ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I've had a couple times when I wanted to share something with someone, but didn't want them to have to dive fully into the thread. Was saddened to see that The Vault hasn't been updated in a year and a half. No blame, because I'm sure it takes a ton of time, and I'm not out volunteering my own time, just sad.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Some percentage may implicitly be thinking about a conviction under 18 U.S. Code § 2383, though he is not actually being charged with such in any venue.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
One argument focuses on particular sub-classes of illegal immigrants. For example, I know a few people who are or were illegally present in the US, and most of their stories are more about some SNAFU with some arcane provision of immigration law (potentially with how it creates conflicts with the law of a foreign country). A math prof I had long ago, for example, had to deal with an awful bureaucratic mess, as she was here legally to teach at the university, but her infant son had no legal right to stay (they had to figure out creative ways to make things work; not sure if it was always legal). I know another person whose mother came over long ago for marriage; I don't actually know the details of what happened, the relationship fell apart. The child (now an adult) never had proper paperwork, but her mother just never took her back home; just kept her here. Eventually grew up to be an adult, and is now like, "Well shit, what am I supposed to do?" In that case, she managed to marry a US citizen and eventually jumped through enough hoops to become legal without being deported. I've heard a story about a student who came from Africa to a European country, and then to the US, which started off legal, but on some trip sometime didn't have whatever right stamp was necessary for whichever government (this was long before the internet, and holy shit, I can't imagine having to navigate the immigration bureaucracy as a young student back then without it), and basically just decided that his best choice among shitty choices was just to just stay in the US illegally.
Thankfully, the internet is making it vastly easier to understand what exactly you're supposed to do in order to check all the legal boxes, but even then it can sometimes be tough. My wife immigrated when we got married, and we almost ended up in a really shitty spot, because they changed one of the requirements mid-process for us, so we got a letter (that was somewhat novel due to it being a new change, so there wasn't a lot of clear existing advice anywhere) that was not that easy to parse for what exactly would satisfy their demand, with a deadline attached that very very very nearly could have been a literally impossible timeline. Thankfully, we were able to scramble like crazy (and pay some additional annoyingly hefty sums) to make it work.
None of these stories are southern-border-adjacent, but they are all real stories. If they were truly representative of the modal story, I could easily see someone thinking that since shit like this happens all the fucking time with USCIS, they should err on the side of protecting people from bureaucratic bullshit unless they really become a problem and start committing other crimes or something. It is genuinely true that the more laws we have regarding this situation and that situation and this requirement and that requirement and on and on, the more often you're going to have situations that are basically just screwed up by accident, be it the fault of the individual or an actual mistake made by USCIS.
(Obligatory, this is not at all relevant to any people who literally just walk across the border at night or whatever, with no paperwork and no reasonable attempt whatsoever to even try to do things legally.)
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Do you mean "not regulated at all" or "not regulated by a federal bureaucracy"? ... The latter statement is what is at stake
I mean, not even that is at stake. Congress could still give agencies pretty broad authorities and pretty broad discretion. It would only be that, given the particular wording the statute uses, if there is an ambiguity, the gov't wouldn't auto-win every time. They'd have to cry a little tear for the poor federal agencies out there make their case in court for their reading of the statute.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Today every major American corporation is staffed by HSW MBAs, so there is simply no more need for management consultants. It isn’t that McKinsey suddenly became worse, it’s that the ‘expertise’ that MBB had in the 80s has been diffused into American corporate life so wholly that it is no longer necessary.
I think the main question here is whether society has, in some sense, "perfected" management. Or at least done something like figure out the problem of management up to the 95% level of perfection or whatever. Are there truly almost no new horizons over which we can actually substantially improve management performance? I think that at least Elon Musk would disagree, saying that it's been mostly a management problem that other companies haven't been able to accomplish the technological feats he's accomplished, and I wonder if Thiel would agree. I think he's saying here that there actually is a lot of room for a more ambitious "management science", but that no one's really doing it, so the result is that everything that's left is basically a scam.
I don't know that I have much of a personal opinion on which perspective is right.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I think there's a strong divide between undergrad and grad. Undergrads seem mostly content to socialize and party for a few years while getting the stamp that demonstrates that they were at least conscientious enough to get most of the work done on time. Grad students are often the ones thinking that they can push science forward, become long-term, impactful academics, and such. I think this theory is primarily about the latter, while your counter-consideration is mostly about the former.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Big Peter Thiel interview with John Gray H/T MarginalRevolution
This hits quite a few topics, but one cluster I'd pull out is science/achievement/religion/wokeness:
[JG:] Part of the resistance to your analysis of science is a kind of quasi-religious conception of the salvific possibilities of science. Science can do what religion hasn’t done, which is to actually change worldly life in a way which rids it of its deepest contradictions. And for some people, if they gave up that faith in science, they would be left with nihilism, or left with despair, or left with unbearable anxiety.
PT: Yeah, although there’s a very complicated history of science. In some ways it was a by-product of Christianity, in some ways it was in opposition to Christianity. And certainly in its healthy, ambitious, early modern forms, whether it was a substitute or a complement to Christianity, it was supposed to be a vehicle for comparable transformation. The indefinite prolongation of human life was an early modern science project in which people still believed in the 17th and 18th centuries. There was a sub-movement within the revolutionary Soviet politics in the 1920s called Cosmism, where a part of the project of the revolution had to be to physically resurrect all dead human beings, because if science didn’t do that it would be inferior to Christianity.
[...] So there is this anti-Christian or derivative from Christianity, very ambitious version of science. And of course, there is also a more defeatist version of science, where science actually tells us about limits and things you cannot do. To use a literary example, when Hamlet’s evil mother, Gertrude, says that all that lives must die, the question one must ask is, is that a law of nature? Or is this just a rationalization for the rottenness that is Denmark? And certainly the early modern conception was that you wanted to transcend this, both in a Christian or a scientific form. By late modernity, as science decayed, that sort of ambition is only on the fringes of science, not the mainstream.
...
One particular example of science’s slide from early modern ambition into late modern torpor is the climate change debate. If one took climate change seriously, there are all kinds of progressive science things one could do. You could be pushing for the construction of hundreds of new nuclear reactors. You could be pushing for nuclear fusion. But in practice, we don’t lean into that. We’re instead told that we should ride bicycles. So much of science today has this Luddite feeling.
The theme is that science used to be ambitious, especially ambitious in thinking that it would easily replace religion in all aspects, even in hope. I don't think he's claiming here that science has directly stalled out technologically, but the way the culture views it and uses it is uninspired and uninspiring. He seems to extend this decline to the science of social technology:
You know, McKinsey was a real thing in 1985 in the United States. If you hired a consultant they actually helped you improve your company, because the companies were badly run. At this point McKinsey is a total racket, it’s just all fake. The Reagan and Thatcher administrations empowered McKinsey because they allowed more companies to be acquired, more M&A activity to happen. It was a somewhat brutal but very powerful reorganization of society that was possible and in fact the right thing to do in the 1980s. At this point, McKinsey is not ever going to be anything other than a super corrupt, fake racket in 2023.
I think that toward the end, he possibly comes to some sort of root of it:
one of my colleagues says that institutions have embedded growth obligations, EGOs, in short. A healthy institution has exponential growth. A healthy, exponentially growing company, for example, creates more jobs and everybody can get promoted. Other institutions have their equivalents. And then at some point, the growth stops, and you have a choice. You can become more honest and say, well, you know, the university isn’t growing anymore. There’ll be very few faculty slots available. If you’re in a PhD program, we’re gonna make sure that 80% of the students drop out of the program within six months so they don’t waste their time. Or, the thing that I think unfortunately happens a great deal, is you just lie and the and the institutions become sociopathic. They pretend that the growth is still going on and then it’s only years and years later that people figure out that there are no jobs.
To tie it back to wokeness, wokeness is designed to distract from and cope with this structural reality. Say you have 10 graduate students in a chemistry program and there’s a job for only one of them at the end. You’re engaged in a Malthusian struggle, fistfights over beakers and Bunsen burners. Then somebody says something slightly racist or slightly inappropriate. What a relief – you can throw that one person off the overcrowded bus! That kind of phenomenon is perfectly natural, and could be avoided with more growth.
That is, I think he is saying that the problem with society and science stems (STEMs?) not from the screwed up incentive to publish ever more just to make number go up, but from the fact that people just didn't take seriously the idea that number don't go up (of faculty), which could be the fundamental driver for why there is the screwed up incentive to publish ever more just to make number go up. That this core problem drove the messed up incentive system, made the whole thing go sociopathic, generating apathy/lack of ambition (you can't have that wide-eyed of an optimistic ambition within the muck of a clearly sociopathic endeavor), and ultimately giving birth to extremely degenerate behavior like wokeness.
I think some here would say that the only reason why number don't go up (of faculty) is a problem is because society has this strange idea that everyone is completely equal in terms of potential/capability, so they think there's no reason why we couldn't have vastly higher quantities of faculty-capable people. But I'm not sure whether that's the case or if we're genuinely dealing with a weird numbers problem. Literally this morning, I saw a new video from a top chess grandmaster, talking about how the rating system is messed up post-COVID. How a ton of young kids across the world poured obscene amounts of their lives into online chess during that time, due to quarantine/addition/general rise in popularity, and they genuinely got really good at chess. But their skill isn't reflected by the traditional "over the board" rating, because they may just not have played enough games in those settings to have it adjust properly.
I do lament that the vast majority of what gets published is totally worthless, but I'm wishy-washy on whether the fundamental driver is that less capable people are getting into these positions or if it's almost purely a result of incentive structure. In the end, I think it's probably both, but let me sketch it out. This is basically an attempt to steelman the possibility that, say, the 85th percentile of folks who could have even plausibly thought about pursuing a career in academia actually has gotten to be a lot better than they were in the past. Then, since total faculty numbers are stagnant, it wasn't as easy to just look at traditional measures and pick out the highest quality folks (akin to how you can't necessarily just look at OTB chess rating nowadays), but since you couldn't just wait and let the rating system self-correct over time, because, uh, you don't have a self-correcting rating system like ELO for academics, they had to go hard in on shit like just making some number or other go up. Then, even though the quantity of reasonable-tier candidates (and their general quality) may be higher, Goodhart's law still takes over, and you end up selecting the ones that are just better at gaming your metric or stabbing each other in the back (and they focus their efforts on gaming metrics/backstabbing, so that even if they're actually more capable, their output becomes generally worse, which would explain how many crap papers are out there). Apathy, lack of ambition, and dysfunction follow.
(I still don't know whether I actually think the 85th percentile of potential faculty actually has gone up, or just people really want to believe in the absence of an actually good measure.)
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
If you're worried that this will lead to lax academic standards or shoddy research practices, I'd reassure you that academic standards have never been laxer and shoddy research is absolutely everywhere, and the existence of review boards and similar apparatchik-filled bodies does nothing to curb these. If anything, by preventing basic research being done by anything except those with insider connections and a taste for bureaucracy, they make the problem worse. Similarly, academia is decreasingly valuable for delivering basic research; the incentive structures have been too rotten for too long, and almost no-one produces content with actual value.
Whew, lots of thoughts. Let's start with total agreement that academic standards have never been laxer, that shoddy research is absolutely everywhere, review boards and such have done nothing to curb it, and that almost no one produces content with actual value. Moreover, I would agree that the incentive structures have been too rotten for too long, and I think that this is a huge driver of the previous four items. "Publish or perish" has creeped ever earlier, and I've actually stopped going to conferences, due to the flood of interestingly-titled talks that end up being, "So, I'm an undergrad, and this is really preliminary work, and... [total garbage]." The undergrads feel like they have to publish bullshit in order to get into grad school, the grad students feel like they have to publish bullshit to get a post-doc, the post-docs feel like they have to publish bullshit to get a professorship, and the assistant professors feel like they have to publish bullshit to get tenure (after tenure, paths tend to bifurcate a bit more, it seems), so the assistant professors are more than happy to push everyone down the chain to go ahead and publish their bullshit (so long as his/her name is on it, so it adds to a count on Google Scholar). It is all for the sake of number go up rather than advancing knowledge.
This trend has been decades long, but I would argue that it has also been exacerbated by one particular huge drop in barrier to submission - the rise of China. I don't know if they've really subscribed to our fucked up incentive structure, because I just don't know as much about how their unis work, but the regional flood has gone global. Not to say that there is zero good work coming from there (I finally recommended acceptance of my first paper from a Chinese group, but it's unsurprising that it was an exceptional case, as the main guy in that group is good enough that he's now taken a position at an excellent Western uni), but the quantity of folks pushing out the quantity of digital ink from there is astounding, and the vast majority of it is undergrad-tier bullshit. It really makes me pause when you say:
If anything, by preventing basic research being done by anything except those with insider connections and a taste for bureaucracy, they make the problem worse.
I really go back and forth in my head. Does having a sort of mental rule that nearly automatically rules out all Chinese work help? Probably so, like 99% of the time. Does having a sort of mental rule that if the first author is an undergrad from a low-tier uni, it's probably shit help? Probably so, like 99% of the time. I joke sometimes that I've never even seen a contemporary masters thesis that was at all interesting (there are some legendary ones from the past, by legit giants in their fields). Having some form of statistically-informed heuristic realllly saves a lot of time and effort that would otherwise be 99% wasted. This sort of "credential chauvinism" obviously won't stop the flood; incentive structures for conferences/journals are also fucked up enough that there's zero chance any will adopt a position of basically, "If you're an undergrad or from a Chinese university, your submission will basically be auto-denied." But they're adopted very pragmatically, almost out of necessity, by the good researchers who just don't have that much time to waste. (I know the irony of writing this in a bloody comment on a rando internet forum.)
My personal strategy is basically defection/free-riding. I've cultivated a network of really talented profs who I personally know, have personally spoken with enough to know how they think, with a not-insignificant percentage of them being assistant profs. They basically feel forced by their incentive structures to wade through all of the crap and constantly engage with all the conferences and reviewing and editing and shit... and they like magically filter through it all and bring up the small number of diamonds in the rough. Is it the best-tuned filter? Possibly not. Might I gain some additional insight by wading through more of it actively? Possibly. But damn if I'm going to ever feel like the cost/benefit tradeoff is going to be worth it anytime soon. But the nature of defection/free-riding is that not everyone can do it without catastrophic consequences.
Getting back to the point of LLMs, this is what I'm worried about. Sure, it'll make it harder for dyed-in-the-wool bureaucrat-and-nothing-more folks, but it'll also make it harder for us. It'll be Eternal September for academia. What possible filters can stand?
Meanwhile I expect harder fields like biomed and material sciences to (continue to) be supercharged by the capabilities of ML, with the comparative ineffectiveness of institutional research being shown up by insights from DeepMind et al.
I don't have as much to say on the social sciences bit, and you may well be perfectly on point there. For harder sciences, I'm really not sure where this will go. Traditional work has been extremely structured in form, whereas I do subscribe to the Nick Weaver School of ML in Research, which is, "ML is great for when you want to model something that you have a good reason to think is structured, but you have no idea how to model it, and you're okay with it being fabulously wrong some percentage of the time." Biomed and materials science are perfectly positioned to reap the gains of this. Those areas in particular have fantastically complicated underlying structures, and at least the experimental folks don't much care how we get a half-decent idea of what to try to build, so long as each iteration doesn't take too much time, we can just try a bunch of them and see what works out. Huge potential for big experimental gains, and a decent chance that experimental gains will subsequently push the theory part forward around those new lodestones. My view of the trends in institutional research has been that they've gone full steam ahead at trying to embrace it for every problem under the sun, even when it doesn't make much sense. But for every work that gets accelerated, every wonder material that gets developed, how many shit-tier "ML" papers will be submitted/published in the field that turn out to just be awful, obnoxious noise? (While this last paragraph is similar in a concern about the flood of crap, it's a bit distinct as it's less focused specifically on the administrative side of the crap production/evaluation.)
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
What is administrative burden in research for?
I think about this in a variety of domains, but it came up again when one of my tech news aggregators pointed to this paper. The idea is using LLMs to generate and evaluate protocols for biology experiments. I think the obvious key concern is related to well-known tradeoffs that people have been brought up in other contexts. Sometimes, it gets reduced to, "Well, people were concerned that with automated spell-checkers, then people will forget how to spell, but that's a silly problem, because even if they forget how to spell, their output that is augmented by the spell-checker will be plenty productive."
I wonder if there are limits to this reasoning. I'm thinking of two topics that I recall Matt Levine writing about (I can't find links at the moment; since Money Stuff always has multiple topics in each letter and he's written about similar topics that use similar words a bunch of times, I can't quickly find them).
One topic I recall is him talking about 'defensive' board meetings. The way I recall it is to suppose that a company puts in their public disclosures that they "consider cybersecurity risks". This doesn't necessarily mean that they do anything about cybersecurity risks, but they have to consider them. The way this plays out is that the board has to put an agenda item for one of their meetings to talk about cybersecurity risks. For an hour or whatever, the board has to talk about the general topic of cybersecurity. This talking can be at a high level of generality, and they don't have to really decide to do anything specific, so long as they have the official minutes that say, in writing, that they "considered" it. Without this, they might be liable for securities fraud. With it, they still might be extremely vulnerable and eventually lose a bunch of money when they're exploited (since they just talked and didn't do anything), but at least when that happens, they won't also get hit with a shareholder suit for securities fraud. (Really, Matt Levine would say, they'll absolutely get hit with a shareholder suit for securities fraud, but they'll be able to point to the minutes to defend themselves.)
The second topic I recall is him talking about where the value lies in corporate contract negotiation. He said that most times, you just start from the "typical" contract. Maybe something you've used in the past. You just pull that old contract off the shelf, change some particulars, then put it forward as a starting point. Then, the negotiations are often about just little modifications, and the phrase, "That's standard," is a pretty solid weapon against any modifications. He then talked about how a firm that does these negotiations in bulk as a service can start to sneak new provisions in around the edges in some contracts, so that they can later point to those prior contracts and say, "That's standard." Having the ability to set the "default" can have value.
So, biology. Science. Writing protocols is complicated, annoying, and time-intensive. Scott has written before about how infuriating the IRB process can be. Even with just that, there were questions about what the IRB process is for, and whether the current level of scrutiny is too lax, too strict, or about right.
Applying LLMs will potentially greatly decrease the barrier for newer researchers (say, grad students) to be able to generate piles of administrative style paperwork, saying all the proper words about what is "supposed" to be done, checking off every box that the IRB or whatever would ask for. But I do have to wonder... will it lead to short-cutting? "Sure, the LLM told us that we needed to have these thirty pages of boilerplate text, so we submitted these thirty pages of boilerplate text, but I mean, who actually does all of that stuff?!" Do they even take the time to read the entirety of the document? I can't imagine they're going to pay as close attention as they might have if they had to painstakingly go through the process of figuring out what the requirements were and why they were necessary (or coming to the personal conclusion that it was a dumb requirement that was necessary for the sake of being necessary). At least if they went through the process, they have to think about it and consider what it was that they were planning to do. This could lead to even worse situations than a board "considering" cybersecurity; they don't even need meeting notes to demonstrate that they "considered" the details of the protocol appropriately; the protocol itself is the written document that they theoretically took things into consideration in an assumed-to-be serious way.
This could also entrench silly requirements. You need to provide the subjects with pencils instead of pens? "That's standard." Who is going to be able to do the yeoman's job of subtly shifting the default to something that's, I don't know, not stupid?
I imagine all sorts of dispositions by particular researchers. There are obviously current researchers who just don't give a damn about doing things the right way, even to the point of outright fraud. There are obviously current researchers who really do care about doing things the "right way", to the point of being so frustrated with how convoluted the "right way" can be that they just give up on the whole she-bang (a la Scott). Which factors become more common? What becomes the prevalent way of doing things, and what are the likely widespread failure modes? Mostly, I worry that it could make things worse in both directions: needing large piles of paper to check off every box will lead to both short-cutting by inferior researchers, possibly producing even more shit-tier research (if that problem wasn't bad enough already; also, since they have the official documents, maybe it'll be in a form that is even harder to discover and criticize) and warding off honest, intelligent would-be researchers like Scott.
I don't know. Lowering the barrier can obviously also have positive effects of helping new researchers just 'magically' get a protocol that actually does make sense, and they can get on with producing units of science when they otherwise would have been stuck with a shit-tier protocol... but will we have enough of that to overcome these other effects?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I mean, I agree with basically your entire comment about what we can do. The bit about "regularly-scheduled program" is that if you just look at the screen about this topic, it might on the surface look like everyone is doing this sort of 'best thing', outlining relevant factors, etc. It looks like the normal, ho-hum, program of people doing the best thing. Alternatively, if you just look at the screen about Section 3 disqualification, it might also look on the surface like everyone is doing this sort of 'best thing', outlining relevant factors, etc. But then it just strikes you when you see both of them smashed together. Like, really?! Trump "engaged in insurrection" on one screen, but we appear to have just an entirely different outline of relevant factors on the other screen. Just wild in contrast.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Because far more prominent individuals who encouraged others to go [in]to the Capitol and were not even charged
First off, I think you mean "into" here. But anyway, complete side track, but it's sort of hilarious watching this regularly-scheduled program on a completely different screen than watching the Section 3 disqualification program. Like, here, the fact that someone just encouraged others to go into the Capitol is good reason to not charge them. But ya know, with Trump, he didn't even do that, yet it is clearly and obviously "engaging in insurrection".
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Seems reasonable that the line is not just the use/mention distinction (as you had previously said, leading to the current confusion). instead, it's just about some ethereal balance of positive/negative vibes that your comment gives concerning the group in question. Thus, why @FiveHourMarathon can point to his comment where he said, "The obnoxious slurs were right," but if you had essentially the same post focusing on geopolitics, but found a way to say, "Of course, the obnoxious slurs were wrong," that's probably a moddin'. Gotta get enough positive vibes to pump those numbers up, make sure it doesn't sound like you're just dumping on the outgroup.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Eh, I find that most atheists are extremely implicitly committed to the a metaphysical ontology that is just, "Oops, I have the methodological constraints of science, and I've mistaken them for an actual metaphysical ontology." When you poke them on this, they don't clarify, "No, actually, I'm not making this extremely boneheaded mistake." They're still committed to it. They just get angry that you pointed it out.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
You're still welcome to give an example of calling people a slur that isn't antagonistic and waging the culture war.
Let me venture an attempt, using just the words HlynkaCG used.
"Fagots (sic) exist."
"Trannys exist."
"Elf Brahmins exist."
These seem to be "calling people a slur". Is it "antagonistic and waging the culture war"? Am I already modded? I must say, if even these examples count as bad, I cannot imagine any possible way they could be used that wouldn't be considered "antagonistic and waging the culture war". Perhaps they could be mentioned, but again, I believe this would be enshrining exactly the use/mention distinction into the rules of the forum and simply banning all uses as being inherently "antagonistic and waging the culture war". You're right that the result isn't that they would be "banned words" at the same level of utter stupidity that led to that business professor getting fired for teaching his students a common Chinese word that sounds a lot like an English slur, but I think it'll be pretty hard to maintain that there is any possible way that someone could use them without being banned.
I say this as someone who has no interest in actually using such words1, and I don't think you'll find any sort of inkling toward wanting to use them in any of my comments; I'm not that kind of person, myself. But I sure do prize clarity, especially when it comes to rules that result in folks like HlynkaCG being banned... and right now, we ain't got it.
1 - The only exception being 'retarded', because I think it's, uh, dumb that it's gotten the hate it's gotten. It's a clear example of an impossible euphemism treadmill that will never stop eating every word that even comes close to it, even when they're perfectly fine words on their own. I will forever continue to talk about internal combustion engine timing as being advanced or retarded, and if someone is late to the party, I will almost certainly joke that, "It's okay, they're just retarded. They'll be here soon."
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
So when you started the phrase with:
not because you used no-no words
You meant, "Not because you mentioned no-no words, but because you used them," and the following clause was superfluous?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
not because you used no-no words, but because you used them in a way calculated to be antagonistic.
Honest question: is there an example of anyone using similar no-no words that isn't judged as being "calculated to be antagonistic"?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
good luck finding a variety of sushi-grade raw fish
One trick I learned a while back, but don't know where my link is at the moment to get the specific temperature number, is that you can "cook" your fish in a sous vide, but at a surprisingly low temperature (something like 105-115), which will help with safety but retain that 'raw fish' texture. It then cools down a bit while you're finishing the prep, so it really does seem like it's just the same.
Also, IIRC, "sushi-grade" isn't really a thing. It depends on species, but for many species, all fish that is sold (at least in the US) is required to be flash frozen to kill parasites. I've seen videos of the commercial operations, where they have the fishing boats that go out and catch the fish, then, while they're still at sea, they transfer their catch to a processing boat. On this boat, while at sea, they do the flash freezing and cutting; I can't remember whether or not they included much packaging on the boat or if that was delayed. But the upshot is that for all of the fish that is caught by these large operations, it is completely impossible for you to get a non-frozen fish; it's frozen long before it comes to dock. You'd pretty much have to have a source that is a local, small-time fisherman who is willing to sell you stuff individually right at the moment he comes back in.
As a Science person with engineering degrees who doesn't like to do engineering1, I am suuuuuper skeptical of other Science people. More of them are simply actively bad at their jobs than is remotely acceptable, and you are 100% right that many of them face no repercussions from this due to the fucked up way the system evaluates work. Furthermore, totally agreed that the engineering folks have a much more visible benchmark for things working, and that is incredibly useful.
That said, if I were to defend those among my people who are good, I would say that one cannot reductively claim that it is only engineering that is pushing boundaries and driving progress. The story I once heard that might resonate with you was that if you were wanting to invade and occupy a country, you need four different types of people: spies, marines, army, and police. The spies have to be there early, get the lay of the land, a sense for what's going on, background information that informs choices of what it is that you're going to try to do and why. Once you have some idea, the marines have to go establish a beachhead, so that you can start to bring serious resources to bear on the problem. Then, the army has to very practically churn through huge piles of materiel, kicking in skulls and establishing concrete facts on the ground. Finally, once you've occupied the place, the police need to maintain order and keep everything somewhat functional.
The analogy is that the Science types are the spies. We try to figure out the lay of the land, when you don't even have a clue as to what types of things may be possible or not. The experimentalists who bridge the gap, pun possibly intended, between the scientists and engineers are the marines; they are often operating on shoestring budgets, trying to read our shit, figure out which ideas are most plausible, and cobble together at least some sort of proof of concept that it could actually work in the real world. Then comes the literal army of engineers. I admit that I'm a little jealous of how they get to see their stuff actually work, but maybe it's their ridiculously fat budgets that I'm more jealous of. They have to very practically establish routinized ways for the idea to consistently work in practice. Finally, you have the cops who maintain the whole thing and are more supposed to interact with the 'customer' to make sure that their needs are being met. Presumably, if you just try to dive in to a country with just your army, with no intel and no established beachhead, one could see the inherent difficulty of pushing the boundaries and driving progress. Maybe you could still get there, but damn if the endeavor isn't likely to blow even fatter budgets of even more obscene amounts of materiel, possibly toward goals that simply don't make any sense and are eventually doomed to failure, which you might have known if you had a proper understanding of the lay of the land.
Now here's the part of the analogy that I've come to add, but which I think makes sense. Not only do you need different types of people for these different jobs, but the way you evaluate the work that is being done in each stage is completely different. There is no sense in which you're going to evaluate a pre-invasion spy by the same sort of metric that you're going to evaluate the face-kicking army. It is, frankly, an unfortunate fact of reality that the nature of the work of spies leads to the possibility that they could totally bullshit you, and it can sometimes be very difficult to tell truth from falsehood. I don't know any honest-to-goodness real life spies, but I really wonder if they have some sort of similar dysfunction/skepticism toward each other that we Science types have toward our own. I also wonder if there just is a significant population of them who kind of suck at their job, the way many of ours do, but don't face many consequences because of the inherent difficulties of evaluation.
1 - I do math, and it's a tossup on whether reviewers will actually pay close attention to whether my proofs do, indeed, prove my theorems... or if they'll even bother reading the proofs and instead make their judgment entirely on the basis of shit like how many of their own papers I've cited.
EDIT: After reading @TheDag's comment, I would amend this by saying that your spies have a very analogous failure mode that is really really bad for you - double agents. They're actively working against you, against providing you knowledge of the truth, and for the adversary. This can be widespread, but also sort of localized. For example, if the Soviets totally convert your spy network there, they can completely wonk up your knowledge of what the hell is happening there, but maybe you still have perfectly good coverage of China. I would agree that there are vast swaths of the social sciences who have been entirely captured. They're worse than just having an evaluation problem; they're an adversarial problem.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
That's not conjectural at all. It's a specific claim that his specific formulation is self-contradictory. Easy question you can ask yourself: Is the "Golden Rule of Desirism" a desire? If no, then it is not a reason for action, by definition. If so, then simply consider a world where no entity holds that desire, and the entire force of the rule disappears.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I think you missed most of my comment.
Fyfe's attempt pretty much grabbed Marks' descriptive theory, but then pretty inexplicably tried just grafting utilitarianism onto it, and it basically doesn't make any sense. He swears that desires are the only reasons for action, because he thinks he has to have this strong rule to keep any sort of god from floating back into the picture... but then immediately introduces a "Golden Rule" (I don't want to look up his exact wording, but the 'do things that tend to fulfill desires' rule). This "Golden Rule" just comes from magic; moreover, it immediately breaks the idea that the only reasons for action are desires. For if no agent in the system desires the "Golden Rule", where does it come from? He can't take the Marks exit (which is not a "Golden Rule" at all, but instead positioned as simply a piece of practical advice for how one can vet their own desires and then go about achieving them). There really is just nothing to save it; it's self-contradictory, pretty quickly.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I think something 'like' Fyfe style, desire utilitarianism is probably the best moral theory out there; and if that isn't true
I might have some bad news for you... this attempt is pretty bad. It gets basically no play in academic works, for good reason. It was a result of peak Internet Atheism, where the trend was that one of the biggest pain spots (places where Internet Atheists felt like they were getting crushed argumentatively) was morality. This led to a bunch of different offshoot directions. Most academically-credible was Joel Marks' desirism, but that version was explicitly anti-realist, TBH not really much of a contribution to the moral question beyond that of Mackie (he was trying to conjure up a slightly different descriptive theory of ethics, attempting to position it apart from morality). Another example would be whatever words you want to use to describe whatever the hell it is that Sam Harris went off to try doing.
Fyfe's attempt pretty much grabbed Marks' descriptive theory, but then pretty inexplicably tried just grafting utilitarianism onto it, and it basically doesn't make any sense. He swears that desires are the only reasons for action, because he thinks he has to have this strong rule to keep any sort of god from floating back into the picture... but then immediately introduces a "Golden Rule" (I don't want to look up his exact wording, but the 'do things that tend to fulfill desires' rule). This "Golden Rule" just comes from magic; moreover, it immediately breaks the idea that the only reasons for action are desires. For if no agent in the system desires the "Golden Rule", where does it come from? He can't take the Marks exit (which is not a "Golden Rule" at all, but instead positioned as simply a piece of practical advice for how one can vet their own desires and then go about achieving them). There really is just nothing to save it; it's self-contradictory, pretty quickly.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
You're not thinking marginally. Any demand curve has "high value consumers". The "addicts", so to speak. They're the ones all the way up at the top left part of the curve. Literally no other product in existence leads people to reason by way of, "There are some high value consumers of this product; therefore, the entire demand curve is nearly perfectly price inelastic." None.
Years back, in the old old place, we analyzed published estimations of the price elasticity of marijuana. I can try to find some time to dig it up. In the meantime, would you like to venture a guesstimate?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I can understand the people who look at the crime that results from drug prohibition and try to estimate that it is higher than would be from increased drug usage in the population. Reasonable minds can estimate those factors differently. What I can't understand is this seemingly pervasive opinion that increasing costs in a market somehow doesn't affect equilibrium quantity. Some people go so far as to say that decreasing costs would lower equilibrium quantity, which is even more absurd. At least with the former, one could have the faintest of theoretical support if they posited a totally inelastic demand curve, one that could not even be shifted by applying/removing literal criminal penalties. This still seems like a pretty whack assumption, but that's what you'd need to even get the weakest version of this sort of claim.
In addition to just having regular meals with the wife that generally include meat/eggs, I have a variety of snacks always on hand. Most often, they include sous vide chicken breast that is seasoned with various things, cut up into little pieces, and frozen, so I can just pull a package, thaw, and eat, protein shakes, cottage cheese, and Greek yogurt.
I'd also echo @Tollund_Man4 that I've found that consistency in lifting, sleeping, and not drinking alcohol tends to more directly and visibly correlate to gainz than optimizing details of my macros. Weirdly though, I always feel not-quite-so-strong when we have fish for dinner the night before... ¯\(ツ)/¯
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