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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3345 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 2, 2023

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

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

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

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Can someone explain how the term egregore is understood on this site? I see the word often enough, and assume it appears in a blogpost or some other place I haven't seen and therefore its meaning (beyond or adjacent to the occulty meaning given online) is generally grasped here by everyone but me.

Another important series on the topic, by a local mottizen:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahwfo.substack.com+%22Memespace+Egregores%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

Can someone explain how the term egregore is understood on this site?

Like this, approximately. "A non-physical entity that arises from the collective thoughts of a distinct group of people" can refer to a literal deity in occult terms, but it could also refer to constructed unities like "England" or "the economy." Usually when people talk about egregores here, they're talking about Moloch, the egregore that emerges from inadequate social equilibria.

Thank you!

Without generating an incident that goes to court, can someone ask for the court or courts to make a ruling based on current law if there isn't an existing one (or rather, a clear one)? If not, why not?

Basically, I'm trying to understand why we can't address unknowns in the legal system sans a court case. My understanding of copyright law, for example, is that there has never been a ruling about the legality of all the meme clips people post online w/o permission from the media owners. Nothing explicitly about that, anyways. Can someone ask for a legal review of that practice?

Without generating an incident that goes to court, can someone ask for the court or courts to make a ruling based on current law if there isn't an existing one (or rather, a clear one)?

In the U.S.--not if it's the federal government. Some state governments do permit advisory opinions in certain cases.

If not, why not?

Because the federal court system exists to try "cases or controversies." Some state systems are also limited in this way by their state constitutions.

I'm trying to understand why we can't address unknowns in the legal system sans a court case.

One reason is because, on modern separation-of-powers theory, this is not the job of the legal system, but the legislature. The court is there to resolve specific disputes, not to make law generally. (I believe this is a bit different in civil law systems, but I am not an expert in comparative law.)

To your example:

My understanding of copyright law, for example, is that there has never been a ruling about the legality of all the meme clips people post online w/o permission from the media owners. Nothing explicitly about that, anyways. Can someone ask for a legal review of that practice?

The short answer is no, because copyright is a federal issue and per the Constitution federal courts cannot issue advisory opinions.

Thanks, I appreciate the links. But I'm left confused because it doesn't seem like any of the links about advisory opinions explain why they aren't allowed. That is, even if you maintain separation-of-powers, why couldn't you let the courts rule on the meaning/impact of a law, but still allow, say, a legislative body to rewrite the laws with the rewritten one taken precedence?

Consider this law review note from 1924. With specific reference to Constitutional questions, the author writes:

The stuff of these contests are facts, and judgment upon facts. Every tendency to deal with them abstractedly, to formulate them in terms of sterile legal questions, is bound to result in sterile conclusions unrelated to actualities. The reports are strewn with wrecks of legislation considered in vacuo and torn out of the context of life which evoked the legislation and alone made it intelligible. These are commonplaces. But they are the heart of the matter of American constitutional law. A failure scrupulously and persistently to observe these commonplaces jeopardizes the traditional American constitutional system more than all the loose talk about "usurpation."

...

The Supreme Court is not a House of Lords with revisory power over legislation, although conservative scholars have suggested that the Supreme Court frankly assume the function implicit in some of its decisions. As part of the ritual of traditional theory, the Supreme Court professes to defer greatly to the legislature.6 Such deference is not merely a gesture of courtesy. It is the formulation of a basic truth in the distribution of governmental power.

...

It must be remembered that advisory opinions are not merely advisory opinions. They are ghosts that slay.

In other words--you're not wrong! It's just that decades and centuries of accumulated legal tradition is stacked against you. Consequently the American legal system, at least, is likely to respond to your question with an invitation--"okay, but since you're the one proposing the change, the burden of persuasion is on you." If you can convince the legislature of your state (assuming you are American) to widely accept advisory opinions, they can do so! At the federal level, however, it would require a constitutional amendment to abolish the "cases and controversies" requirement.

Makes sense, thanks.

Generally, the US Constitution requires you to stick your neck out by having "standing" in a "case or controversy" before the judicial system can do anything. Otherwise, judges would be kings, issuing rulings on anything and everything, with no risk on the part of the people bringing suit.

There are some ways to get around that and obtain declaratory judgments.

Has anyone else tried Github Copilot, and found it to have really insidious downsides? I noticed the other day that copilot really fucks up my mental flow when building a program, it's like it prevents me from building a complete mental map of the global logic of what I'm doing. It's not that the code copilot outputs is bad exactly, it's that writing the code myself seems to make me understand my own program much better than just reading and correcting already-written code. And overall this "understanding my code" effect makes me code much faster, so I'm not even sure that copilot truly provides that large of a speed benefit. I also notice my mind subtly "optimizing for the prompt" instead of just writing the code myself, like some part of my mind is spending its resources figuring out what to write to get copilot to produce what I want, instead of just writing what I want.

Maybe copilot is a lifesaver for people who aren't programming particularly complex programs, and I do think it's useful for quickly making stuff that I don't care about understanding. But if I'm writing a new Reinforcement Learning algorithm for a research paper, there is no way that I'd use it.

I'm going to school and taking an intro VB computer class and its fing great. for doing simple stuff having it write all the boring stuff its amazing. My program isn't programming but I know when I get out I could be doing simple .net apps and so I think its a huge productivity booster.

I like it when I'm writing boilerplate like constructors that validate and throw, but when writing actual methods I am not sold on its usefulness yet. It saves about as many keystrokes again as IntelliSense, but I can't really trust what it's writing and keep second-guessing it. It's like writing with autocorrect on, it just disrupts my flow, like Edge highlighting the last word of this comment because I've paused for a second and this must mean I've forgotten to finish my sentence with a full stop.

Nah doesnt work for me. Its style of output throws off my rhytm.

I write mostly python and there are "pythonic" ways to do things. Most python code out there is unpythonic given its written by non python devs. And copilot is much the same.

I make heavy use of ternary operators, lambdas and numpy vectorization tricks in my code and copilots result wont.

edit

At work I can't use it, and at home I don't want to. My workplace is pretty regressive regarding open source and stuff, so co-pilot is almost certainly dead in the water until management decides to implement their own cluster for our repos. And even then, I'm not sure it would be helpful. A lot of our work is on existing systems, which means we need to have an idea of how our processes need to change in specific rather than in general. Our checkout process alone is nearly a million lines, not counting the secondary services like shipping, returns, etc. that we maintain. We already don't have a ton of boilerplate, maybe it could write configs quick?

And when I'm at home? I'm writing for myself systems that I like writing. Little games and scripts that I have complete control over. Maybe if I had a hustle I would use copilot to produce useful-yet-shitty code to ship and iterate fast, but I prefer to write hobby stuff as a hobby, not a job.

That said, I can see maybe using it to build shitty internal apps at work. I'm hourly so I spend and log most of my time on site work and am allotted only so much time to tinker in a given week. Moving quick on scripts or internal dept. apps could be nice. As it is, though, I mostly use GPT to compress code, double check syntax, or write javadoc. It's also good for spitting out synopsis of large code blocks so I can make sense of certain legacy methods and whatnot. Other than that my job has yet to change from the AI revolution.

I couldn't notice it, because I'm a Butlerian Jihadist, but this is one of the reasons I am one. I did notice something similar with DeepL - it does make my life easier when I need to write an email at work, but it's an obvious obstacle to actually learning the language. This is also why I can't take the AI Alignment movement seriously, they're preoccupied with outlandish Skynet scenarios, and are ignoring obvious AI-caused detriments to humanity that are staring us in the face.

deleted

Fixed now! Sorry about that - we made a change with how hidden/deleted/removed comments work (they will no longer automatically hide all child comments) and there was a glitch in the HTML.

Naturally it also happened right before I needed to head to bed, but I figured it wasn't going to be a lethal bug to leave up overnight.

No you are not

Everything is working on my end. @ZorbaTHut, might it be related to this?

Yep, about 1 hr ago

Me too; the site on desktop is looking like the CSS mug, only worse.

Nope, same here

I'm the same, though in my case 'recently' means within the last 24 hours; when I was checking the site yesterday there were no such formatting/column oddities. (To clarify: by default the comments now take up about 1/3 of my screen, with the other two thirds reserved for a single comment thread that starts at the top of the page, above the 'The Motte Needs You', by the 'New'/'Top' drop-down. If I minimize that single comment thread, it shrinks to taking up only 1/4 of the screen, with the other 3/4 used for the normal set of comments). No idea what's going on or why.

First time poster so i'm not very well versed in the formalities here just to let you guys know.

Will try to be as direct as possible.

Im of the coviction that modern civilization is doomed to collapse. Because of energy constaints, namely the energy return on investment (EROI) of: peak oil and renewable energies. Further more the energy density of oil alternatives is not dense enough to accomodate the modern standard of living.

Here a couple pieces of information that support my viewpoint: Number 1: "EROI of different fuels and the implications for society (2014)" research paper by Charles A.S Hall and others. Number 2: The article "renewables-ko-by-eroi" on the website energytransition.org. Number 3: "Energy, EROI and quality of life (2014)" by Jessica G. Lambert and others.

A couple of assumtions i made are that high EROI is needed for modern living. In case of big EROI losses there will be a massive increase in civil unrest. There is enough coal in the ground to supply our energy needs. However this is not very applicable in cars nor is it good for the envirmoment, which in turn will cause civilisation collape in the longhaul.

If i forgot anything here please let me know.

It would be very nice to hear some counter viewpoints! Because looking at the future and seeking a bleak one is not nice.

All the best,

William

P.S. How do you post links here?

What do you consider a collapse? How far back will civilization regress? Stone Age? Iron Age? Early Modern Age? Steam Age? Atomic Age?

I think population decline will hit us quicker than fossil fuels. P.R. of China speedran the demographic transition, but so did South Korea. African countries will do the same in the next 50-70 years.

I think @Stefferi had some stats about how the global fertility rate is below replacement because of the mortality rates in poorer countries, despite technically being above 2 per female.

I think it's basically on the edge, might dip below replacement this year or somewhere in the close future. I discussed this on Twitter a while ago and it seems the mortality rates are a bit lower than I though. The point is, though, that while generally replacement rate is considered to be 2,1, it's a bit higher than this globally, maybe like 2,2 or 2,3, and the global fertility rate is pretty close to this already.

It's interesting that you bring up energy density, but don't mention nuclear, which blows everything else out of the water.

If you're talking about energy density of transportable power (i.e. oil as a fuel for vehicles rather than electricity creation), I'm willing to assume batteries arent an option due to energy density/materials required, but you should probably addresss why hydrogen and ammonia *aren't * valid options as an oil/gasoline replacement (other than the cost of replacing infrastructure, but if that's the argument, it's a separate one).

At least, that's my thought process on the matter.

Heavy transport can switch to lng fairly easily, I believe, and we’re much farther from running out of that than with oil.

Thanks for the response.

Nuclear is very good on the small scale. However there is not enough uranium to support longterm global reliance on nuclear energy. If the entire world would switch to nuclear energy today, the known uranium supply will be depleted within 5 years.

See the article: "Why nuclear power will never supply the world's energy need" on phys.org.

I will give you that there is alot of uranium in the world's oceans, maybe this could be extracted. But this will cut deeply into the net energy gain nuclear gives.

Even then maybe this could feasible. Not so sure, i havent versed myself verywell in this department.

*Edit, ofcourse there could be alot of new uranium discoveries, but since the known supply is 'only 5 global energy years'. I assume the unknown deposits wont supply much more.

**More edits, For hydrogen there are big energy costs for compressing it into a density where it is feasable to use. As for ammonia i havent looked into this one yet, thank you very much!

All the best,

William

How do spent fuel reprocessing and thorium reactors affect the lifespan of nuclear energy reserves?

Welcome. I'd recommend you take this post into the shop and try again, you'll probably get a more interesting response.

  1. This would be more appropriate in the Culture War Roundup thread.

  2. You're saying something with a massive inferential distance from what most people talk about around here. Try to anticipate and address in advance common objections like the one @Mewis brought up (why the peak of conventional oil didn't translate to peak oil, why EROI is an insurmountable challenge that technology can't address, etc)

  3. Links use this format: [inferential distance](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLqWn5LASfhhArZ7w/expecting-short-inferential-distances)

Thank you very much!

All the best,

William

Peak Oil has been anticipated many times. It hasn't happened because we discover new deposits, or figure out ways to exploit existing ones that were written off as impractical or uneconomical. This isn't to say it will never happen. However it seems more likely that we'll run into trouble as a result of excessive GHG emissions from burning fossil fuels first.

Thanks for the response.

While we are still finding new oil deposits, the discovery rate of the new oil depositst follows a downward trend. (the line has the same figure like a normal-distribution)

Some pieces that support this statement, See 1: The USGS forecast. See 2: "Ecology in Times of Scarcity" by John W Day and others. See 3: the article "The Growing gap" on planetforlive.com.

Also the new discoveries are very often in locations that are diffuclt to access. Think of very deep sea or antartica, et cetera. This ensures the Energy cost getting this oil will be high, so it is coupled with a high EROI. I cant not quickly find sources for this statement, appolagies.

All the best,

William

What would be the optimal sources for fine-grained demographic data on social media/messaging platform userbases? E.g. finding out how many US-based Hindi-speakers use Twitter, or what % of WhatsApp users in the US are messaging in Spanish? I know it won't be perfect or uniform, but trying to find the clearest route to public teeth-sinkable-into data to test some potentially quite interesting thoughts.

Does anyone have any rigorous, evidence-based resources or knowledge about early childhood development? For example, reading a lot of things like 'more tummy time helps babies learn to crawl/walk sooner' or 'x is correlated with earlier speech development.' Is there any actual evidence to show that any of these things matter for outcomes later in life?

Tangential, but related.

Rick Beato ended up doing a fairly rigorous experiment with the datapoint of 1 on his own child for developing perfect pitch. It used to be thought that you're born with it, can't be learned and is exceedingly rare. While a datapoint of 1 is low, the likelihood of a very-low-probability positive outcome being noise, is also fairly low.

It ties in well with learning seemingly-impossible skills and early age neuro-plasticity at large.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=TgFdics3uKo

Someone did a study years ago that babies in tonal language nations are far more likely to have perfect pitch, which gives more evidence to it being something that can be learned in early childhood. Also as a Pat Finnerty subscriber, I feel obligated to say, BEATO!

Emily Oster always comes up as a good resource in these discussions. I have not read her, however.

Thanks for the recommendation!

I’ve read two of her three books (Expecting Better and Cribsheet) and in general trust her. She digs into the veracity of studies backing certain claims and also understands that there’s only so much bandwidth a parent has when trying to follow strict guidelines that feel overly high stakes.

I read Cribsheet, and while I wouldn’t exactly say I trust her, I can say that she is way more diligent, honest, and scientifically minded than most. She approaches the evidence with appropriate amount of skepticism, and is aware of many common pitfalls in scientific reasoning. I would definitely recommend her, but I still recommend using your own judgement as well, especially in areas where the social desirability bias is particularly strong.

I don't have specific recommendations, but I would advise checking the index for any book you're thinking of getting (the index is often shown for free on Amazon's or Google Books' preview feature) and disregarding any book that doesn't have index entries for something like genes, genetics, heritability, or twin studies. Any non-RCT study of parenting or childhood outcomes that does not control for heritability (and most don't) is literally worthless.

Agreed, thanks.

Brain Rules for Baby was the most honest parenting book I read regarding what evidence there is for their recommendations, but I don't think tummy time specifically came up.

Thanks for the recommendation! I'll take a look.

I stumbled upon this post https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cgqh99SHsCv3jJYDS/we-found-an-neuron-in-gpt-2 where the authors explain that they have found a particular "neuron" activations of which are highly correlated with the network outputting article "an" versus "a" (they also found a bunch of other interesting neurons). This made me thinking, people often say that LLMs generate text sequentially, one word at a time, but is that actually true?

I mean, in the literal sense it's definitely true, at each step a GPT looks at the preceding text (up to a certain distance) and produces the next token (a word or a part of a word). But there's a lot of interesting stuff happening in between, and as the "an" issue suggests this literal interpretation might be obscuring something very important.

Suppose I ask a GPT to solve a logical puzzle, with three possible answers, "apple", "banana", "cucumber". It seems more or less obvious that by the time the GPT outputs "The answer is an ", it already knows what the answer actually is. It doesn't choose between "a" and "an" randomly, then fit the next word to match the article, it chooses the next word somewhere in its bowels, then outputs the article.

I'm not sure how to make this argument more formal (and force it to provide more insight contrary to the "it autocompletes one word at a time"). Maybe it could be dressed up in statistics, like suppose we actually ask the GPT to choose one of those three plants at random, then we'll see that it outputs "a" 2/3rds of the time, which tells us something.

Or maybe there could be a way to capture a partial state somehow. Like, when we feed the GPT this: "Which of an apple, a banana, and a cucumber is not long?" it already knows the answer somewhere in its bowels, so when we append "Answer without using an article:" or "Answer in Esperanto:" only a subset of the neurons should change activation values. Or maybe it's even possible to discover a set of neurons that activate in a particular pattern when the GPT might want to output "apple" at some point in the future.

Anyway, I hope that I justified my thesis that "it generates text one word at a time" oversimplifies the situation to the point where it might produce wrong intuitions, that when a GPT chooses between "a" and "an" it doesn't yet know which word will follow. While it does output words one at a time, it must have a significant lookahead state internally (which it regenerates every time it needs to output a single word btw).

See also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nmxzr2zsjNtjaHh7x/actually-othello-gpt-has-a-linear-emergent-world

The headline result is that Othello-GPT learns an emergent world representation - despite never being explicitly given the state of the board, and just being tasked to predict the next move, it learns to compute the state of the board at each move.

IMO, LLMs are "just" trying to predict the next token, the same way humans are "just" trying to pass on our genes. It does not preclude LLMs having an internal world model, and I suspect they actually do.

Strongly agree that it internally represents state about very distant parts of it's answer somehow. I've never tried interacting with it in German, but German's Satzklammer or separable prefix verbs offer more extreme examples of this kind of distant grammatical agreement rule that can be used to assess/prove that the ai is thinking ahead.

So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up Condon's The Manchurian Candidate. I had stumbled on some other work of his and was very impressed with his writing skills. The movie left little impression, but the trope of brainwashing seems to be a recurring one in the modern mentality, even if it appears in different forms over time.

Barbara Mertz' Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs (2009 edition), a fantastically written history of Ancient Egypt. Last year I had also read Jan Assmann's The Mind of Egypt, a more scholarly text focusing on its self-image and its conceptions of the world, history, and power. My combined impressions were as follows:

  1. For being a Bronze Age kingdom ruled by literal god-kings, Ancient Egypt looks surprisingly nice. Sure, they had their share of dispotism, chauvinism, and imperial warfare, but I haven’t found anything like Assyrian brutality on prisoners, Roman blood sports, Greek slave economy and rampant misogyny, or Aztec mass human sacrifices. For the standards of antiquity (which are very low to us), it seems an actually pretty decent place to have lived as a commoner.
  1. The development of culture and worldview looks so strangely like a coherent arc. First there’s Ancient Kingdom pharaohs, who look so aloof and self-sufficient in their divinity. Then the kingdom collapses in rebellion and civil war, teaching the rulers of Egypt that they have responsibilities towards their people; Middle Kingdom pharaohs care a lot more about justifying their position with philosophy and theology. That era collapses too, with an invasion and occupation that teaches them that the rest of the world exists, too; and the New Kingdom is defined by imperial engagement with the great powers of Asia. Eventually the state model of the Bronze Age becomes unsustainable and Egypt fades into a province of distant empires, ruled by fatalism and detachment. This honestly sounds like the kind of satisfying storytelling that one should be most skeptical about in history; I wonder how much this understanding is due to scarcity of records, pareidolia, and my own ignorance, and in what proportion.

Finally getting around to Thucydides' The History of The Peloponnesian War, I meant to pair it with Herodotus' Histories which I read a few years back but other things distracted me.

Apt Pupil is great. Really, his whole novella collection Different Seasons is some of his best work.

The Long Walk is also good. Even better when you know King came up with the idea while an undergraduate. Once you’re done, check out The Running Man.

Following Paul Graham's recommendation, I recently finished reading Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Going into it I wasn't sure what to expect, and maybe I'm being overly cynical, but wow is this book ever corny. Every other page contains an anecdote like "I spent ten years trying to land this one particular client, and was met with a door in the face every time. Then I tried this One Weird Trick, and the prospective client immediately opened an account with me, invited me to be his guest at the opera, and urged me to fuck his wife." The whole book is like this.

Maybe it's a book that should be read backwards because its insights are in the water supply. Perhaps in 1938, "start off by praising your employees before offering constructive criticism" was an innovative suggestion, but I've had six permanent office jobs in my life and I'm pretty sure every one of my employers and supervisors had taken this advice onboard years (if not decades) ago. Hence, the general tenor of work is presumably much less confrontational and gladiatorial than it was in the thirties, but everyone's relative position in their ability to effectively deal with people hasn't changed.

I also found it kind of weird how the message of the first chapter is "never criticise people" and then the last six chapters provide techniques and strategies for how to criticise effectively and diplomatically. Which one is it, Dale?

De Tocqueville (writer of Democracy in America) also wrote a less rosy book on the French Revolution, might be worth checking out.

A Night Without Stars by Peter F. Hamilton. Apparently it’s part of his Commonwealth Saga, which is some of the best hard-ish sci-fi I’ve read.

I finished the first three books of The Corean Chronicles but put the series down after that. It started off strong but by the end of the third book the MC was just destroying everything no sweat. He was so strong there was no tension left.

It’s a shame because I really loved L. E Modesitt Jr.’s Recluce Saga but this series I didn’t find nearly as good.

He basically has one thing he writes, but he does it very well...

Him and Ty Frank (of The Expanse fame) are both old school SpaceBattles serial posters who sold out/went legit and it kind of shows.

Plus one for Project Hail Mary, excellent read.

Am I justified in hating Jacob Collier as much as I do? I cannot stand him or the music culture that adores him. In my opinion, he divorces music from what makes it close to God — its ability to make the reasonable listener feel powerful, rare, beneficial emotions — into a contest of cramming in obscure theory which (unlike a Bach or Dirty Projectors or John Williams) fails to actually sound good. He fails the first and final task of the composer, which is making music that is Great according to someone who doesn’t know theory but has listened to music before and possesses emotional intelligence. I see this trend as an invisible poison that afflicts all of the arts, and not just music. The arts are no longer designed to heal or beautify the souls of reasonable people, but have become an incestuous competition between info fetishizers.

I cannot digest Jacob Collier at all despite being a self-professed inaccessible wanker-music fan (prog of all kinds, Indian classical, exteme metal, avant garde), he stands out as someone I uniquely struggle to empathize with.

For me, you've hit the nail on the head. Complex music is by definition inaccessible. But, eventually you decode it, and it turns into a heart-to-heart. Behind it all, there has to be emotion.

The most extreme examples of this for me are : BTBAM's Coma Ecliptic and Viljhartha's Den Helige Anden . Took me months of finding the music inaccessible, until one day it clicked. And now if it finds me in the right mood, then at least goosebumps and at time tears are to be expected.

I have tried very very hard to find the heart behind Collier's music, and I simply haven't been able to find any. Compare him to his fellow virtuosic youtube wierdos (Ben Levin, Louis Cole, Animals as Leaders, Tigran, Snarky Puppy) and they all have heart. Even non-sensical live bands like Neely's Sungazer still have an element of fun to it all, that Jacob's music just doesn't have.

Jacob Collier to me, is the uncanny valley of music.

Given my position as this forum's self-appointed music maven, and the apparent fact that no one else here knows who he is, I feel obligated to offer my opinion. One look at the guy's bio tells you all you need to know: Raised in a musical family, started making YouTube videos at age 17, which, coincidentally, was right around the time that YouTube became viable as a medium for original content. Attended the Royal Conservatory briefly but was soon taken under the wing of Quincy Jones and whisked around the world as the next great young musical genius, and over the past decade his star has grown to the point where he can't release an album without a slew of celebrity guests.

The upshot to all this is that there was never a time in Collier's life when anyone told him no. He never had composition professors marking up his music with a red pen. He never spent years as a working musician playing shows night after night to learn what worked and what didn't. He never played his hyper-harmonized compositions in front of an audience of local teenagers at the fire hall to get public reaction about what worked and what didn't. I guess he had Quincy Jones, but Jones was by that point 80 years old and entering the no-filter interview stage of his career and probably wasn't spending too much time offering constructive criticism. Instead, he cultivated an online audience based on what was essentially a gimmick and used that as a platform for incorporating advanced ideas and educating the public about them.

But the ideas don't always work. If his output was limited to educational videos and the occasional composition when something really works, he's be a lot more tolerable. Instead he releases albums that expose the limitations of his compositional abilities. His complex harmonies sound lush when he's noodling on the keyboard, but when we're subjected to them for an hour straight on an album it all blends together in a sort of lite-funk Muzac. So there's a weird juxtaposition wherein the guy is treated like the second coming of Duke Ellington, and when presented with select examples one may believe it, but listening to an entire album reveals that the emperor has no clothes. Sure, advanced harmony and microtonality and the like have their place in contemporary composition. But that can't be all there is. It's like a spice in a dish—it's good to have an added twist, but it can't replace the meat and potatoes.

An compounding the problem is the fact that the media and his band of followers are all too eager to jump on the genius bandwagon. A few years back Wired or a similar outlet did one of those videos where they try to explain a complex topic at varying levels of difficulty by having an expert explain it to a five year old, ten year old, and so on up to another expert. They had Collier explain harmony and him talking to kids was fine enough, but at the end they had him explain harmony to Herbie Hancock, a man who has contributed more to the world's harmonic vocabulary that Collier ever will. To be fair, he was appropriately humble with Hancock, and it was more of a conversation than a lesson, but immediately prior to this, they had Collier explaining harmony to a professional cellist, and the cellist had the appearance of a high school student who was eager to learn something and in awe of his teacher. The idea that a professional orchestral cellist—who would have probably studied at a conservatory and have years of experience performing in all sorts of ensembles—would need to turn to a YouTube star to learn more about harmony is preposterous.

All that being said. I'm glad Jacob Collier exists. With music education funding in constant peril and pop music nothing but 4 chord loops, the possibilities for today's kids to have any real sense of music appreciation seem hopeless. Collier's music may be mediocre, but it's miles ahead of what's on pop radio. And that, I think, explains the adulation he receives from his fans to some extent. If you're a high school kid who normally hears nothing but Top-40 radio and a guy like Collier comes along and shows that there's a whole universe of musical possibility out there, it can be tempting to brand the man a genius, especially with the whole media ecosystem telling you he is. Even if his talent is often overstated, his popularity is entirely based on his talent and not his marketability. As someone who grew up immersed in jazz and classical music Collier's whole schtick may seem sophomoric, but let's face it; it's not like his fans would otherwise be listening to Thelonious Monk records. If Collier can at least point them in the right direction, I'd say that's a good thing.

Good thoughts, well put. Yeah I suppose his music theory lessons are good for young people, but the musical genius label is unfitting. Musical theory genius, sure, more fitting.

If I had learned even the most basic of music theory in elementary or middle school, I would probably still be a cellist and perhaps a composer of electronic music. As it is, I never learned how to produce something that sounds good, only to play rote what other people wrote.

I too only learned to play rote what other people wrote in my music education, and this was something I found to be utterly mind-numbing (in my case, I played piano). But when I was 15 or 16 I picked up how to use a digital audio workstation and started making electronic music, a hobby which I now think I'm pretty good at.

In my experience, formally learning music theory isn't that essential. Don't get me wrong, a grasp of theory helps, but it's not absolutely necessary for composition and most people who are intent listeners do intuitively pick up some sense of theory while listening to music (and you pick up even more when trying to make things).

As with anything else, getting good at making music mainly involves slowly gaining experience through trial and error and spending thousands upon thousands of hours on it. I'm fairly certain that a good amount of the artists you like aren't thinking about it in terms of formal theory, they're making things and keeping what sounds good to them, discarding what doesn't, and learning along the way.

I don't like him. His "childlike wonder" appears phony. His fans are culty. His vocal timbre is borderline repulsive. His work is sterile. No clue how he has five Grammy wins. Dude needs to get addicted to heroin or fight in a war or something. Shit's boring.

That picture of Pope Francis in a puffer coat got me thinking:

AI generation of highly realistic images is a problem. Ideally, we would want a reliable way to distinguish truth from lies. So we train another AI to spot the difference. Then someone trains a different AI to fool both humans and AIs.

Will this be an endless arms race? Will one side win?

This is basically what the GAN architecture is--generative adversarial networks.

One, the generator, is being trained to generate e.g. photorealistic images. The other, the discriminator, is being trained to classify images as real or generated.

At first, the generator sucks and the discriminator is unsophisticated. But they co-evolve in an arms race. Afaik this architecture was developed in order to make it less costly to produce the generator (requiring less human grading of outcomes), but it turns out the trained discriminator might be handy as well.

To me, though, it seems that the discriminator's job is intrinsically harder. With infinite training resources, I don't see any way to avoid ending up in a situation without lots and lots of false positives--real images categorized as fakes.

Well, the question is what is the difference between real imagine, and a fake image that is visually indistinguishable on a technical level from a real one? (Assuming you do not have an external knowledge about the subject matter in the image.)

I have been wondering about this in the context of historical record-keeping. How will our descendants be able to tell the difference between real and fake historical documents, images, and videos if convincing forgeries are so easy to produce? The space of false information is much larger than that of true facts, so this problem will grow exponentially over time. My impression is that there might be a solution to this combining blockchain and Canticle for Leibowitz-style orders of historian-monks who vet everything and check each other for accuracy, but that may still be a concerning level of centralization.

I have been wondering about this in the context of historical record-keeping. How will our descendants be able to tell the difference between real and fake historical documents, images, and videos if convincing forgeries are so easy to produce?

I THINK, and it is really a fumbling guess, that they'll at least be able to make inferences based on the volume of separate accounts and recordings of particularly notable events (say, a Super-Bowl halftime show), and then be able to cross-reference the events they have 'high' confidence about with those that they have lower confidence about to reach a hopefully coherent unified view of how the past likely unfolded. This counts on it being much easier to analyze the mountains of date (including 'junk' data) being produced now sometime in the future.

Simple example: we, currently, can be quite confident that Elvis Presley existed. We know this because there are large amounts of video, audio, photographic recordings from the era he allegedly lived, far more than could be reasonably faked at the time. We can also be pretty certain he died on August 16, 1977. We 'know' this because tons of newspapers, of which we can find existing physical copies, reported this death. So any stories of the world that rely on Elvis not existing OR Elvis still being alive after that date are automatically going to be mostly discounted by any serious historian. At a bare minimum this should prevent future historians from being thrown off by tabloid stories claiming Elvis is still alive.

Side note: this is actually why I take the simulation hypothesis somewhat seriously. If society 100 years in the future (having survived whatever catastrophes we expect to face) gets curious about how some underdocumented event really transpired, and they can't trust the veracity of the records, one (probably the ONLY) solution is to run a high-fidelity simulation of all of human civilization up until the moment of said event and then observe what the simulation believes were the most probable outcome.

There are many historical events or people that I know I am curious about, so I can easily believe even as humanity gains more technological power they might still be interested in what their relatively primitive ancestors got up to.

The only winning move is not to care.

Seriously, I don't know how we overcome that problem from a technical standpoint, so we as a society need to evolve away from scandal.

I don't know how we do that either.

I don't know how we do that either.

That'll happen by itself when anyone can create a fake scandal with little effort. "That's fake" won't just be a believable excuse, but everyone's default assumption.

Yes but the times getting there will surely be tumultuous. I wonder how quickly we’ll adapt.

When does “new money” become “old money”? How many generations does wealth need to pass before you become the latter?

Rampant speculative thoughtstream:

It becomes 'old' money when the sources of a family's wealth are all but inextricably woven into the fabric of the society in which said family operates, in such a way that their wealth will never disappear without A) an actual revolution or B) the collapse of said society.

This definition makes it easy to declare Saudi money 'old' money despite being relatively young since their oil wealth is the entire backbone of their respective nations.

The Walton Family is now old money insofar as we can't imagine an American Nation that doesn't have a Wal-mart in every single town, and any event that led to Wal-Mart collapsing would probably spell massive doom for huge swaths of the country too. The Gates family may or may not be old money by this definition. Microsoft is woven into the fabric, but I don't think that constitutes most of his wealth and I'm not sure how he has the rest of his money squirreled away.

Elon Musk's fortune is tied directly to the fates of SpaceX, Tesla, now Twitter, and probably a few other companies, He is exposed to risks directly related to the fates of those companies that could succeed or fail irrespective of how well the U.S. as a whole does. That's new money, it isn't 'locked in' yet although it trends that way. One can imagine a mere twenty years in the future where SpaceX is the equivalent of the railroad companies of old, being our primary method of transport into space, Tesla is the largest car manufacturer, and Twitter remains the most-used forum for screaming at your political opponents, and thus Musks descendants enjoy a multi-trillion dollar fortune that is inextricably tied to the U.S. economy. With a bit more diversification, then they would be 'old money' by then.

I think Taleb makes a point about this as well. "Old money" gets insulated from risk by pure attrition. The families that don't store money in incredibly safe places, or that don't properly distribute their risk by effective diversification will ultimately get wiped out, sooner or later, leaving behind the families that are, by definition, good at spreading risk around and thus having a finger in almost every pie.

This definition does imply that any fabulously wealthy individual can become 'old money' regardless of how they earned their wealth simply by hiring a competent financial advisor who puts their money into a carefully chosen portfolio that is unlikely to ever be wiped out absent a civilizational crash.

Old Money has no strict, universally useful meaning. The difference between Old Money and New Money is one of reputation, history, and honor. It is the state at which you don't worry about having cash on hand, because someone somewhere will provide it to you because of who you are. Consider Tolstoy describing such a character and his role in the civil service:

Stepan Arkadyevitch had learned easily at school, thanks to his excellent abilities, but he had been idle and mischievous, and therefore was one of the lowest in his class. But in spite of his habitually dissipated mode of life, his inferior grade in the service, and his comparative youth, he occupied the honorable and lucrative position of president of one of the government boards at Moscow. This post he had received through his sister Anna’s husband, Alexey Alexandrovitch Karenin, who held one of the most important positions in the ministry to whose department the Moscow office belonged. But if Karenin had not got his brother-in-law this berth, then through a hundred other personages—brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, and aunts—Stiva Oblonsky would have received this post, or some other similar one, together with the salary of six thousand absolutely needful for him, as his affairs, in spite of his wife’s considerable property, were in an embarrassed condition.

Half Moscow and Petersburg were friends and relations of Stepan Arkadyevitch. He was born in the midst of those who had been and are the powerful ones of this world. One-third of the men in the government, the older men, had been friends of his father’s, and had known him in petticoats; another third were his intimate chums, and the remainder were friendly acquaintances. Consequently the distributors of earthly blessings in the shape of places, rents, shares, and such, were all his friends, and could not overlook one of their own set; and Oblonsky had no need to make any special exertion to get a lucrative post. He had only not to refuse things, not to show jealousy, not to be quarrelsome or take offense, all of which from his characteristic good nature he never did. It would have struck him as absurd if he had been told that he would not get a position with the salary he required, especially as he expected nothing out of the way; he only wanted what the men of his own age and standing did get, and he was no worse qualified for performing duties of the kind than any other man.

Old Money is when a lack of liquidity, or even obvious wealth, wouldn't stand in the way of one being extended credit, a loan, a job opportunity, a business partnership, a friendship. You know you'll get your money or your favor paid back from such a person, because there is money and power somewhere in the family, or another connection will come through and help him through this rough patch, etc. It is an inevitability that a person such as this will succeed, so by doing them a favor you secure yourself a favor/influence/power in the future from him or his family. This of course is self-perpetuating, when everyone around you is doing you favors you probably succeed, and even if you don't you can borrow from Peter to pay Paul for quite a while before it catches up to you. You know that no matter what happens this person and their family will be around; and the fact that you know it balls-to-bones makes it true. New Money is simply the lack of such a widely-shared social certainty in your wealth's permanence. In God We Trust, all others bring cash.

Obviously this exists on a spectrum, your money isn't Old, or New; it is Old Enough that someone would X or it isn't Old Enough. Your family reputation is large enough that it is known to your interlocutor, or it isn't. The Windsors would be the most extreme example, the closest we get to universal Old Money, so we'll use them for a hypothetical, assuming that I am absolutely certain of the identity of the man I am talking to and no fraud or mistake is possible.

If I ran into Prince William on the Jersey Shore this summer, and he came up to me and said "FiveHour, old chap, I'm a little out of money right now, lost it all in Atlantic City at a craps table I think was crooked, could I borrow $1,000 cash to sort out some things, and give me a ride to the airport, I'll get it all back to you just as soon as I'm in London." I've never met the man in my life, but I would lend him the money without hesitation. Because I'm fairly certain that someone will lend him the money, or that he'll get out of this jam somehow, it's an inevitability, and whoever does will get the little bump of social credit for having done him a solid, and that might as well be me, why let that opportunity to do the heir a favor go to someone else? If the opportunity to lend him $1,000 and give him a ride to the airport were broadly offered, people would be crawling over each other to be the one to provide it.

At a less extreme and more local level, there are family names in my hometown where no local small business would ask for a credit check, where any local contractor would give any payment terms, because even if they didn't pay up you could go to their father/uncle/etc. and get the money. The family patriarch might take it out on the wayward son/nephew/etc.; but there is absolute certainty that you as a vendor will get your money from someone in the family. You might as well do the favor, you'll get your money back and curry favor with the family. That scales up to job offers, business partnerships, college admissions, everything. That is old money.

*The family must act to maintain this reputation, or it dissipates quickly, one dissolute cousin can tank the reputation of the whole clan. You have to be committed as a family to spending resources to prop up weaker members, getting them jobs or lending them resources, and those weaker members themselves can't be too dissolute or they will burn through reputation faster than stronger members can build it. It's a whole family commitment to respectability, it is rare in today's world but it can still happen in limited circumstances.

There was a (possibly fake) AMA years back on Reddit with an old timer who was in a 1%er biker gang, in answer to a question something like "How do you become a 1%er?" he said "Put a 1%er patch on your jacket, walk into a biker bar where other 1%ers hang out, beat the hell out of anyone who tries to take the patch off you." Nobility, or old money status, is the same way: you declare yourself Old Money and you defend yourself from any allegation that you aren't. When allegations against your family succeed, when someone lends money to your cousin and never gets it back, when they offer your nephew a salesman job and he doesn't deliver on using connections to secure sales, your family loses status. Lose enough status, the whole aura is dissipated.

This is mostly hype that has no basis in reality IMO, look at who the daughters of William Gates the III are dating or married to. Also the general huge rate of exogamy at old money schools is clear evidence that the difference is contrived. Old money has been fucking and befriending new money since the Rothschilds

Yeah, British peers marrying American tycoons was a trope in the Victorian era.

The second generation that has never had to work for a living and went to the "right" school is "old money".

Fred Trump worked for a living, Donald Trump was born into a rich family and went to UPenn, he's the first generation. Donald Trump Jr. is the second generation and is old enough money for the US.

When it gets the same culture as old money by going to the same schools and saying the same things.

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