doglatine
1yr ago
To be clear, in my original prediction, this was listed at <5% (ie not going to happen this year)
doglatine
2mo ago
Not an expert on this by any means but I have seen some encouraging results on in vivo (as opposed to in utero or in vitro) gene editing. Here's a sample paper discussing the state of the field. There's also a further question whether in vivo gene editing for intelligence would produce the kind of behavioural impacts we care about; as far as I know, that's an open uncertainty.
doglatine
10mo ago
Hanania is far and away my favourite US politics blogger right now. This piece somehow managed to be both hilarious and insightful. He manages to describe Republican primary voters in a way that should to any rational reader code as contemptuous and disparaging, and yet he comes across like he's giving a purely descriptive analysis. Potentially the American Dominic Cummings?
doglatine
10mo ago
Remind me about this if I haven’t replied or posted next week! Not ignoring your nice question at all but will need to find 30 mins to do it justice.
doglatine
1yr ago
doglatine
1yr ago
Getting a green card currently takes 12-18 months, and if it's through marriage to a US citizen it's conditional for two years on the marriage being bona fide. Getting full blown citizenship takes five on top of that. I'm not saying that US citizenship isn't a significant attraction for people from the developing world, but you'd very much have to be playing a long game, especially since you're presumably going to be having sex with a partner (and potentially having kids). Combine that with residual stigma around divorce in some SEA cultures and their tendency towards pragmatism around marriage (it's about building a family and shared financial platform, with sexual attraction relatively de-emphasised) and I think this risk is overblown. Sure, it happens sometimes, but most SEA women who partner up with American guys are going to be entering the marriage in good faith on the assumption they can make it work and build a better life for themselves, rather than intending to bail at the first opportunity.
doglatine
1yr ago
Certainly people's behaviour is complicated by a host of competing beliefs, goals, and interests, and people are very good at rationalising away conflicts. However, the specific class of pseudo-beliefs I had in mind are those that people don't feel particularly obliged to reconcile with their actual beliefs or translate into behaviour. Sure, you have the person who genuinely believes that climate change is a real threat, and would love to be vegetarian but feels unable to do so for health reasons. But you also have people who seemingly sincerely assent to statements like "climate change is a real threat" but don't feel any real normative pressures to make that fit in with their other beliefs or translate it into behaviour. I think a lot of our social and political utterances are like this. They're not lies, and we take ourselves to genuinely believe them, but they constitutively function in a manner quite different from canonical beliefs.
doglatine
1yr ago
One, I think you're assuming people are more consciously aware of the logical implications and probabilistic consequences of, well, anything, than they really are.
To be clear, I'm happy with the idea that everyone routinely fails to anticipate or consider even the immediate implications of most of the things they assert. All that matters for pinning down the belief/s-disposition distinction is that in the case of the former but not the latter, in the cases where people are aware of the implications, they should (and as a rule do) adopt and endorse them.
And now, their trust in math and applying it correctly (from that point on) leads to a firm belief that the number in the box should be a 3.
A nice case! That said, what you're giving me here is an instance where someone - in virtue of the evidence at their disposal - could quite reasonably and rationally fail to draw the logical consequence that someone with better evidence would draw. That's distinct from the kinds of failures that I take to be indicative of s-disposition instances, where even when people can follow through and endorse the implications, they're not disposed to do so.
doglatine
1yr ago
LNG isn't as cheap as pipelines, but it's how a majority of the world imports their gas (Japan, China, India, South Korea....). And it's only a medium-term solution for Germany.
Renewables were always a joke for Germany as well, they don’t get enough wind or sunlight for them to work
You seem to be operating with outdated information. In 2021, renewables provided 250 TW/h out of Germany's electricity production of 600 TW/h, about the same proportion as fossil fuels, the remainder being made up by nuclear power. In fact wind power alone was the single biggest source of electricity production if one separates out lignite and hard coal as fuels.
Energy storage is still a problem, but one that we're making great progress on. Gas and nuclear can cover base load medium-term, and there's exciting stuff also happening in geothermal. Ultimately the answer will be integrated global energy grids and lots of redundant electricity storage capacity (maybe fusion too), but we'll be waiting a while for that.
doglatine
1yr ago
I'll definitely try that formula! I just plugged it into Terminator: Resistance (a game that I've been massively enjoying of late, but which got mediocre reviews) and it came out at 91%, which matches my experience.
doglatine
1mo ago
100% agree on all points. Not clear whether Google will be able to adapt AdWords for LLMs but at least they have a chance if they’re the ones leading the revolution.
And also completely agree about the changing shape of LLMs. They’ll just become a mostly invisible layer in operating systems that eg handles queries and parlays user vague requests (“show me some funny videos”) into specific personalised API calls.
doglatine
7mo ago
I mean there’s this whole thing.
doglatine
11mo ago
With traditional Christian-values inspired conservatism, yes. But most conservatives here are of the Nietzschean post-Christian kind, which is much less fussy about the sanctity of life and much more comfortable with humans differing in intrinsic value. And yet even people in the second camp have to make the proper prostrations to liberal pieties.
doglatine
1yr ago
100%. I honestly think this is one of reasons it's valuable to have some non-monogamous options on the table in a long-term relationship - it helps combat the 'grass is greener' phenomenon if you're occasionally allowed to leave your house and check out the neighbourhood. And generally speaking, these days the neighbourhood is a burning valley of cinder and radioactive ash. Maybe you find an intact tin of beans or something but you're mostly relieved to rush back into your cosy warm home.
doglatine
1yr ago
It's funny you mention ChatGPT, as this line of thinking on my part was partly inspired by thinking about whether (and under what circumstances) it might make sense to attribute beliefs to LLMs. I don't think they come close to instantiating the kind of self-regulating representationalk dynamics associated with ideal cases of belief in humans, but they clearly come some of the way there. In that sense, I'm fine with saying that - at an appropriate level of abstraction - ChatGPT has S-dispositions.
doglatine
1yr ago
A psychological natural kinds framework can certainly accommodate these states being (i) qualitatively different categories, and (ii) two clusters on a spectrum (positions on a spectrum is maybe messier). My own view on this would be that mental attitudes in general (beliefs, desires, hopes, regrets, fears, etc.) can be individuated on a multi-dimensional spectrum as a variety of ways that the mind handles content. While in principle there are all sorts of "in-between states" (cf. Andy Egan on delusions as in-between states), the vast majority of mental contents get handled in a few stereotyped ways, where these ways are themselves underpinned by substantially different neural mechanisms (e.g., for imagining scenarios vs believing scenarios).
doglatine
1yr ago
FWIW dude I really like your substack and it’s now one of the blogs I’m most happy to see updates for!
doglatine
1yr ago
That much is implied by the very term 'Russophobia'. Otherwise it would just be called 'having an entirely rational and appropriate attitude to Russia'.
doglatine
9d ago
Yeah, I’ve seen some wild liveleak stuff in the past but the scene with the dog was enough to make me decide my brain really doesn’t need this content in it.
doglatine
1mo ago
I don’t think it’s an insuperable problem. A difficult one to be sure, but academic incentive structures are a lot more mutable than a bunch of other social problems if you have the political will. There’s also the fact that the current blind review journal-based publishing system is on borrowed time thanks to advances in LLMs, so we’ll need to do a fair amount of innovating/rebuilding in the next decade anyway.
Oh, I didn't mean to suggest that one did it without one's partner's knowledge and consent. And of course it won't work for all relationship dynamics. But I think more couples in general could benefit from having (explicit) loose rules around occasional dalliances outside the relationship.
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