out to be as simple as some kind of cheap novel cocktail of existing drugs and supplements that we just didn’t realize was actually the key to eternity.

First, the "we can't describe the mechanisms" argument is peculiar. We couldn't describe the mechanisms of most breakthrough technologies before they existed. In 1900, you couldn't have described how digital computers would work. In 1950, you couldn't have detailed how CRISPR gene editing would function. The inability to specify exact mechanisms in advance isn't evidence against feasibility.

But more importantly, we do know many of the mechanisms of aging. We have the Hallmarks of Aging framework. We understand telomere attrition, mitochondrial dysfunction, cellular senescence, stem cell exhaustion, and epigenetic alterations. What we lack isn't theoretical understanding - it's the engineering capability to intervene effectively at scale.

If there's an AI winter around, it hasn't gotten particularly chilly yet. We can still get improved performance by throwing more compute and data at the problem. Most strikingly, the use of large amounts of synthetic data hasn't caused mode collapse, so we're already bootstrapping.

I think the economy hasn't even digested the full consequences of GPT-4, let alone more recent models. o1 and o3 might be remarkably expensive at the moment (which may not last given the OOMs of cost reductions each model to date seems to experience within its lifetime), but it also demonstrates performance that, for more taxing problems, is worth the expense.

We’re yet to even figure out whether AI trained on human reasoning can get much smarter than us (collectively).

Take a moment to consider deeply what it even means to be asking that question. Implicitly, you seem to acknowledge that a given model can outperform most individual humans, and often in their core domains to boot. So now the goal-post has moved, and is moving fast enough to achieve escape velocity itself.

15 years back, getting an AI model to identify a picture had a bird in it was stunning. (Insert relevant XKCD).

We're also in the middle of a Renaissance in industrial robotics, so it's not like our models are stuck as disembodied yogis either.

Even if AGI only improved modestly, what do you think the implications of having an entity capable of doing knowledge work for far less than minimum wage 24/7 are? Mass unemployment, and probably a lot of economic growth. At the bare minimum, the latter means more money and resources to throw at problems we care about, even the ones we don't seem to care about as much as we should.

Intelligence is powerful. We are still making AI more intelligent, and it's already at the point where it can solve PhD math problems and Terence Tao thinks it's a mediocre grad student (mediocre in the eyes of arguably the most accomplished modern mathematician), and that was a statement on an older model to boot.

This is a particularly strange form of AI hyperoptimism (which even I, someone pretty e/acc, balk at) wherein the technology is essentially magic and all we need is a sufficiently advanced LLM and it will literally be able to derive, deduct and synthesize the sum of human knowledge to suddenly find mountains of undiscovered low hanging fruit that no human being or team of researchers, scientists or capitalists ever even imagined, that will likely turn out to be as simple as some kind of cheap novel cocktail of existing drugs and supplements that we just didn’t realize was actually the key to eternity

Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. We're landing skyscrapers on their tails after circling the globe, most accounts of magic pale in comparison. Even fiction acknowledges "hard" vs "soft" magic systems, with the former being bounded and limited by clearly acknowledged laws, and the latter doing whatever the author feels like today. I am positing, with reasonable confidence, that even ASI is limited by physics. The world today has more Witchcraft and Wizardry than dreamt by anyone burned at the stake or those doing the burning.

What unlocks more technology? Intelligence. What are we scaling up? Intelligence.

It would be more surprising if there were literally no low-hanging fruit. We make advancements every year that turn out to arise from the implications of research and data collected decades ago, but where nobody connected the dots till much later. The Efficient Market Hypothesis is not actually, literally true, and there is absolutely no analogue for the Marketplace of Ideas.

that will likely turn out to be as simple as some kind of cheap novel cocktail of existing drugs and supplements that we just didn’t realize was actually the key to eternity.

You're arguing with a strawman here. I make no such claims. It might well turn out that reversing aging is incredibly expensive and time consuming even with Singularity tech (even if I think that's unlikely, I can't rule it out). If you told Turing that instantiating the machine god required etching quadrillions of runes on a few inches of silicon, he might balk at that ever happening, not having the luxury of knowing that Moore's law was around the corner. Besides, things that might be disconcertingly expensive for us might well not be so to a much richer and more advanced society.

We could start work on a Dyson Swarm today. It's not particularly hard to build a solar panel and put it in solar orbit. We might even create replicators that speed up the process (humans are Von-Neumann replicators after all), but it doesn't take much of a leap in logic to think that AGI might let us do that far quicker than tens of thousands of years.

Even if AGI only improved modestly, what do you think the implications of having an entity capable of doing knowledge work for far less than minimum wage 24/7 are? Mass unemployment, and probably a lot of economic growth.

Side point: have you come around to expecting universal basic income, then?

We could start work on a Dyson Swarm today.

Sure, but this is exactly the issue with what you say when you say:

We understand telomere attrition, mitochondrial dysfunction, cellular senescence, stem cell exhaustion, and epigenetic alterations. What we lack isn't theoretical understanding - it's the engineering capability to intervene effectively at scale.

“We understand the basics of how to terraform Mars to make it habitable to humans, and have done since the 1950s, probably before. What we lack isn’t theoretical understanding, it’s the engineering capability to intervene effectively at scale” is indeed a statement that makes complete sense. We don’t know yet, but reversing aging could easily be a ‘terraform Mars’ level problem.

Side point: have you come around to expecting universal basic income, then?

Expecting it if the Powers That Be are benevolent enough to want to maintain or improve the standard of living of the billions of people made obsolete? It seems like a necessity, since I consider it unlikely that baseline humans can be augmented to be be competitive with AGI without massive subsidies, and the end result will likely be indistinguishable (I don't necessarily consider this a bad outcome).

Probably true, but not reliably so, and there might well be a period of severe pain along the way. It's well worth preparing for the worst case scenario that isn't just instant death.

“We understand the basics of how to terraform Mars to make it habitable to humans, and have done since the 1950s, probably before. What we lack isn’t theoretical understanding, it’s the engineering capability to intervene effectively at scale” is indeed a statement that makes complete sense. We don’t know yet, but reversing aging could easily be a ‘terraform Mars’ level problem.

"Extremely difficult problems" encompasses a range of difficulties that extend all the way till literally impossible. I think solving aging is a $200 billion and twenty years problem (give or take a hundred billion or a decade) whereas terraforming Mars is, by most estimates, a $several trillion and a century problem.

I would be rather surprised if we didn't end up with anti-aging by 2050, and the majority of the probability mass I'd expect to assign would be in things like WW3, societal collapse or AI x-risk. In other words, I expect that dying from old age is unlikely for us, and if we do die, it's because something else got us first.

If you google Bryan Johnson, you'll discover a very wealthy guy who turns his whole life into a mission. The goal of the mission is extending the mission. He eats seeds, berries, and protein compounds, all before like midday, then nothing, injects himself with various substances, sleeps a lot, takes various supplements (until he stops taking them), has weird waxy skin, and declares that he isn't going to die. I'd rather be me.

Wishful thinking. All of it.

What do people think about the idea of longevity escape velocity happening in our lifetimes? (I’m 32)

I am very bearish on this ever happening.

There are islands of longevity where people live for 100+ years very frequently, but everyone with a documented age follows the Bible’s rule that no one lives longer than 120. Bodies just don’t last, even with no sickness people aren’t going to live more than a decade or too longer than the current oldest people.

I believe it actually says 120.

You’re right, edited.

Tangent:

Let's say we get the MacGuffin that extends everyone to 130+ with ease. Does the Pope-At-The-Time allow for suicide after 120?

There are islands of longevity where people live for 100+ years very frequently

Where? The Blue Zones thing is fake. https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-blue-zone-distraction

Probably we could find some real ones somewhere. Monaco seems like a good candidate with a lifespan nearing 90 years old. Chinese-American women live to nearly 92 on average.

But yeah, maximum life span hasn't increased. The worldwide gains in life expectancy are just the result of a higher percentage of people reaching their genetic potential. We'll never have a life expectancy over 100 years old unless we can fix aging itself.

Fair, and I suppose probably unsurprising.

I mean even 15 years ago immunotherapy for cancer was not noteworthy enough to be included in a popular overview book “The Emperor of All Maladies” and now it’s a treatment that’s used all over the place, albeit with varying success rates.

Cancer immunotherapy is great, but it's not going to move the needle on deaths from cancer. You get maybe 30-40% cure rates in advanced melanoma (very difficult to give you exact numbers based on how you slice up your patient population), much lower cure rate in lung cancer and a statistically significant but depressingly small boost in survival for a bunch of other cancers. Typically those with high TMB. Then you have CARs which work wonders for two leukemias, but haven't been made to work in any meaningful way for solid tumors.

if you want to actually move the needle on cancer deaths, you need something with meaningful cure rates for lung cancer (vast majority is NSCLC), pancreatic cancer, prostate/breast cancer and colorectal cancer. Melanoma and ALL/multiple myeloma (leukemias that respond to CARs) don't even make the list.

Combining that with AI improvements it doesn’t seem so unreasonable to me that we could conceivably see some wild advances in the next 2-3 decades.

AI has been great for lit review and protein design but otherwise hasn't really impact bio research yet. Even if they build autonomous agents that can run experiments, I fear they'll be trained on the same dogshit qualitative cartoon literature and it will be largely impossible for them to make the kind of progress singularitarians imagine.

What do people think about the idea of longevity escape velocity happening in our lifetimes? (I’m 32)

Very bearish, for reasons I've outlined before and don't really have time to get into now. If you want the redux:

  1. Look at Calico. Launched in 2013, raised 2.5 billion, and here's their pipeline. If you aren't used to looking at drug pipelines, theirs is pathetic for the age and funding of the company and...nothing is related to aging?

  2. Aubrey de Grey is a hack. The internal research program at his institute was absolute garbage, and whenever he claimed credit for a significant paper it was because they gave grants to some traditional academic labs.

  3. The vast majority of the drugs right now are small molecules or biologics (mostly antibodies) inhibiting single genes. Maybe you'll find something that can modestly extend lifespan, but aging is complex and poorly understood so the odds of something significant coming out of this approach is unlikely. But it will nevertheless be where most of the money goes.

Books like this seem more promising to me, but have plenty of problems of their own to overcome.

I handle a lot of cases involving mesothelioma due to asbestos exposure and, though this is completely anecdotal, immunotherapy seems to be working wonders on that front. It seems like a few years ago meso was a death sentence, and now there are people who, while not exactly cured, seem to be living with it for years. One case involved a 60 year old woman who had a resection and subsequent immunotherapy after being symptomatic for over a year before doctors even figured out the correct diagnosis, and she was judged to be completely cancer free, which is something I thought impossible. There are of course plenty of people who respond poorly to it, but these are usually people in their 80s who were probably close to death anyway. Some of these cases are surprisingly sad, though, beyond the fact that any cancer case is sad. One that I'm working on now involved an 87 year old man who was walking miles every day over challenging terrain without any problem and slipped on ice when out on one of his walks. He hurt his ribs and went to the hospital for a CT scan, which uncovered pleural effusions and was suspicious for meso, which a biopsy confirmed. I honestly wonder for a guy his age who wasn't having any problems if the treatment is worse than just living with the disease until he needs palliative care, considering that he was otherwise active but was wiped out by the cancer treatments.

I handle a lot of cases involving mesothelioma due to asbestos exposure and, though this is completely anecdotal, immunotherapy seems to be working wonders on that front. It seems like a few years ago meso was a death sentence, and now there are people who, while not exactly cured, seem to be living with it for years

I don't know mesothelioma because it's relatively rare, and I don't see patients - just lines on a graph. That being said, it seems like a pretty similar story with 2 year survival rates of 41% versus 27%. Don't get me wrong, if I get cancer I'll take the pembro, but we're laughably far from curing cancer or LEV.

If you get diagnosed with a solid tumor (i.e. not a leukemia), basically you're either lucky and we caught it early enough to remove it entirely by surgery or you're going to die from it with vanishingly rare exceptions.

One case involved a 60 year old woman who had a resection and subsequent immunotherapy after being symptomatic for over a year before doctors even figured out the correct diagnosis, and she was judged to be completely cancer free, which is something I thought impossible.

I imagine that's bad for your bottom line. Or she lived long enough for you to collect?

I honestly wonder for a guy his age who wasn't having any problems if the treatment is worse than just living with the disease until he needs palliative care, considering that he was otherwise active but was wiped out by the cancer treatments.

Yeah. That's the choice to be made. Hopefully he was of sound mind and deciding for himself.

I once had a nightmare that eternal longevity tech arrived when I was old. Everyone was frozen where they were, so the young people were 18 forever, but the old people were just old forever. Even excellent cosmetic surgery can't change your age, and with ever growing numbers of billions of people young and hot forever, those who were older - the last generations to ever be old - were discriminated against, ignored, and treated awfully. I'm sure many people have written science fiction stores with this exact plot, but I found it sad anyway.

It's also one of the more likely scenarios, since arresting senescence is likely a more achievable task than reversal.

It is a rather unlikely scenario, I'd go so far as to say ridiculously unlikely. It would mean that even with effectively unbounded amounts of time to tackle the problem we'd make no progress.

Being stuck with the cognition of an 85 year old for another twenty years is far more likely than being stuck that way for a number of years that could extend to Heat Death, or at the very least thousands of years.

It would make sense. There would be this period of discrimination and living horror that old people would have to endure (100 years as a fragile elder?) before reversal technologies were developed.


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