Sam Bankman-Fried had to have his parents and an unknown third-party sign a $250 million bond. In the media, it has been widely reported that this is "secured" by the parents' house, which is worth far less than $250 million, and is almost certainly worth less than $25 million which seems to be another magic number for bail bonds in this court. The most detailed article I could find on the mechanics was this one but I'm hoping a lawyer here could actually clarify the situation.
Does 10% collateral mean that the parents and the third-party person are literally taking a loan out against the house and issuing the court a check for $25 million? In the media, they have mostly been saying that the house is being put up as collateral, which doesn't imply to me that this is the case.
In the case where he skips bail, the parents and this other person are on the hook for $250 million. If the house is being used as collateral, wouldn't this imply that all of their assets are collateral, and so the house specifically being collateral is irrelevant?
Does the court assess the creditworthiness of the people signing the bond, to ensure that they actually have $250 million to pay?
Only a couple hours after asking this, I saw this article that seems to resolve my question if accurate. Their summary is that my confusion was well warranted, it's literally just that they committed a $4m as "collateral" that's forfeit if he doesn't show up, and a promise to pay the full amount.
Edit: additional interesting discussion on HackerNews
Seconding 5434a at not understanding the sublimation bit, but a couple of weeks ago I was driving to work in the morning alone on a dark country road listening to '100 Years' by Five for Fighting (2003) and some flood gate just unlatched in my brain and I spent the remaining 15 minutes of my commute just absolutely emphatically sobbing, laughing, profoundly sad and terribly grateful to be alive, struck by the absurdity of the experience.
This was I think the third time this 19 year old #28 US Billboard Hot 100 Single soft rock ballad has flipped that exact switch for me while driving alone, over the course of the last probably 6 months. Always catches me on normal ass days.
I don't understand the relation to sublimation so I'll just give you the last two times I can remember shedding tears that weren't due to cutting onions.
-The one line comment on /r/4chan "foot fags unite and take over" hit me with enough mounting waves of laughter to tip me over the edge.
-For something more sombre, watching the group stage of the world cup reminded me of the Danish player basically dropping dead on the pitch last year at the Euros. Awful.
I was wondering wether the change is acute or durable if so how long.
Most importantly I am wondering how much the notion of limited/scarce lymphocyte T memory is true over longterm, AKA would a simulated vaccine infection recruit an excess amount of lymphocyte T and therefore accelerate functionally thymus involution/age immunosuppression and age immuno-inadaptativity.
As a reminder, lymphocyte T half life is 17.5 years.
Finally has anyone data/insights on the relevance of semi-chronic (how long) inflammation because of increased immune activity (including cytokines) by vaccines (and on oxidative stress) ?
Those are the questions that matter regarding the latent invisible (actually not) effects vaccines could have when we get old in 50 years.
Note:
No I'm not an antivaxx.
I have erudition in medecine but regarding those questions I am partially ignorant.
It is plausible the chronic very long term effects of those vaccines are negligible but still those questions needs to be answered, and to even begin, must be answered wether the vaccine has chronic effects at all, AKA at least one Biomarker that would be altered over a year? many years?
This is completely observable but the world is it seems, too mediocre to do said observation semi-exhaustively.
However even if the inflammation would be only acute (not a given), the fact it induce myocarditis shows that effect on health can be potent.
Therefore it doesn't take many braincells to understand that humans have varying health damage "budgets" and that on many, they would not have myocarditis, yet it could still plausibly induce long term microscopic conformational changes (mitochondria fitness, apoptosis or cellular sensecence) and other low observable latent accelerated ageing.
Again I believe a significant effect is unlikely, yet I also believe the medical system is too mediocre to fund the answers to those questions, let alone update policies based on said answers. One day, mankind will again play with dices, but this day, mankind will be doomed.
I hope we got lucky.
I hope someone will collaboratively take motivation to answer some of my important questions.
Is the enjoyment of music sourced from the aural experiences of real life, which become associated with all kinds of emotional states? And music is a re-arrangement of different “conditioned sounds” gained from real life experience?
This would explain why some people cannot appreciate music (their minds have a poor memory of sound as it relates to experiences), why certain musical complexity is appreciated by older adults, why children have a primitive appreciation of music where they only like music that codes for basic happiness. And also why some people who have poor emotional intelligence appear to have a terrible taste in music (the other way is not necessarily the case).
Then I would also wonder:
is the music unsophistication of east asia the result of tonal language (where sound memory is encoded in logic rather than emotion), or the result of an actual mental de-prioritization of emotional states? For this last one, consider how European art and religion and poetry is so dramatic and sympathetic to strong emotional states of all sorts, and East Asian less so (emphasizing transience, stability, equanimity)
is sufficient music-listening necessary to fully appreciate complex music and why? Is there also an element of “learning the language of compositions”? This must be the case but how does it work?
what’s happening when we hear a song (for a lot of people: Satie’s gymnopedie) and it brings us a new emotional state?
is too much music bad because it desensitizes us to the significance of real life sound cues?
Is the enjoyment of music sourced from the aural experiences of real life
Probably not. E.g. what 'aural experiences' would to chords correspond to?
'some people can't appreciate music', 'adults like more complex music', and 'children like simpler music' are explained by most theories of music that attribute any complexity to it. 'poor emotional intelligence ~ bad taste in music' is also just explained by 'smart people like smart things'.
That is a big claim to make. Western music elevates traits of music that they've identified as important, and undermines aspects of music that they've not paid attention to. For ex: western music (pre-20th century) cared a lot about Harmony & melody, but IMO, was little lacking in their understanding of rhythm, jamming and the power of space (silence). More here(I know, ignore the title, it has good substance.)
Now, the 17-21st century were a golden period of prosperity and time for the West in a manner that the east simply couldn't compete. I don't think it is fair to compare the recent exponential flourishing of western music in a couple of the richest places on earth (Vienna, USA) to places that were struggling to make ends meet in the east.
My theory is that just as the west looks to a few locations for their artistic direction (NYC, LA, London, Paris, Vienna), East-Asia largely relied on China and India as the their sources of artistic direction. (especially SEA, Japan, Korea). Indian classical & contemporary music comfortably goes toe-to-toe with anything western classical or contemporary music throws at it, but Indian classical has failed to flourish over the last 400 years for obvious reasons. Chinese classical music on the other hand, stagnated from colonial humiliation and was destroyed like all classical structures due to communism. So now you have this naïve blank slate that appears pretty bad when compared to contemporaries elsewhere. The rest of the continent despite its best efforts could not recover from having its 2 main sources of aesthetic understanding collapse. (Japan was less affected, as 2 centuries of isolation forced it to come up with it's own aesthetic identity separate from Indian-inspired Buddhism or Chinese cultural influence)
is sufficient music-listening necessary to fully appreciate complex music
I believe so. I have had an interesting journey with pop. I used to find it bland and only listening to progressive (almost deliberately complex) music for a decade. Those 10 years made me a discerning listener, listening for atmospheric queues, syncopation, tension-release and the precision of good production. Now that I can discern good pop from bad pop, I've begun to appreciate the magic and the power of simple yet effective tools.
The specific things that took a lot of learning were:
What is a pocket, why do people like dancing ? -> it unlocked my enjoyment of funk & Rap (Only after I learned to play the drums)
What does an odd-time signature actually do emotionally -> Unlocked tension/release and African-style music (After listening to a lot of prog)
What is the "free feeling" & stank-face ? -> unlocked my enjoyment of blues, jazz, Indian-classical(After actually jamming with people in real life)
What is atmosphere ? -> unlocked my enjoyment of western classical. (After brute forcing my way through Black metal and Black gaze. I hated it until I started loving it. Also, attending real life concerts. It just hits different.)
What is production -> unlocked my enjoyment of pop (after trying to get a note to sound just-right when I was tuning my guitars and drums)
That being said, the best works can be enjoyed by noobs and experts alike. Lose yourself, Comfortably Numb, Hotel California, Pavrotti's Nessun Dorma, 10,000 days part 2, All along the watch tower or Certain Ragas are universal experiences.
I have gone through a similar journey with soccer. From being a kid that loved flamboyant tricksters like Ronaldinho, to now appreciating players like Fabregas or Berbatov who use the basics to absolute perfection. I can also finally appreciate players who seemingly stand in the right spot every time. (Busquets, T.Silva, Giroud, Jorginho). That being said, just like great music, even an idiot can see the greatness of Messi.
what’s happening when we hear a song (for a lot of people: Satie’s gymnopedie) and it brings us a new emotional state?
Like all aesthetics, there are some universal cues (symmetry, Height, Clear face) and some that signal higher-level societal phenomenon. (Japanese like crooked teeth, attraction for thin frail sickly-looking women in China and western modelling, attraction towards lighter skin to signal class and not needing to work in fields in India)
is too much music bad because it desensitizes us to the significance of real life sound cues?
I refuse to buy that. If anything, music makes me a more discerning listener towards real life sound cues as well. But yeah, don't wear headphones everywhere and aurally separate yourself from society.
I miss all of the posts about transhumanism, the future of politics/law, medical science, etc on the old forum. I'm interested in writing some posts on these topics, and happy to do research, but a bit low on ideas at the moment. Anyone have prompts or posts they've been thinking of writing to share? Happy to collaborate or edit as well.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
TheDag 1yr ago
I want to get my thoughts on the future of totalitarianism/collectivism in order, given new or improved technologies and social technologies and other tendencies that are currently coming. I suppose I could phrase the question as "will humanity as a whole adopt new forms of social organization, and will they be abhorrent to me?". Some trends that I suspect could become worse:
People being increasingly online, divorced from their physical surroundings, anonymized and atomized and drowned in useless information.
The dilution and possible disappearance of western nations and their complete replacement by cosmopolitan societies-of-convenience.
The further domestication of man through urbanization, infantilization, safetyism, the elimination of the private sphere, micromanagement of the economy, complete surveillance and tracking.
Declining standards of living in the west due to economic inefficiencies, state mismanagement and plain old decadence, and how people will adjust or be adjusted to them.
-- How do we define performance enhancing drugs? Historically the tests and justifications have been legality, negative side effects, and combining the two to say other competitors shouldn't be forced to take X to keep up. As medical science advances, to what extent will these arguments become irrelevant or old fashioned? Is WADA doing any kind of work towards new standards over time? Is the public drifting towards laxly tested sports versus highly tested sports? How do athletes doing medical tourism for eg stem cell treatments fit in?
-- How will future security cameras defeat the inevitable "deepfake defense" and maintain the ability to serve as conclusive evidence in court? I'm going after a gang of kids who vandalized a house we own, and I have decent camera shots of them, but a sufficiently skilled photoshopper could have done them, how do you get beyond a reasonable doubt?
-- How common are major and minor aesthetic procedures across young people in different countries, and how have aesthetic and cultural preferences changed in cultures where such procedures are more common? Already around me I see more and more Instagram face, and I find it unattractive, is that because it's naturally unattractive, because it's unoriginal and uncanny, or because it's culturally signifying that we wouldn't get along in the same way one of those clever joke t shirts would?
Those are ideas kicking around my head where I feel I lack the expertise to say anything, but I'd like to read someone as smart as you think about them.
How will future security cameras defeat the inevitable "deepfake defense"
Even if fakes become indistinguishable from real footage, it'll still remain valuable. After all, there are plenty of forms of evidence we accept today that are even easier to fake.
Eg. we accept witness testimony, even though just lying is even easier than photoshopping. So I think we'll just see the same standards applied: we'll trust footage on the basis of things like whether you have a motive to frame those particular people etc. So it's still going to be stronger evidence than, say, just reporting that you saw them, since doctoring footage would require actual malice on your part, while you could have been mistaken if it was just your recollection. And it should also be noted that just being indistinguishable from a fake "from the pixels" doesn't make it impossible to distinguish in general: like all lies, you're opening up yourself to contradictions if there are other reliable pieces of evidence to compare with (eg. if the kids have an alibi, or if your footage differs from your neighbours in terms of things like expected shadows / ambient light etc for the same time, you could be caught out). Even if no such evidence happens to exist, you can't reliably know that in advance, and so the fact that you're implicitly opening yourself up to prosecution in turn should it be wrong makes your footage more credible.
There are also probably ways to improve this further should such claims become more prevalent. Eg. cameras handled by third party companies that archive the realtime footage and provide a documented and consistent chain of custody for the evidence: faking footage in such a system would require a lot more technical knowledge.
Feel free to ask me about IPEDs, there are many interesting ones.
Now regarding your question, one should observe that the property of being a drug is contingent, and therefore the question of the legality or (di)incentivisation of Image and Performance Enhancers apply to everything, including innate genetics advantages (nature), and specific environmental enrichments and behaviours (nurture) and even the "in-between" of nature and nurture, such as the so called critical-periods.
About Nature, it is well known that many of the world champions in sports have specific genetic breeding/mutations (e.g. probably for Usain Bolt)
About Nurture, The science of behavioural and environmental performance optimizations is evolving in real time. Some things have evidence for benefits, e.g resistance training your legs leads to an acute testosterone release that will optimize the subsequent anabolicity of your arms muscles. A competitive athlete that lacks this niche erudition, will not be competitive eventually. However as with the rampant Universal Mediocrity of this timeline, no athlete on earth has ever attempted to combine all relevant niche optimizing behaviours.
Meditation brings neuro/synaptogenesis, but many behaviours/enrichments have mostly unknown effects, e.g. one really of the frontiers of realms is the ASMR. ASMR is scientifically the only externally inducible tactilo-auditive synesthesia that can be experienced by normal human beings. In addition to its interest in the field of studying qualias, like meditation is could be an atypical nootropic/nocitropic with unique performance altering properties.
About critical periods, well few know that some are actually reversible, for example basic epigenetic methylation induced by HDACs allow adults to develop an Absolute pitch.
So How do we define performance enhancing drugs?
I don't see an original answer, IPEDs definition is in the name, it's tautological. Is an IPED any drug (note we could define co-IPEDs) that enhance Image or "performance" AKA any desired behavioural metric. Therefore the scope is larger than what people have in mind, e.g. increasing your ability to love human beings (how many, how intensely, how long, how flexibly and how easily) could be seen as an IPED.
A co-IPED, would be a drug that become useful or maximally useful when concomitant to a behaviour(s) and/or even aforementionned critical periods.
As for the legality of IPEDs, one should distinguish between the legalisation for professionals/athlete and for the general public.
As for competitive athletes, the pros are:
Can improve their healthpan, lifespan and career-span.
Can improve their performance, therefore the show is (generally) more enjoyable for the public and for the athlete (many animes shows many sports with imaginary supra-human perfornance as an entairtainment). This is something I would like to see.
Alter the distribution/inequality of talent. There would be much more top performers, AKA more would reach a similar plateau.
speculative: would enable new sports? (e.g Imagine if we could make humans live underwater (cf famous rat study breathing when filled with a fluid), fly, etc)
other pros I'm too lazy to think about.
the cons are:
for drugs:
side effects risks therefore
possibly reduced healthspan, lifespan and career-span.
escalation to always wanting more IPEDs, hence reducing the health/perf ratio
other cons I'm too lazy to think about.
for nurture:
hypothetically some behaviours become too complex or costly, hence increasing talent distribution inequality and unhapiness.
The athlete like many professions can be seen as having an utilitaristic budget and indeed we could afford to alter the healthspan and lifespan of athletes negatively, to an extent.
And then we enter in a classic allocation tradeoff optimization problem.
E.g we could compromise and allow IPDEDS as a parallel league, therefore you would either be a regular athlete or a transhuman athlete and they would not play together (by default).
This has cons (split the talent pool) but still would be a net benefit in many sports.
The other questions is if we allow IPEDs, which one and how much (rationning)
The use of anabolics such as steroids has diminishing returns (yet bimodal) regarding health/vs performance benefits (IIRC it shows the potent retardation of mankind when you realize testosterone supplementation worldwide would save more lives than the current criminal de facto stigma on TRT, let alone depressions).
Therefore I would be for allowing up to a max. The max would indeed not be a dose, but take into account the massive endogenous testosterone production inequalities and the body capacitance.
However many IPEDs have mostly beneficial health effects (don't remember about low dose EPO though), e.g. probably apply to ALCAR, BPC-157, growth hormone if taken young, (and antioxidants if we consider performance enhancing over career-span)
Finally, one should understand that the regulation/controls for doping are broken and can't really work.
The biggest barrier to doping isn't anti-doping controls.. it is of course the extreme scarcity of humans being pubmed erudite.
I have seen many atypical anabolics that have not even a single mention on the whole reddit website nor a wikipedia page.
Even among the popular unpopular anabolics, such as the insect anabolics ecdysteroids, there are no control for them IIRC. Let alone for fungal anabolics (used in the Cow industry).
IIRC even regular anabolics like growth hormone and long ester steroids, have latent durable IPED effects and are "undetectable"
Messi is probably the #1 in the world because he took growth hormone therapy. That's not the only reason, but probably a necessary reason.
As for the legality of IPEDs on regular human beings, well as with most things with serious consequences, the legality should be conditional on the obtention of a diploma, after positively answering a quizz proving that the user understand said consequences and current known unknowns (like we should do for voting in "democracies").
Despite homeostasis, the use of drugs often has permanent effects on the human body, it's just that they are often low-observable, not necessarily insignificant.
The legality could mandate the concomitant use of protectors/mitigators, such as HCG for testosterone.
One striking example of permanent consequences is Melatonan-II, which simply makes you black.
The mere possibility that it is possible to fabricate evidence does not usually create reasonable doubt. After all, it is possible to fabricate all sorts of evidence, from testimony to physical evidence. Of course you never know what a jury will say, but you would generally need at least some evidence that the evidence was fabricated. That's why evidence of Mark Fuhrman's use of racial epithets was admissible in the OJ Simpson trial: it corroborated (albeit very, very weakly) the defense claim that the evidence was planted.
Sure, but we aren't far away from a world where deepfakes are consumer off-the-shelf tech. Hearsay is probably the better historical parallel: we don't allow people to just say "Oh, X said he did it" outside of very specific exceptions, because it's too easy to fake. Photo and video evidence isn't far away from ending up in the same place, where it will be trivially easy to fake. Will that work in 100% of cases? No. But I'm curious how security companies are thinking about how to preserve the usefulness of their product.
But that would still be a world in which 99.99% of videos are real. Someone could, of course, deep fake a liquor store's video in order to falsely implicate someone in a robbery, but unless there is evidence that someone had a motive to do so, why would they? And the analogy to hearsay doesn't really work, because hearsay is excluded not simply because it is too easy to fake, but rather because the original declarant is not subject to cross-examination, and so there is no way to examine the reliability of his statement. Indeed, the fact that I can lie on the stand about what you said (i.e., it is easy for me to fake the evidence of your statement) is irrelevant to the hearsay exclusion, because I am subject to cross-examination re whether I have faked the evidence. After all, if I testify, a) "Joe said that he robbed the bank" and b) "Joe said that thought the dead guy was sleeping with his wife." neither claim is inherently more or less likely to be a fabrication by me. But #a is admissible as an exception to the hearsay rule (or IIRC, not hearsay at all under the federal rules), but #b is not.
Regardless, there is an interesting (and refreshingly brief, for a law review article) discussion of the issue here which you might find interesting; the author argues for raising the standard for admissibility of such evidence.
I was just now reading through old Motte posts and I found this comment thread, which I think was a pretty good one. Maybe not exactly what you're looking for.
Nah I’d actually say I’m more on the left than right, and personally I find the modern conception of ‘right’ to be almost explicitly against any sort of articulated vision. Modern rightism seems like a negative or destructive (as in negating) ideology. Not that their ideas are all bad especially with our modern extravagance, but I rarely see any right wing ideas for building.
I guess I would be curious to see a steel man of that.
I find the modern conception of ‘right’ to be almost explicitly against any sort of articulated vision. Modern rightism seems like a negative or destructive (as in negating) ideology. Not that their ideas are all bad especially with our modern extravagance, but I rarely see any right wing ideas for building.
This and the similar ask by @Chrisprattalpharaptr in the CW thread make me think this must be a misunderstanding because of the common description of the right as "conservative" and thus they must be primarily concerned with placing the world in a temporal bubble that prevents all change positive or negative. I don't really call myself a conservative or really anything in particular but I do find myself defending conservatives pretty consistently, in my head this because I have surrounded myself with progressives and have very few actual interactions with the right wing and that the default left aligned cultural forces pervasive on the internet and corporate world feed me a constant drip of slightly irritatingly bad left wing positions and practically not irritating bad right wing positions that I don't seek out.
My steelman of the right/conservatism is that they genuinely think that our traditional values are how we have gotten to this place of historically unrivaled wealth, prosperity and equality and that if we maintain them things will simply continue improving. The 90s but everything costs 1/10th of what it did back then might as well be a utopia. Attempting to treat each other how the bible tells us to should have been able to produce much of the social progress we've had over the years without the need for vilification, which is probably why rightists are so fond of accusing leftists of operating on the unacknowledged framework of Christianity laundered through the enlightenment.
That you see rightists as purely opposing/negating leftist ideas is like viewing the staff that repairs an industrial factory as purely opposing/negating because rather than improving the factory they spend all their time preventing the progress of rust and decay. Sometimes yes, there is a way to improve the functioning of the factory but there are also many ways to leave it in ruin and prevent the good work that it does. Sometimes the conservatives have trouble differentiating a call to try replacing the dangerous water heater with a more advanced model from a call to replace a perfectly fine water heater with non-functional tube that has "water heater" written on it in crayon and that is where a functional left is vital but the left seems to very very direly underestimate just how fragile this whole thing is.
Conservatives see leftists as people who have this one quick trick to get around doing the hard part of actually improving society. How much money and human suffering has the left thrown at trying to solve things like homelessness? If we had just done nothing are you actually sure that we'd be worse off?
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
titivate 2yr ago·Edited 2yr ago
I am always fascinated by digital activity related paranoia to this extent. Most of the time it betrays a ignorance of how computer systems work. And bad fermi estimation abilities.
How you would get put on a list is if a certain website is considered a congregation place for the types of people who are usually added to lists, people coming into the site will be added to the list.
This is orders of magnitude less compute/bandwidth-intensive than checking every internet search. That would be markedly insane, and I doubt the world has enough CPU power/money/political will to pull that off.
Think of it this way, there are thousands of pipes leading to thousands of buckets. It's infinitely cheaper to monitor one specific bucket to find what you are looking for, as opposed to monitoring all the pipes.
This is orders of magnitude less compute/bandwidth-intensive than checking every internet search. That would be markedly insane, and I doubt the world has enough CPU power/money/political will to pull that off.
I don't think this is even close to being true. It'd be relatively trivial in terms of compute power for google to, say, generate a list of everyone who ever searched the word "tor". The trickier part would be correlating with your real-world identity, but google is already doing that just so it can advertise to you better, so I'd say not only is this not insane, I'd say it's already being done: you're already on that list as soon as you do the search, and it's just a question of who has access to it, and whether "The list of everyone searching for tor" would be too many people to be useful. If some federal agency wants a list of everyone who ever searched for "tor", it's only a matter of whether they can get google to turn over that information. The compute power required is trivial.
Have there been any additional double-blind controlled studies for the vaccines, especially over a 12-24mo period? Besides the original Pfizer one which showed no benefit? Why haven’t scientists bred immune-weakened birds or monkeys to test the longterm cost/benefit of vaccine?
I can’t get over the idea that the huge selection bias involving the vaccine (in personality traits and culture->occupations/habits) is why we see higher mortality rates in the unvaccinated
Why haven’t scientists bred immune-weakened birds or monkeys to test the longterm cost/benefit of vaccine?
Can you specify what you mean by 'immune-weakened birds or monkeys' and what experiments you'd like to run?
Generally speaking, gene editing monkeys is very rare and not done as a routine matter of course. The resources required put it outside the reach of the vast majority of academic labs. Birds are even less-researched than monkeys or other mammalian animal models by several orders of magnitude. They are also very, very rarely used for research in the way you're describing, have very significant differences in their immune systems relative to mammals, and are probably inappropriate for what is my best guess at the experiment you want to do. Gene editing of mice or cell lines is done routinely, so more or less anything you can think of genetically is possible. I would guess that your best bet on this front is probably still epidemiological data.
At this point, doing any efficacy studies on the vaccine is very difficult. It's better than being COVID-19 naive (i.e. never infected), but there are virtually none of those people left in most countries of the world. If your comparison is previously infected vs. vaccinated there (as far as I'm aware) doesn't seem to be a meaningful difference in outcomes. This may change if they update the vaccines to actually target the variants people are being infected with.
I still haven't seen any convincing data for safety concerns with the mRNA vaccines, minus the extremely rare myocarditis/anaphylaxis after vaccination or the development of anti-PEG antibodies.
The fact that vaccines clinical trials have no post-marketing longitudinal continuous monitoring potently shows we live in the middle ages, and that the fact society currently function is merely an accident/luck.
I can’t speak to additional testing, but I don’t think we can breed new vertebrates that fast. Maybe for lab mice?
Skeptics would probably dismiss studies on brand-new designer animals. Political concerns aside, biology is complicated, and other critters can be poor substitutes.
Have there been any additional double-blind controlled studies for the vaccines, especially over a 12-24mo period? Besides the original Pfizer one which showed no benefit?
no because the manufacturers will not allow you to get the drugs to do this test and there are civil and criminal penalties for obtaining them through deceit to do it (not to mention ethics boards and other gatekeepers)
also the original trials weren't double blind either, see Brook Jackson's whistle rblower complaint, among a long list of other issues
I can’t get over the idea that the huge selection bias involving the vaccine (in personality traits and culture->occupations/habits) is why we see higher mortality rates in the unvaccinated
controlling for household income erases any claimed "efficacy" and that's even with the various dishonest bayesian games of categorizing who is and isn't "vaccinated"
is why we see higher mortality rates in the unvaccinated
these numbers are comically manipulated and various governments who were releasing the best data data when it supported their claims (and were subject to the bayesian games I talked about) either stopped doing this entirely or would only release manipulated numbers with made up denominators when those numbers flipped
My angle is that (1) the relevant mortality figure is over time, not “deaths from Covid”, because of potential complications of vaccine to longterm health and the fact that the vaccine is ineffective for mutations and post-8mo; (2) the “selection bias” effect means that people who opt in for health interventions are genuinely healthier, and this is exacerbated by the chronically ill Americans who are more likely to opt out of all health interventions (alcoholics, addicts, agoraphobics, hoarders, schizophrenics, morbidly obese and others); (3) the cultural divide among vaccination is significant because of differences in urban versus rural health / obesity / diabetes, stress and occupational hazard in blue collar labor, differences in drug and alcohol consumption
Wealth variables are a workable proxy for (2) and (3) at least in the US. I suspect this is because wealth correlates to something else and that something else is the better proxy for pretty much all life outcomes, health included. As far as I know, I've never seen a public health or science publication on vaccine efficacy which makes adjustments for the health/wealth correlation. Once you notice it, you start to notice a pattern of how the gap is used to manipulate results on health interventions, e.g., where trial sites are chosen, which populations are recruited, what is controlled for, etc.
One interesting thing I remember from 2021 which hits on this topic was some backwards looking efficacy numbers for the early injection campaign. One example I remember provides evidence for your selection bias hunch; the injections seemingly reduced mortality rates for things outside of covid19 or related illness. The report takes number from the CDC October VSD report. Look at the standardized mortality rate at the end of the report. Look at the relative mortality risk by age group. Wow, it's 60-70% effective at preventing non-Covid mortality! This thing is a wonderdrug!
Or there is something else which explains this obvious nonsense. When you look up total mortality for these age groups, you find car accidents, suicides, and homicides, account for approx. 80% of all mortality in these younger groups. In order to accept these at face value, you would have to believe covid injections are at least ~25-30% effective at preventing motorcycle accidents, suicide, and being shot by others.
additionally, you would also need to account if there were different treatment protocols for injected and uninjected, e.g., in the US, people without the injection were more likely to receive remdeathivir when looking at comparison numbers among a wide variety of other issues, one of which you've hit on
total mortality is heavily correlated with covid vaccine rollouts to the point where you can tell when mass campaigns began at different times in different countries across the world by looking at their mortality and covid numbers
I just finished 2 Years on a Bike. Overall I think it was a great dose of wanderlust - a big, hardback book with great print quality. I'd watched the 2-hour long movie on Youtube which was great. My worries about the book having 0 new content were unfounded, there was a lot of excellent extra detail.
Some reviewers noted that the author had maybe "too much" detail around his relationships over the 2 years. I disagreed - while there was a little bit of jealousy on my part that this guy was basically living my dream of biking around and sleeping with various models I think he covered them at an appropriate level without bragging.
The other chief complaint was if he was pure enough in the endeavor. There was plenty of shipping of supplies to the next cities, taking occasional side trips in cars, and long breaks in cosmopolitan cities. I think perhaps some of the folks complaining about that haven't done bikepacking in truly rough terrain over a 2 year period.
There was a lot of honesty about how miserable parts of the trip were, and how by the end he was essentially burned out on natural beauty. When you're stuck in an office for 10 hours at a time it's easy to forget that if you've seen breathtaking mountains continuously for 2 years, by the end you'll just be breathing pretty normally.
Finally from a culture war angle my other concern was that since all the people who get to do this are fucking hippies with trust funds that there'd be a lot of junk in that vein. Not so much! Or at least at a low enough level to be truly benign.
Still reading The Seven: The Lives And Legacies Of The Founding Fathers Of The Irish Republic. Not that I know much about the history of socialism, but it seems like James Connolly had the idea of socialism in one country long before Stalin, square brackets mine:
In deference to the nationalism of those he was trying to convert, [Connolly's 1896 manifesto] also denounced the 'subjection of one nation to another, as of Ireland to the authority of the British Crown', and called for an 'Irish Socialist Republic'. This was a novel idea that Connolly developed in three articles in the ILP's weekly, Labour Leader, designed to persuade British Marxists to abandon their belief that Home Rule for Ireland was a necessary stage before the proletariat took over throughout the British Empire. 'The interests of labour all the world over are identical, it is true,' he said, 'but it is also true that each country had better work out its own salvation on the lines most congenial to its own people.'
Edit: More research has me discovering that this wasn't quite a pre-empting of Stalin, and that Lenin saw Connolly as unobjectionable enough to take inspiration from him.
I've read half of a self-help/pop psychology book called The Four Tendencies. It basically divides people into four groups, and it really feels pretty applicable to real life.
Just finished the Licanius trilogy. Pretty good epic fantasy with some bright moments in the writing. Unfortunately the author set up an amazing plot and didn't quite do it justice. Still worth a read.
Just bought The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus: The Mathematics of Christmas but haven't started it yet. In the middle of Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism
We were watching Wednesday, partially cause I like goths, but 90% because I'd like to fuck Jenna Ortega. Even though I knew in my bones it would have some hamfisted woke junk in it. My wife expressed surprise and that it hadn't been on her radar at all.
As we watched, she continually dished out factoids.
This dance was choreographed by Jenna!
Christina Ricci was in the original and was really happy to return.
Gwendoline Christie said this was the first show she's felt beautiful in.
I asked: "Wait a second. You didn't even want to watch this show. Did you watch an interview with the creators or something?"
No. Instead she'd been served all this in Tik Toks about supposedly different topics from supposedly non-affiliated users/fans. Obviously not organic. The scope of it astonished me. She does spend too much time on Tik Tok, but not enough for something like this to be absorbed naturally. It was a massive coordinated campaign.
I was "pleasantly" surprised how little there was: even in universe when she talked about the "patriarchy" seemed some kind of parody and the other characters replied like "are you a retard?".
They built up the Lati heritage of the Addams family, despite them all being very white-coded
The climax is literally a black woman and a latinx woman tag-teaming an old white guy
I could go on but my eyes were rolling. They sacrificed world-building and feel for these things too IMO, everything past episode 3 was like kids running around hogwarts in jeans.
Those were annoying and eye-rolling but were so overt and ridiculous that I actually thought about parody. Is that Poe's law in action?
The climax is literally a black woman and a latinx woman tag-teaming an old white guy
I live in a whiter than average European country: I've met only 2 black people and zero Latinos so I didn't really noticed. For me every US tv shows since the "colorblind" 90s is exotic.
They built up the Lati heritage of the Addams family, despite them all being very white-coded
Now that I noticed I agree. Catherine Zeta Jones was seriously miscast and Gomez was supposed to be only half Latino (they could have at least chose an attractive Gomez though.)
FWIW hearing that you're not American makes this click a bit. Our race fetish is stronger than anywhere else, and there's a huge focus on the treatment of natives. Honestly this isn't the thread for CW but it was stunningly obvious, and I don't think that it's meant to be a parody. This is just the state of mainstream entertainment.
Regarding CZJ.... she's so hot I didn't even think about her being miscast.
Speaking as a non-American myself, the woke themes in Wednesday are so strong that I'm still surprised that someone can not notice them. Not only is the entire plot's message very clearly "Look at how the evil pilgrims have historically persecuted natives, why is no one talking about this!" with "outcasts" being used as a stand-in for natives, there is almost constant progressive messaging about gender relations from Wednesday and only once do I remember someone even slightly pushing back against her on that (Xavier, after he saves her life and she accuses him of upholding the patriarchy through his chivalry). I feel like it's far too charitable to interpret these things as satire, woke talking points are not only sprinkled throughout the show but are in fact woven into its very narrative, and they are never really significantly contested in any way.
I will say nobody's really missing much by giving it a pass. There's other problems I have with the show, like the character writing - Wednesday is 1) an I'm-14-and-this-is-deep quote generator and 2) an incredibly atrocious and overconfident detective who is wrong almost all of the time in spite of the show's best attempts to portray her as capable. Additionally, her friends and two potential love interests somehow stick around her despite her treating everyone quite terribly for most of the show, which does not come off as realistic, but I'm getting a bit into the weeds here.
Your second paragraph exactly matches my thoughts as well. While I understand the personality is who the character is to an extent, by the end of 8 episodes there wasn't much of a reason for anyone to like her. I could have been productive or watched a good show, I would definitely call it a skip.
I don't follow a lot of popular media in the way of movies music tv, so rather about fashion sports or cars.
Percentage that is human in the sense that real human fingers typed words that the human brain attached to them would tell you he genuinely believed? 85-90%+
Percentage that is organically human, in the sense that at no point has a paid marketing campaign influenced that human opinion being typed? <10%.
Humans are basic and easily manipulated into parroting a narrative. Parroting the narrative is enjoyable; look how many people will go out of their way to call into a sports radio show just to say the same nonsense they heard another caller say about "Dak Prescott just can't win the big games" or "Defense wins championships" or "the trouble with arsenal is they always try to walk it in." It makes the reddit commenter feel like a big boy to give the big narrative. Other posters with brains the size of navel oranges upvote the narrative, reprocess the meme, and turn it into homoerotic copypasta.
So I'd say it's less about real grassroots versus fake grass AstroTurf; it's more about organic native grasses versus GMO seeded chemical fertilized drought resistant MegaGrass. Once upon a time one could be sure a plant in your garden was native if it was ugly and thorny, but we're so far down the process of hipster recursion that most of those ugly thorny opinions are just dollars flowing to some substack or some podcast advertising Athletic Greens.
Percentage that is organically human, in the sense that at no point has a paid marketing campaign influenced that human opinion being typed? <10%.
Another aspect of this to keep in mind is that a vanishingly small amount of opinions are original. And the seed comments on a matter are much more likely to become consensus.
I'm not a big football watcher, but I watched all the World Cup games for the fuck of it. An interesting dynamic I noticed in online discussions is that the earliest or most common opinions of a specific play or decision became the consensus, and this was seemingly random and often totally wrong.
The average "fan" is probably just parrotting an opinion someone else said earlier somewhere else.
I'd guess not much strict astroturfing (as in "let's keep this about RAMPART"). We're probably at a point where AI-assisted astroturf could have an effect, but would it be efficient? More importantly, would the ad industry think it's efficient?
The state-of-the-art in manufactured consensus is probably what Amazon deployed on a certain insanely expensive venture. Ratings manipulation, review skewing, and probably a few more subtle things for various niches. Frankly, it was not a very impressive campaign.
Does it count as astroturfed if a publisher sends a prerelease copy to a media outlet, and the media outlet reviews it? When a PR firm markets a nice story to the media?
So, on /r/television - at least 50%, probably more, of popular posts/comments that advertise a particular show are 'organic', as in made by actual users OR content-agnostic repost bots. Some of those posts are links to news sites publishing PR material, though. And no doubt some posts/comments are explicit 'astroturfing'/advertising, although what the proportion is. You have to keep in mind, hundreds of millions of people watch television, and a solid 5% of those want to discuss that on the internet, and will enthusiastically post/upvote/comment - 'astroturfing' has to either have a lot of volume and subtlety to beat that, or function in a less direct and less "astroturfed" way. The same goes for politics, and the accusations of 'russian bots' or 'liberal bots' - they aren't bots, they are the millions of politics-obsessed normal 100iq people.
My feeling is that there are a ton of people "working" as trend setters, writing early posts on topics trying to set the tone for further engagement.
These "people" are a small minority but since they are aware of when things are released they can be first on the ball, kind of like pre-release copies are sent out to favourably inclined reviewers.
How much of this niche is captured by “influencers”? I get the impression that advertisers try to leverage existing following, maybe openly (sponsorships) or maybe not.
I think these are slightly different things. There are the influencers lending their real name to a product to give the impression that "high status" people are interested/like the product, and then there are the staff/bots etc who are instantly there cheering on various (semi)pseudonymous platforms, trying to give the impression that the masses are positive/excited about the product, that the conversations about the product is positive/excited and that there is a conversation/engagement.
Is it reasonable to distinguish between civil wars of the Russian type on one side, and American type on the other in that in the former case all warring parties fought to rule over the entire country, while in the latter one side also sought this, but the other only wanted independence? So the Chinese civil war would be binned together with the Russian as both Mao and Chiang wanted the same thing, but Serbian-Kosovo war would belong to the American as while Serbs wanted to rule Serbia and Kosovo, the Kosovars didn't desire dominion over Serbia and only sought independence.
Seems so to me. As far as I know, there's no formal term for "failed war of independence" distinct from a war between two factions for control of an area they both share. Maybe we should make one up.
I've never heard it before, but that seems more due to 'war of independence' having inherited positive connotations which people don't want to grant to an unpopular loser rather than it being an incoherent label.
Question for those familiar with the Chicago area:
Where are the geeks? Back in Milwaukee, there were several gaming pubs and a hole-in-the-wall LGS that was packed to the gills Saturday nights, with Warhammer players, at least one 4-player EDH game going, and maybe a D&D session in the corner. There were one or two women there, typically someone's SO, but they held their own in Magic, and knew the references.
I go to a much larger store in a "real" city, and it's a godsdamned ghost town. Empty tables on a Saturday evening. It's got a handful of lumpy, poorly-dressed beardless dudes who use "diversity" in every other sentence, but there's no women, and fewer actual black people than the podunk hole-in-the-wall. I feel like the coolest person there (which is not a good sign).
All the board game players I've met in Chicago just hold private groups rather than meet at a designated hall. As mentioned elsewhere there are some locations that are trying to do what you suggest but they aren't super popular.
As someone else said, Snakes and Lattes is one of the more geeky places in the city at least for board games. The Games Tender there has told me that they tried MTG and didn't get much of a showing. There is a DnD bar called Dmen Tap up in avondale that has a campaign on Weds, open to new people. Dice Dojo up in Edgewater is much more neckbeardy. I never did my FNM there but they sold cards and the clerks seemed knowledgeable. Avoid Bonus Round its super woke, wouldn't even stock secret hitler because it was made by "those people" according to them.
I've been to both dice dojo and had been hanging around with some of the bonus rounds people when they were just a board game meetup and didn't buy the place yet. Went to the place too for a few months but I kind of got the impression they didn't like me/my group very much and they are indeed very woke. As far as I can tell most board game enthusiasts simply do private gatherings, which is the direction I went as soon as I had gathered a stable group.
I actually disagree with the whole private gathering exclusivity idea. my experience is that most people meet through meetups or they bring their existing friends. I know a couple groups in Chicago, that do the exclusively euro-style, long, strategy games in a rotating manner, and they use meetup to find new games/and or people and occasionally get together privately for a very specific game. Since moving away from Chicago a couple months ago, I'd say my new city has 11 board game bars in the area and I play at many of them through both meetups and private gatherings with people I met from those meetups.
I'm very much not against meetups in general, I got to know the person who ultimately set me up with my fiance through a board game meetup so I have a kind of fondness for them as an idea. I'm just describing my experience with the Chicago boardgame scene and why it may different from other towns.
I think the term geek has gone full circle. Almost everyone is into some video game or some traditonally geek hobby nowadays: that the true social recluses/retards who partake in those hobbies out of necessity can once again reclaim that term.
Having a geek hobby is not the identifier anymore.
I recently started a MeetUp for tabletop stuff and it's either super-woke Blue Tribe (e.g. a black woman who said "Well, Africa's my culture", despite having never left the US in her life) or aspies that I can only tolerate for about an hour before I get the urge to strangle them. I've met about two or three people whose I genuinely enjoy gaming with. It's maddening.
Most normal people are just meeting with each other at their homes rather than a central location, which to actually be central and desirable would need to also be quite profitable which can be a hard thing for hobby spaces to achieve. There is a certain level of scale this all just falls apart where the place needs to charge customers more than it would cost to just buy the game and play it at home. The killer feature of allowing you to meet more people becomes difficult when all the people it's most fun to play with all meet each other after a few visits and never return while those who would not be invited are a fixture.
I wonder if bigger cities are more prone to boom/bust cycles, where a well-run group that organically arises with low status members achieves some success, which attracts attention and higher-status people in sufficient quantity to drive out the original members. Then the new arrivals list interest but the original members have already moved on, and the group dies. In smaller cities there may not be enough interested high-status members to displace the founders. Or perhaps the status games are not as ruthless to begin with.
In any case, I am aware of a sex club that has game nights in Milwaukee, so maybe it's just a Milwaukee thing. The vestigal influence of GenCon perhaps.
That sounds very much like the "geeks, mops and sociopaths" model of subcultures, though that adds the notion of "sociopaths": those in it to make money from the new popularity that end up focusing around the more easily monetised influx, rapidly diluting the original thing towards mass appeal.
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Notes -
Sam Bankman-Fried had to have his parents and an unknown third-party sign a $250 million bond. In the media, it has been widely reported that this is "secured" by the parents' house, which is worth far less than $250 million, and is almost certainly worth less than $25 million which seems to be another magic number for bail bonds in this court. The most detailed article I could find on the mechanics was this one but I'm hoping a lawyer here could actually clarify the situation.
Does 10% collateral mean that the parents and the third-party person are literally taking a loan out against the house and issuing the court a check for $25 million? In the media, they have mostly been saying that the house is being put up as collateral, which doesn't imply to me that this is the case.
In the case where he skips bail, the parents and this other person are on the hook for $250 million. If the house is being used as collateral, wouldn't this imply that all of their assets are collateral, and so the house specifically being collateral is irrelevant?
Does the court assess the creditworthiness of the people signing the bond, to ensure that they actually have $250 million to pay?
Only a couple hours after asking this, I saw this article that seems to resolve my question if accurate. Their summary is that my confusion was well warranted, it's literally just that they committed a $4m as "collateral" that's forfeit if he doesn't show up, and a promise to pay the full amount.
Edit: additional interesting discussion on HackerNews
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What recently gave you emotional tears? (sublimation)
Seconding 5434a at not understanding the sublimation bit, but a couple of weeks ago I was driving to work in the morning alone on a dark country road listening to '100 Years' by Five for Fighting (2003) and some flood gate just unlatched in my brain and I spent the remaining 15 minutes of my commute just absolutely emphatically sobbing, laughing, profoundly sad and terribly grateful to be alive, struck by the absurdity of the experience.
This was I think the third time this 19 year old #28 US Billboard Hot 100 Single soft rock ballad has flipped that exact switch for me while driving alone, over the course of the last probably 6 months. Always catches me on normal ass days.
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I don't understand the relation to sublimation so I'll just give you the last two times I can remember shedding tears that weren't due to cutting onions.
-The one line comment on /r/4chan "foot fags unite and take over" hit me with enough mounting waves of laughter to tip me over the edge.
-For something more sombre, watching the group stage of the world cup reminded me of the Danish player basically dropping dead on the pitch last year at the Euros. Awful.
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Can someone find a comparison of excess mortality between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated that is up to date?
I was skimming this study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9012513/ that shows Interferon I signaling depletion induced by mRNA vaccines.
I was wondering wether the change is acute or durable if so how long.
Most importantly I am wondering how much the notion of limited/scarce lymphocyte T memory is true over longterm, AKA would a simulated vaccine infection recruit an excess amount of lymphocyte T and therefore accelerate functionally thymus involution/age immunosuppression and age immuno-inadaptativity.
As a reminder, lymphocyte T half life is 17.5 years.
Finally has anyone data/insights on the relevance of semi-chronic (how long) inflammation because of increased immune activity (including cytokines) by vaccines (and on oxidative stress) ?
Those are the questions that matter regarding the latent invisible (actually not) effects vaccines could have when we get old in 50 years.
Note:
No I'm not an antivaxx.
I have erudition in medecine but regarding those questions I am partially ignorant.
It is plausible the chronic very long term effects of those vaccines are negligible but still those questions needs to be answered, and to even begin, must be answered wether the vaccine has chronic effects at all, AKA at least one Biomarker that would be altered over a year? many years?
This is completely observable but the world is it seems, too mediocre to do said observation semi-exhaustively.
However even if the inflammation would be only acute (not a given), the fact it induce myocarditis shows that effect on health can be potent.
Therefore it doesn't take many braincells to understand that humans have varying health damage "budgets" and that on many, they would not have myocarditis, yet it could still plausibly induce long term microscopic conformational changes (mitochondria fitness, apoptosis or cellular sensecence) and other low observable latent accelerated ageing.
Again I believe a significant effect is unlikely, yet I also believe the medical system is too mediocre to fund the answers to those questions, let alone update policies based on said answers. One day, mankind will again play with dices, but this day, mankind will be doomed.
I hope we got lucky.
I hope someone will collaboratively take motivation to answer some of my important questions.
I am in good faith.
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Is the enjoyment of music sourced from the aural experiences of real life, which become associated with all kinds of emotional states? And music is a re-arrangement of different “conditioned sounds” gained from real life experience?
This would explain why some people cannot appreciate music (their minds have a poor memory of sound as it relates to experiences), why certain musical complexity is appreciated by older adults, why children have a primitive appreciation of music where they only like music that codes for basic happiness. And also why some people who have poor emotional intelligence appear to have a terrible taste in music (the other way is not necessarily the case).
Then I would also wonder:
is the music unsophistication of east asia the result of tonal language (where sound memory is encoded in logic rather than emotion), or the result of an actual mental de-prioritization of emotional states? For this last one, consider how European art and religion and poetry is so dramatic and sympathetic to strong emotional states of all sorts, and East Asian less so (emphasizing transience, stability, equanimity)
is sufficient music-listening necessary to fully appreciate complex music and why? Is there also an element of “learning the language of compositions”? This must be the case but how does it work?
what’s happening when we hear a song (for a lot of people: Satie’s gymnopedie) and it brings us a new emotional state?
is too much music bad because it desensitizes us to the significance of real life sound cues?
Probably not. E.g. what 'aural experiences' would to chords correspond to?
'some people can't appreciate music', 'adults like more complex music', and 'children like simpler music' are explained by most theories of music that attribute any complexity to it. 'poor emotional intelligence ~ bad taste in music' is also just explained by 'smart people like smart things'.
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That is a big claim to make. Western music elevates traits of music that they've identified as important, and undermines aspects of music that they've not paid attention to. For ex: western music (pre-20th century) cared a lot about Harmony & melody, but IMO, was little lacking in their understanding of rhythm, jamming and the power of space (silence). More here(I know, ignore the title, it has good substance.)
Now, the 17-21st century were a golden period of prosperity and time for the West in a manner that the east simply couldn't compete. I don't think it is fair to compare the recent exponential flourishing of western music in a couple of the richest places on earth (Vienna, USA) to places that were struggling to make ends meet in the east.
My theory is that just as the west looks to a few locations for their artistic direction (NYC, LA, London, Paris, Vienna), East-Asia largely relied on China and India as the their sources of artistic direction. (especially SEA, Japan, Korea). Indian classical & contemporary music comfortably goes toe-to-toe with anything western classical or contemporary music throws at it, but Indian classical has failed to flourish over the last 400 years for obvious reasons. Chinese classical music on the other hand, stagnated from colonial humiliation and was destroyed like all classical structures due to communism. So now you have this naïve blank slate that appears pretty bad when compared to contemporaries elsewhere. The rest of the continent despite its best efforts could not recover from having its 2 main sources of aesthetic understanding collapse. (Japan was less affected, as 2 centuries of isolation forced it to come up with it's own aesthetic identity separate from Indian-inspired Buddhism or Chinese cultural influence)
I believe so. I have had an interesting journey with pop. I used to find it bland and only listening to progressive (almost deliberately complex) music for a decade. Those 10 years made me a discerning listener, listening for atmospheric queues, syncopation, tension-release and the precision of good production. Now that I can discern good pop from bad pop, I've begun to appreciate the magic and the power of simple yet effective tools.
The specific things that took a lot of learning were:
What is a pocket, why do people like dancing ? -> it unlocked my enjoyment of funk & Rap (Only after I learned to play the drums)
What does an odd-time signature actually do emotionally -> Unlocked tension/release and African-style music (After listening to a lot of prog)
What is the "free feeling" & stank-face ? -> unlocked my enjoyment of blues, jazz, Indian-classical(After actually jamming with people in real life)
What is atmosphere ? -> unlocked my enjoyment of western classical. (After brute forcing my way through Black metal and Black gaze. I hated it until I started loving it. Also, attending real life concerts. It just hits different.)
What is production -> unlocked my enjoyment of pop (after trying to get a note to sound just-right when I was tuning my guitars and drums)
That being said, the best works can be enjoyed by noobs and experts alike. Lose yourself, Comfortably Numb, Hotel California, Pavrotti's Nessun Dorma, 10,000 days part 2, All along the watch tower or Certain Ragas are universal experiences.
I have gone through a similar journey with soccer. From being a kid that loved flamboyant tricksters like Ronaldinho, to now appreciating players like Fabregas or Berbatov who use the basics to absolute perfection. I can also finally appreciate players who seemingly stand in the right spot every time. (Busquets, T.Silva, Giroud, Jorginho). That being said, just like great music, even an idiot can see the greatness of Messi.
Like all aesthetics, there are some universal cues (symmetry, Height, Clear face) and some that signal higher-level societal phenomenon. (Japanese like crooked teeth, attraction for thin frail sickly-looking women in China and western modelling, attraction towards lighter skin to signal class and not needing to work in fields in India)
I refuse to buy that. If anything, music makes me a more discerning listener towards real life sound cues as well. But yeah, don't wear headphones everywhere and aurally separate yourself from society.
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Excellent topic and set of questions! Like really.
If I cut your question in half:
This is part of one of the most important utilitaristic question,
How and Why some kinds of Environmental Enrichments are much less sensitive to the hedonic treadmill/brain homeostasis?
What are surprising cross-tolerances between environmental enrichment X and Y?
What are surprising cross-tolerances between environmental enrichment Z and drug A?
The one that can answer this has unique key knowledge on how to maximize joy/happiness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_enrichment
Food for thought: how does the music and amphetamine high differ and similarise?
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I miss all of the posts about transhumanism, the future of politics/law, medical science, etc on the old forum. I'm interested in writing some posts on these topics, and happy to do research, but a bit low on ideas at the moment. Anyone have prompts or posts they've been thinking of writing to share? Happy to collaborate or edit as well.
I want to get my thoughts on the future of totalitarianism/collectivism in order, given new or improved technologies and social technologies and other tendencies that are currently coming. I suppose I could phrase the question as "will humanity as a whole adopt new forms of social organization, and will they be abhorrent to me?". Some trends that I suspect could become worse:
People being increasingly online, divorced from their physical surroundings, anonymized and atomized and drowned in useless information.
The dilution and possible disappearance of western nations and their complete replacement by cosmopolitan societies-of-convenience.
The further domestication of man through urbanization, infantilization, safetyism, the elimination of the private sphere, micromanagement of the economy, complete surveillance and tracking.
Declining standards of living in the west due to economic inefficiencies, state mismanagement and plain old decadence, and how people will adjust or be adjusted to them.
What does the future hold in store?
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Feel free to talk to me, I have erudition and curiosity in all those topics, especially medical science.
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-- How do we define performance enhancing drugs? Historically the tests and justifications have been legality, negative side effects, and combining the two to say other competitors shouldn't be forced to take X to keep up. As medical science advances, to what extent will these arguments become irrelevant or old fashioned? Is WADA doing any kind of work towards new standards over time? Is the public drifting towards laxly tested sports versus highly tested sports? How do athletes doing medical tourism for eg stem cell treatments fit in?
-- How will future security cameras defeat the inevitable "deepfake defense" and maintain the ability to serve as conclusive evidence in court? I'm going after a gang of kids who vandalized a house we own, and I have decent camera shots of them, but a sufficiently skilled photoshopper could have done them, how do you get beyond a reasonable doubt?
-- How common are major and minor aesthetic procedures across young people in different countries, and how have aesthetic and cultural preferences changed in cultures where such procedures are more common? Already around me I see more and more Instagram face, and I find it unattractive, is that because it's naturally unattractive, because it's unoriginal and uncanny, or because it's culturally signifying that we wouldn't get along in the same way one of those clever joke t shirts would?
Those are ideas kicking around my head where I feel I lack the expertise to say anything, but I'd like to read someone as smart as you think about them.
Even if fakes become indistinguishable from real footage, it'll still remain valuable. After all, there are plenty of forms of evidence we accept today that are even easier to fake.
Eg. we accept witness testimony, even though just lying is even easier than photoshopping. So I think we'll just see the same standards applied: we'll trust footage on the basis of things like whether you have a motive to frame those particular people etc. So it's still going to be stronger evidence than, say, just reporting that you saw them, since doctoring footage would require actual malice on your part, while you could have been mistaken if it was just your recollection. And it should also be noted that just being indistinguishable from a fake "from the pixels" doesn't make it impossible to distinguish in general: like all lies, you're opening up yourself to contradictions if there are other reliable pieces of evidence to compare with (eg. if the kids have an alibi, or if your footage differs from your neighbours in terms of things like expected shadows / ambient light etc for the same time, you could be caught out). Even if no such evidence happens to exist, you can't reliably know that in advance, and so the fact that you're implicitly opening yourself up to prosecution in turn should it be wrong makes your footage more credible.
There are also probably ways to improve this further should such claims become more prevalent. Eg. cameras handled by third party companies that archive the realtime footage and provide a documented and consistent chain of custody for the evidence: faking footage in such a system would require a lot more technical knowledge.
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Great ideas ty! I'm not sure I qualify as extremely smart, but in my experience a small amount of research goes a long way on topics like this.
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Here's your blog post about IPEDs:
Feel free to ask me about IPEDs, there are many interesting ones.
Now regarding your question, one should observe that the property of being a drug is contingent, and therefore the question of the legality or (di)incentivisation of Image and Performance Enhancers apply to everything, including innate genetics advantages (nature), and specific environmental enrichments and behaviours (nurture) and even the "in-between" of nature and nurture, such as the so called critical-periods.
About Nature, it is well known that many of the world champions in sports have specific genetic breeding/mutations (e.g. probably for Usain Bolt)
About Nurture, The science of behavioural and environmental performance optimizations is evolving in real time. Some things have evidence for benefits, e.g resistance training your legs leads to an acute testosterone release that will optimize the subsequent anabolicity of your arms muscles. A competitive athlete that lacks this niche erudition, will not be competitive eventually. However as with the rampant Universal Mediocrity of this timeline, no athlete on earth has ever attempted to combine all relevant niche optimizing behaviours.
Meditation brings neuro/synaptogenesis, but many behaviours/enrichments have mostly unknown effects, e.g. one really of the frontiers of realms is the ASMR. ASMR is scientifically the only externally inducible tactilo-auditive synesthesia that can be experienced by normal human beings. In addition to its interest in the field of studying qualias, like meditation is could be an atypical nootropic/nocitropic with unique performance altering properties.
About critical periods, well few know that some are actually reversible, for example basic epigenetic methylation induced by HDACs allow adults to develop an Absolute pitch.
So How do we define performance enhancing drugs?
I don't see an original answer, IPEDs definition is in the name, it's tautological. Is an IPED any drug (note we could define co-IPEDs) that enhance Image or "performance" AKA any desired behavioural metric. Therefore the scope is larger than what people have in mind, e.g. increasing your ability to love human beings (how many, how intensely, how long, how flexibly and how easily) could be seen as an IPED.
A co-IPED, would be a drug that become useful or maximally useful when concomitant to a behaviour(s) and/or even aforementionned critical periods.
As for the legality of IPEDs, one should distinguish between the legalisation for professionals/athlete and for the general public.
As for competitive athletes, the pros are:
Can improve their healthpan, lifespan and career-span.
Can improve their performance, therefore the show is (generally) more enjoyable for the public and for the athlete (many animes shows many sports with imaginary supra-human perfornance as an entairtainment). This is something I would like to see.
Alter the distribution/inequality of talent. There would be much more top performers, AKA more would reach a similar plateau.
speculative: would enable new sports? (e.g Imagine if we could make humans live underwater (cf famous rat study breathing when filled with a fluid), fly, etc)
other pros I'm too lazy to think about.
the cons are:
for drugs:
side effects risks therefore
possibly reduced healthspan, lifespan and career-span.
escalation to always wanting more IPEDs, hence reducing the health/perf ratio
other cons I'm too lazy to think about.
for nurture:
The athlete like many professions can be seen as having an utilitaristic budget and indeed we could afford to alter the healthspan and lifespan of athletes negatively, to an extent.
And then we enter in a classic allocation tradeoff optimization problem.
E.g we could compromise and allow IPDEDS as a parallel league, therefore you would either be a regular athlete or a transhuman athlete and they would not play together (by default).
This has cons (split the talent pool) but still would be a net benefit in many sports.
The other questions is if we allow IPEDs, which one and how much (rationning)
The use of anabolics such as steroids has diminishing returns (yet bimodal) regarding health/vs performance benefits (IIRC it shows the potent retardation of mankind when you realize testosterone supplementation worldwide would save more lives than the current criminal de facto stigma on TRT, let alone depressions).
Therefore I would be for allowing up to a max. The max would indeed not be a dose, but take into account the massive endogenous testosterone production inequalities and the body capacitance.
However many IPEDs have mostly beneficial health effects (don't remember about low dose EPO though), e.g. probably apply to ALCAR, BPC-157, growth hormone if taken young, (and antioxidants if we consider performance enhancing over career-span)
Finally, one should understand that the regulation/controls for doping are broken and can't really work.
The biggest barrier to doping isn't anti-doping controls.. it is of course the extreme scarcity of humans being pubmed erudite.
I have seen many atypical anabolics that have not even a single mention on the whole reddit website nor a wikipedia page.
Even among the popular unpopular anabolics, such as the insect anabolics ecdysteroids, there are no control for them IIRC. Let alone for fungal anabolics (used in the Cow industry).
IIRC even regular anabolics like growth hormone and long ester steroids, have latent durable IPED effects and are "undetectable"
Messi is probably the #1 in the world because he took growth hormone therapy. That's not the only reason, but probably a necessary reason.
As for the legality of IPEDs on regular human beings, well as with most things with serious consequences, the legality should be conditional on the obtention of a diploma, after positively answering a quizz proving that the user understand said consequences and current known unknowns (like we should do for voting in "democracies").
Despite homeostasis, the use of drugs often has permanent effects on the human body, it's just that they are often low-observable, not necessarily insignificant.
The legality could mandate the concomitant use of protectors/mitigators, such as HCG for testosterone.
One striking example of permanent consequences is Melatonan-II, which simply makes you black.
VoiceOfLogic
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The mere possibility that it is possible to fabricate evidence does not usually create reasonable doubt. After all, it is possible to fabricate all sorts of evidence, from testimony to physical evidence. Of course you never know what a jury will say, but you would generally need at least some evidence that the evidence was fabricated. That's why evidence of Mark Fuhrman's use of racial epithets was admissible in the OJ Simpson trial: it corroborated (albeit very, very weakly) the defense claim that the evidence was planted.
Sure, but we aren't far away from a world where deepfakes are consumer off-the-shelf tech. Hearsay is probably the better historical parallel: we don't allow people to just say "Oh, X said he did it" outside of very specific exceptions, because it's too easy to fake. Photo and video evidence isn't far away from ending up in the same place, where it will be trivially easy to fake. Will that work in 100% of cases? No. But I'm curious how security companies are thinking about how to preserve the usefulness of their product.
But that would still be a world in which 99.99% of videos are real. Someone could, of course, deep fake a liquor store's video in order to falsely implicate someone in a robbery, but unless there is evidence that someone had a motive to do so, why would they? And the analogy to hearsay doesn't really work, because hearsay is excluded not simply because it is too easy to fake, but rather because the original declarant is not subject to cross-examination, and so there is no way to examine the reliability of his statement. Indeed, the fact that I can lie on the stand about what you said (i.e., it is easy for me to fake the evidence of your statement) is irrelevant to the hearsay exclusion, because I am subject to cross-examination re whether I have faked the evidence. After all, if I testify, a) "Joe said that he robbed the bank" and b) "Joe said that thought the dead guy was sleeping with his wife." neither claim is inherently more or less likely to be a fabrication by me. But #a is admissible as an exception to the hearsay rule (or IIRC, not hearsay at all under the federal rules), but #b is not.
Regardless, there is an interesting (and refreshingly brief, for a law review article) discussion of the issue here which you might find interesting; the author argues for raising the standard for admissibility of such evidence.
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I was just now reading through old Motte posts and I found this comment thread, which I think was a pretty good one. Maybe not exactly what you're looking for.
Nah I’d actually say I’m more on the left than right, and personally I find the modern conception of ‘right’ to be almost explicitly against any sort of articulated vision. Modern rightism seems like a negative or destructive (as in negating) ideology. Not that their ideas are all bad especially with our modern extravagance, but I rarely see any right wing ideas for building.
I guess I would be curious to see a steel man of that.
This and the similar ask by @Chrisprattalpharaptr in the CW thread make me think this must be a misunderstanding because of the common description of the right as "conservative" and thus they must be primarily concerned with placing the world in a temporal bubble that prevents all change positive or negative. I don't really call myself a conservative or really anything in particular but I do find myself defending conservatives pretty consistently, in my head this because I have surrounded myself with progressives and have very few actual interactions with the right wing and that the default left aligned cultural forces pervasive on the internet and corporate world feed me a constant drip of slightly irritatingly bad left wing positions and practically not irritating bad right wing positions that I don't seek out.
My steelman of the right/conservatism is that they genuinely think that our traditional values are how we have gotten to this place of historically unrivaled wealth, prosperity and equality and that if we maintain them things will simply continue improving. The 90s but everything costs 1/10th of what it did back then might as well be a utopia. Attempting to treat each other how the bible tells us to should have been able to produce much of the social progress we've had over the years without the need for vilification, which is probably why rightists are so fond of accusing leftists of operating on the unacknowledged framework of Christianity laundered through the enlightenment.
That you see rightists as purely opposing/negating leftist ideas is like viewing the staff that repairs an industrial factory as purely opposing/negating because rather than improving the factory they spend all their time preventing the progress of rust and decay. Sometimes yes, there is a way to improve the functioning of the factory but there are also many ways to leave it in ruin and prevent the good work that it does. Sometimes the conservatives have trouble differentiating a call to try replacing the dangerous water heater with a more advanced model from a call to replace a perfectly fine water heater with non-functional tube that has "water heater" written on it in crayon and that is where a functional left is vital but the left seems to very very direly underestimate just how fragile this whole thing is.
Conservatives see leftists as people who have this one quick trick to get around doing the hard part of actually improving society. How much money and human suffering has the left thrown at trying to solve things like homelessness? If we had just done nothing are you actually sure that we'd be worse off?
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Install brave browser, open a new private tab with tor and do as much research safely as you want.
Brave hasn't had the greatest safety record with respect to how it handles Tor traffic; the Tor Browser proper has a better track record in this respect.
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I am always fascinated by digital activity related paranoia to this extent. Most of the time it betrays a ignorance of how computer systems work. And bad fermi estimation abilities.
How you would get put on a list is if a certain website is considered a congregation place for the types of people who are usually added to lists, people coming into the site will be added to the list.
This is orders of magnitude less compute/bandwidth-intensive than checking every internet search. That would be markedly insane, and I doubt the world has enough CPU power/money/political will to pull that off.
Think of it this way, there are thousands of pipes leading to thousands of buckets. It's infinitely cheaper to monitor one specific bucket to find what you are looking for, as opposed to monitoring all the pipes.
I don't think this is even close to being true. It'd be relatively trivial in terms of compute power for google to, say, generate a list of everyone who ever searched the word "tor". The trickier part would be correlating with your real-world identity, but google is already doing that just so it can advertise to you better, so I'd say not only is this not insane, I'd say it's already being done: you're already on that list as soon as you do the search, and it's just a question of who has access to it, and whether "The list of everyone searching for tor" would be too many people to be useful. If some federal agency wants a list of everyone who ever searched for "tor", it's only a matter of whether they can get google to turn over that information. The compute power required is trivial.
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Too late; the simple act of knowing what that is has already put you on a list.
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Seconding sloth.
Here, I’ll do my part to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio. I just googled how to do it. Whether or not I actually do, now...
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A list that you aren't already on by talking with us? No.
What is your threat model? Are you in Iran or some place with similar limited internet and maximum reasons to monitor?
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Have there been any additional double-blind controlled studies for the vaccines, especially over a 12-24mo period? Besides the original Pfizer one which showed no benefit? Why haven’t scientists bred immune-weakened birds or monkeys to test the longterm cost/benefit of vaccine?
I can’t get over the idea that the huge selection bias involving the vaccine (in personality traits and culture->occupations/habits) is why we see higher mortality rates in the unvaccinated
Can you specify what you mean by 'immune-weakened birds or monkeys' and what experiments you'd like to run?
Generally speaking, gene editing monkeys is very rare and not done as a routine matter of course. The resources required put it outside the reach of the vast majority of academic labs. Birds are even less-researched than monkeys or other mammalian animal models by several orders of magnitude. They are also very, very rarely used for research in the way you're describing, have very significant differences in their immune systems relative to mammals, and are probably inappropriate for what is my best guess at the experiment you want to do. Gene editing of mice or cell lines is done routinely, so more or less anything you can think of genetically is possible. I would guess that your best bet on this front is probably still epidemiological data.
At this point, doing any efficacy studies on the vaccine is very difficult. It's better than being COVID-19 naive (i.e. never infected), but there are virtually none of those people left in most countries of the world. If your comparison is previously infected vs. vaccinated there (as far as I'm aware) doesn't seem to be a meaningful difference in outcomes. This may change if they update the vaccines to actually target the variants people are being infected with.
I still haven't seen any convincing data for safety concerns with the mRNA vaccines, minus the extremely rare myocarditis/anaphylaxis after vaccination or the development of anti-PEG antibodies.
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The fact that vaccines clinical trials have no post-marketing longitudinal continuous monitoring potently shows we live in the middle ages, and that the fact society currently function is merely an accident/luck.
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I can’t speak to additional testing, but I don’t think we can breed new vertebrates that fast. Maybe for lab mice?
Skeptics would probably dismiss studies on brand-new designer animals. Political concerns aside, biology is complicated, and other critters can be poor substitutes.
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There is an acute monkey shortage right now, and breeding is apparently pretty hard.
Don’t know about birds though.
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no because the manufacturers will not allow you to get the drugs to do this test and there are civil and criminal penalties for obtaining them through deceit to do it (not to mention ethics boards and other gatekeepers)
also the original trials weren't double blind either, see Brook Jackson's whistle rblower complaint, among a long list of other issues
controlling for household income erases any claimed "efficacy" and that's even with the various dishonest bayesian games of categorizing who is and isn't "vaccinated"
these numbers are comically manipulated and various governments who were releasing the best data data when it supported their claims (and were subject to the bayesian games I talked about) either stopped doing this entirely or would only release manipulated numbers with made up denominators when those numbers flipped
My angle is that (1) the relevant mortality figure is over time, not “deaths from Covid”, because of potential complications of vaccine to longterm health and the fact that the vaccine is ineffective for mutations and post-8mo; (2) the “selection bias” effect means that people who opt in for health interventions are genuinely healthier, and this is exacerbated by the chronically ill Americans who are more likely to opt out of all health interventions (alcoholics, addicts, agoraphobics, hoarders, schizophrenics, morbidly obese and others); (3) the cultural divide among vaccination is significant because of differences in urban versus rural health / obesity / diabetes, stress and occupational hazard in blue collar labor, differences in drug and alcohol consumption
Wealth variables are a workable proxy for (2) and (3) at least in the US. I suspect this is because wealth correlates to something else and that something else is the better proxy for pretty much all life outcomes, health included. As far as I know, I've never seen a public health or science publication on vaccine efficacy which makes adjustments for the health/wealth correlation. Once you notice it, you start to notice a pattern of how the gap is used to manipulate results on health interventions, e.g., where trial sites are chosen, which populations are recruited, what is controlled for, etc.
One interesting thing I remember from 2021 which hits on this topic was some backwards looking efficacy numbers for the early injection campaign. One example I remember provides evidence for your selection bias hunch; the injections seemingly reduced mortality rates for things outside of covid19 or related illness. The report takes number from the CDC October VSD report. Look at the standardized mortality rate at the end of the report. Look at the relative mortality risk by age group. Wow, it's 60-70% effective at preventing non-Covid mortality! This thing is a wonderdrug!
Or there is something else which explains this obvious nonsense. When you look up total mortality for these age groups, you find car accidents, suicides, and homicides, account for approx. 80% of all mortality in these younger groups. In order to accept these at face value, you would have to believe covid injections are at least ~25-30% effective at preventing motorcycle accidents, suicide, and being shot by others.
additionally, you would also need to account if there were different treatment protocols for injected and uninjected, e.g., in the US, people without the injection were more likely to receive remdeathivir when looking at comparison numbers among a wide variety of other issues, one of which you've hit on
total mortality is heavily correlated with covid vaccine rollouts to the point where you can tell when mass campaigns began at different times in different countries across the world by looking at their mortality and covid numbers
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So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Lucretius' On the Nature of Things, and also flipping through whatever vaguely Christian books happen to be in arm's length.
I have a rant over in the CW thread about Ancillary Justice. In summary - I didn't finish it because it was so bad.
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I just finished 2 Years on a Bike. Overall I think it was a great dose of wanderlust - a big, hardback book with great print quality. I'd watched the 2-hour long movie on Youtube which was great. My worries about the book having 0 new content were unfounded, there was a lot of excellent extra detail.
Some reviewers noted that the author had maybe "too much" detail around his relationships over the 2 years. I disagreed - while there was a little bit of jealousy on my part that this guy was basically living my dream of biking around and sleeping with various models I think he covered them at an appropriate level without bragging.
The other chief complaint was if he was pure enough in the endeavor. There was plenty of shipping of supplies to the next cities, taking occasional side trips in cars, and long breaks in cosmopolitan cities. I think perhaps some of the folks complaining about that haven't done bikepacking in truly rough terrain over a 2 year period.
There was a lot of honesty about how miserable parts of the trip were, and how by the end he was essentially burned out on natural beauty. When you're stuck in an office for 10 hours at a time it's easy to forget that if you've seen breathtaking mountains continuously for 2 years, by the end you'll just be breathing pretty normally.
Finally from a culture war angle my other concern was that since all the people who get to do this are fucking hippies with trust funds that there'd be a lot of junk in that vein. Not so much! Or at least at a low enough level to be truly benign.
Recommend it if you can shelve your jealousy.
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I recently finished Macnamara's Folly too. I appreciated that it was written by an ordinary soldier, as opposed to an academic or policy wonk.
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Still reading The Seven: The Lives And Legacies Of The Founding Fathers Of The Irish Republic. Not that I know much about the history of socialism, but it seems like James Connolly had the idea of socialism in one country long before Stalin, square brackets mine:
Edit: More research has me discovering that this wasn't quite a pre-empting of Stalin, and that Lenin saw Connolly as unobjectionable enough to take inspiration from him.
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I'm currently prepping for Summa Theologica, getting a complete version for Christmas.
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Trying to end the year on an optimistic note so:
Fully Automated Luxury Communism (just finished actually)
Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek
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I've read half of a self-help/pop psychology book called The Four Tendencies. It basically divides people into four groups, and it really feels pretty applicable to real life.
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Just finished the Licanius trilogy. Pretty good epic fantasy with some bright moments in the writing. Unfortunately the author set up an amazing plot and didn't quite do it justice. Still worth a read.
Is that, uh, James Islington? I think I picked it up but haven’t been gotten to read t yet.
Yep you got it! Let me know what you think if you finish it.
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What a contrast!
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Just bought The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus: The Mathematics of Christmas but haven't started it yet. In the middle of Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism
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What percentage do you think of conversation about newly released media is organic/astroturfed/fans trying to drum up interest?
Let's say a relevant thread for a new episode of a tvshow on Reddit.
What about foreign language media?
I had a striking incidence of this recently.
We were watching Wednesday, partially cause I like goths, but 90% because I'd like to fuck Jenna Ortega. Even though I knew in my bones it would have some hamfisted woke junk in it. My wife expressed surprise and that it hadn't been on her radar at all.
As we watched, she continually dished out factoids.
I asked: "Wait a second. You didn't even want to watch this show. Did you watch an interview with the creators or something?"
No. Instead she'd been served all this in Tik Toks about supposedly different topics from supposedly non-affiliated users/fans. Obviously not organic. The scope of it astonished me. She does spend too much time on Tik Tok, but not enough for something like this to be absorbed naturally. It was a massive coordinated campaign.
I was "pleasantly" surprised how little there was: even in universe when she talked about the "patriarchy" seemed some kind of parody and the other characters replied like "are you a retard?".
Ah wow, that wasn't my take at all.
I could go on but my eyes were rolling. They sacrificed world-building and feel for these things too IMO, everything past episode 3 was like kids running around hogwarts in jeans.
Mmm... Maybe it's because I am not American and I do not notice this thing as heavily.
Those were annoying and eye-rolling but were so overt and ridiculous that I actually thought about parody. Is that Poe's law in action?
I live in a whiter than average European country: I've met only 2 black people and zero Latinos so I didn't really noticed. For me every US tv shows since the "colorblind" 90s is exotic.
Now that I noticed I agree. Catherine Zeta Jones was seriously miscast and Gomez was supposed to be only half Latino (they could have at least chose an attractive Gomez though.)
FWIW hearing that you're not American makes this click a bit. Our race fetish is stronger than anywhere else, and there's a huge focus on the treatment of natives. Honestly this isn't the thread for CW but it was stunningly obvious, and I don't think that it's meant to be a parody. This is just the state of mainstream entertainment.
Regarding CZJ.... she's so hot I didn't even think about her being miscast.
Speaking as a non-American myself, the woke themes in Wednesday are so strong that I'm still surprised that someone can not notice them. Not only is the entire plot's message very clearly "Look at how the evil pilgrims have historically persecuted natives, why is no one talking about this!" with "outcasts" being used as a stand-in for natives, there is almost constant progressive messaging about gender relations from Wednesday and only once do I remember someone even slightly pushing back against her on that (Xavier, after he saves her life and she accuses him of upholding the patriarchy through his chivalry). I feel like it's far too charitable to interpret these things as satire, woke talking points are not only sprinkled throughout the show but are in fact woven into its very narrative, and they are never really significantly contested in any way.
I will say nobody's really missing much by giving it a pass. There's other problems I have with the show, like the character writing - Wednesday is 1) an I'm-14-and-this-is-deep quote generator and 2) an incredibly atrocious and overconfident detective who is wrong almost all of the time in spite of the show's best attempts to portray her as capable. Additionally, her friends and two potential love interests somehow stick around her despite her treating everyone quite terribly for most of the show, which does not come off as realistic, but I'm getting a bit into the weeds here.
Your second paragraph exactly matches my thoughts as well. While I understand the personality is who the character is to an extent, by the end of 8 episodes there wasn't much of a reason for anyone to like her. I could have been productive or watched a good show, I would definitely call it a skip.
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I don't follow a lot of popular media in the way of movies music tv, so rather about fashion sports or cars.
Percentage that is human in the sense that real human fingers typed words that the human brain attached to them would tell you he genuinely believed? 85-90%+
Percentage that is organically human, in the sense that at no point has a paid marketing campaign influenced that human opinion being typed? <10%.
Humans are basic and easily manipulated into parroting a narrative. Parroting the narrative is enjoyable; look how many people will go out of their way to call into a sports radio show just to say the same nonsense they heard another caller say about "Dak Prescott just can't win the big games" or "Defense wins championships" or "the trouble with arsenal is they always try to walk it in." It makes the reddit commenter feel like a big boy to give the big narrative. Other posters with brains the size of navel oranges upvote the narrative, reprocess the meme, and turn it into homoerotic copypasta.
So I'd say it's less about real grassroots versus fake grass AstroTurf; it's more about organic native grasses versus GMO seeded chemical fertilized drought resistant MegaGrass. Once upon a time one could be sure a plant in your garden was native if it was ugly and thorny, but we're so far down the process of hipster recursion that most of those ugly thorny opinions are just dollars flowing to some substack or some podcast advertising Athletic Greens.
Another aspect of this to keep in mind is that a vanishingly small amount of opinions are original. And the seed comments on a matter are much more likely to become consensus.
I'm not a big football watcher, but I watched all the World Cup games for the fuck of it. An interesting dynamic I noticed in online discussions is that the earliest or most common opinions of a specific play or decision became the consensus, and this was seemingly random and often totally wrong.
The average "fan" is probably just parrotting an opinion someone else said earlier somewhere else.
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I'd guess not much strict astroturfing (as in "let's keep this about RAMPART"). We're probably at a point where AI-assisted astroturf could have an effect, but would it be efficient? More importantly, would the ad industry think it's efficient?
The state-of-the-art in manufactured consensus is probably what Amazon deployed on a certain insanely expensive venture. Ratings manipulation, review skewing, and probably a few more subtle things for various niches. Frankly, it was not a very impressive campaign.
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Does it count as astroturfed if a publisher sends a prerelease copy to a media outlet, and the media outlet reviews it? When a PR firm markets a nice story to the media?
So, on /r/television - at least 50%, probably more, of popular posts/comments that advertise a particular show are 'organic', as in made by actual users OR content-agnostic repost bots. Some of those posts are links to news sites publishing PR material, though. And no doubt some posts/comments are explicit 'astroturfing'/advertising, although what the proportion is. You have to keep in mind, hundreds of millions of people watch television, and a solid 5% of those want to discuss that on the internet, and will enthusiastically post/upvote/comment - 'astroturfing' has to either have a lot of volume and subtlety to beat that, or function in a less direct and less "astroturfed" way. The same goes for politics, and the accusations of 'russian bots' or 'liberal bots' - they aren't bots, they are the millions of politics-obsessed normal 100iq people.
My feeling is that there are a ton of people "working" as trend setters, writing early posts on topics trying to set the tone for further engagement.
These "people" are a small minority but since they are aware of when things are released they can be first on the ball, kind of like pre-release copies are sent out to favourably inclined reviewers.
How much of this niche is captured by “influencers”? I get the impression that advertisers try to leverage existing following, maybe openly (sponsorships) or maybe not.
I think these are slightly different things. There are the influencers lending their real name to a product to give the impression that "high status" people are interested/like the product, and then there are the staff/bots etc who are instantly there cheering on various (semi)pseudonymous platforms, trying to give the impression that the masses are positive/excited about the product, that the conversations about the product is positive/excited and that there is a conversation/engagement.
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Nowadays? 90%. 8 years ago, maybe 15%.
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Is it reasonable to distinguish between civil wars of the Russian type on one side, and American type on the other in that in the former case all warring parties fought to rule over the entire country, while in the latter one side also sought this, but the other only wanted independence? So the Chinese civil war would be binned together with the Russian as both Mao and Chiang wanted the same thing, but Serbian-Kosovo war would belong to the American as while Serbs wanted to rule Serbia and Kosovo, the Kosovars didn't desire dominion over Serbia and only sought independence.
Seems so to me. As far as I know, there's no formal term for "failed war of independence" distinct from a war between two factions for control of an area they both share. Maybe we should make one up.
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That is a standard distinction. See discussion of typology here
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Isn't that the space 'war of independence' covers?
How often does the American Civil War get called a war of independence?
I've never heard it before, but that seems more due to 'war of independence' having inherited positive connotations which people don't want to grant to an unpopular loser rather than it being an incoherent label.
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Question for those familiar with the Chicago area:
Where are the geeks? Back in Milwaukee, there were several gaming pubs and a hole-in-the-wall LGS that was packed to the gills Saturday nights, with Warhammer players, at least one 4-player EDH game going, and maybe a D&D session in the corner. There were one or two women there, typically someone's SO, but they held their own in Magic, and knew the references.
I go to a much larger store in a "real" city, and it's a godsdamned ghost town. Empty tables on a Saturday evening. It's got a handful of lumpy, poorly-dressed beardless dudes who use "diversity" in every other sentence, but there's no women, and fewer actual black people than the podunk hole-in-the-wall. I feel like the coolest person there (which is not a good sign).
All the board game players I've met in Chicago just hold private groups rather than meet at a designated hall. As mentioned elsewhere there are some locations that are trying to do what you suggest but they aren't super popular.
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As someone else said, Snakes and Lattes is one of the more geeky places in the city at least for board games. The Games Tender there has told me that they tried MTG and didn't get much of a showing. There is a DnD bar called Dmen Tap up in avondale that has a campaign on Weds, open to new people. Dice Dojo up in Edgewater is much more neckbeardy. I never did my FNM there but they sold cards and the clerks seemed knowledgeable. Avoid Bonus Round its super woke, wouldn't even stock secret hitler because it was made by "those people" according to them.
Actually Dive Dojo is the place I mentioned that was a ghost town full of diversity lingo, so the neck beard stronghold has fallen.
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I've been to both dice dojo and had been hanging around with some of the bonus rounds people when they were just a board game meetup and didn't buy the place yet. Went to the place too for a few months but I kind of got the impression they didn't like me/my group very much and they are indeed very woke. As far as I can tell most board game enthusiasts simply do private gatherings, which is the direction I went as soon as I had gathered a stable group.
I actually disagree with the whole private gathering exclusivity idea. my experience is that most people meet through meetups or they bring their existing friends. I know a couple groups in Chicago, that do the exclusively euro-style, long, strategy games in a rotating manner, and they use meetup to find new games/and or people and occasionally get together privately for a very specific game. Since moving away from Chicago a couple months ago, I'd say my new city has 11 board game bars in the area and I play at many of them through both meetups and private gatherings with people I met from those meetups.
I'm very much not against meetups in general, I got to know the person who ultimately set me up with my fiance through a board game meetup so I have a kind of fondness for them as an idea. I'm just describing my experience with the Chicago boardgame scene and why it may different from other towns.
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How many years have passed between your two experiences? Only because I bet “geek”dom has been trending toward a more chronically online culture
I think the term geek has gone full circle. Almost everyone is into some video game or some traditonally geek hobby nowadays: that the true social recluses/retards who partake in those hobbies out of necessity can once again reclaim that term.
Having a geek hobby is not the identifier anymore.
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Try Snakes and Lattes on Milwaukee. It's got a good crowd every weekend, though mostly board games, not Warhammer or D&D.
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I recently started a MeetUp for tabletop stuff and it's either super-woke Blue Tribe (e.g. a black woman who said "Well, Africa's my culture", despite having never left the US in her life) or aspies that I can only tolerate for about an hour before I get the urge to strangle them. I've met about two or three people whose I genuinely enjoy gaming with. It's maddening.
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Most normal people are just meeting with each other at their homes rather than a central location, which to actually be central and desirable would need to also be quite profitable which can be a hard thing for hobby spaces to achieve. There is a certain level of scale this all just falls apart where the place needs to charge customers more than it would cost to just buy the game and play it at home. The killer feature of allowing you to meet more people becomes difficult when all the people it's most fun to play with all meet each other after a few visits and never return while those who would not be invited are a fixture.
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I wonder if bigger cities are more prone to boom/bust cycles, where a well-run group that organically arises with low status members achieves some success, which attracts attention and higher-status people in sufficient quantity to drive out the original members. Then the new arrivals list interest but the original members have already moved on, and the group dies. In smaller cities there may not be enough interested high-status members to displace the founders. Or perhaps the status games are not as ruthless to begin with.
In any case, I am aware of a sex club that has game nights in Milwaukee, so maybe it's just a Milwaukee thing. The vestigal influence of GenCon perhaps.
That sounds very much like the "geeks, mops and sociopaths" model of subcultures, though that adds the notion of "sociopaths": those in it to make money from the new popularity that end up focusing around the more easily monetised influx, rapidly diluting the original thing towards mass appeal.
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