felis-parenthesis
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User ID: 660
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
The Department of Corrections had required Hood to sign a waiver agreeing to stay 3 feet (0.9 meters) away from Smith’s gas mask in case the hose supplying the nitrogen came loose.
It is a deficiency in the article that it fails to mention the composition of the air that Hood was breathing. It would have clarified why Smith's attempt to avoid hypoxia by holding his breath demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of the peril he faced.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
The sociological interest lies in watching people fail to join the dots.
The airplane safety card has a section on depressurization and the oxygen masks dropping down. "Put your own mask on first."
The danger being guarded against is that the parent takes too long trying to fit the mask on their frightened child and the parent passes out themselves. But how could that happen? Surely the parent soon suffers respiratory distress that forces them to fit their own mask before resuming helping their child? No. Hypoxia doesn't work like that. It is the carbon dioxide that makes you want to breath and the parent is breathing that out just fine. You can pass out from hypoxia with very little warning. I think this is now widely know, mostly due to the warning on the airplane safety card. The warning retains its place on the terse card because they want every-one to know.
There are other routes to this knowledge. Starving My Brain of Oxygen…For Safety?!? is two minute video on pilot training
Without proper training, pilots may not recognize the symptoms of hypoxia
More on the hypoxia training story I was looking for a much older video, which I think was an upload of a historical film of hypoxia training for pilots, with the low oxygen environment being some kind of Nissen hut. Hypoxia training isn't new.
There is a classic industrial accident involving a storage tank. Workman climbs down inside to do maintenance after the tank has been drained. But the residual chemicals have reacted with the oxygen, so he climbs down into a nitrogen atmosphere and dies. His safety buddy sees that he has passed out and, forgetting his training, climbs inside to do a heroic rescue. He also dies. Do you prefer Deaths from Environmental Hypoxia and Raised Carbon Dioxide or Confined Spaces Deadly Spaces: Preventing Confined Space Accidents? The YouTube video has a cute animation with a plumber with a mustache (Mario?) testing the air in the sewer. This also happens down on the farm Incident Investigation: Worker Loses Consciousness in Manure Spreader Tank | WorkSafeBC.
News coverage pretends to know none of this
In his Guardian interview, Smith said he feared that if Alabama carried out his execution it would put the new killing method of nitrogen hypoxia on the map.
The news coverage makes it seem that you can blunder into a confined space with little oxygen, gasp and struggle, and face the horrifying prospect that if you cannot escape in twenty-two minutes, then the lack of oxygen will kill you. And that this is a new hazard. I would feel more comfortable with agit-prop headlines screaming: Capitalism has been killing workers with nitrogen hypoxia for decades.
I'm feeling a little lost. Was the execution deliberately botched by pro-death-penalty activists trying to persuade the impalers and the crucifiers that the method is sufficiently cruel? Were the difficulties invented by anti-death-penalty activists trying to persuade us that the method is excessively cruel? I can tell that I'm being lied to, but not why or by whom or which details are false.
I can also see that the lying isn't being called out, perhaps not even noticed. The lies contradict well known stories about how the world works and how to avoid being killed by it, and yet people don't seem to join the dots and complain about the contradictions. That troubles me.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
The problem is that any efficient and humane way of executing people inevitably ends up associated with death,...
I advocate using lethal injection of alcohol as the means of execution. Injection? It is not that toxic, so it probably needs a big IV bag. Given the enthusiastic recreational use of alcohol, no-one can argue that it is a cruel method of execution. And to return to your point about the association with death, using alcohol sends a valuable public health message about the dangers of binge drinking. In the UK acute alcohol poisoning causes 500 or 600 deaths each year (out of about 6000 alcohol specific deaths, of which 78% are due to alcoholic liver disease). Some of those deaths might be avoided if people had a background awareness that alcohol is what is used for executions by lethal injection, which hints that heroic drinking might not be entirely safe.
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
This takes me back to 8th November 2002 and Security Council Resolution 1441
The remarkable bit is in section 5
...further decides that UNMOVIC and the IAEA may at their discretion conduct interviews inside or outside of Iraq, may facilitate the travel of those interviewed and family members outside of Iraq,...
Basically, UNMOVIC gets to whisk the Iraqis who know, out of Iraq, and their families too, so that they can spill the beans without having to worry about going back to Iraq or about how to get their families out.
I tried to guess what would happen next. Once Saddam's own experts were outside Iraq, and their families were outside Iraq, they would be able to speak freely. What would they say?
Perhaps they would say that Iraq did indeed have forbidden weapons and say where they were hidden.
Perhaps they would explain how weird and corrupt it all was. There was money allocated to the Mustard Gas budget, but it was "stolen" to build a palace. It is no use looking for Mustard Gas, there isn't any. The Mustard Gas budget is just there to fake out the Iranians. (The CIA believed it too!)
I admitted to myself that I just didn't know and went 50:50.
Notice that I managed to be 100% wrong. Saddam never complied with 1441. UNMOVIC never got to talk to Iraq's weapons experts outside of Iraq. And that refusal to obey 1441 was the legal basis of the war.
We all remember how it looked to hoi polloi. Weapons of Mass Destruction. We must invade before they can be used against us. Panic! War!
But insiders, steeped in the minutiae of UN Security Council Resolutions probably had a different take. What if the weapons are not found? What if the weapons were never there? Do they get into trouble for starting a war on lies? No.
Technically they were not actually claiming to know for sure. They were claiming the right to find out for sure. Saddam was playing a game of "I've handed over all the weapons. I've dragged my feet and obstructed the inspectors for so long that no-one feels really sure, but don't worry, that is only to frighten the Iranians. Honest!". And 1441 gives UNMOVIC the right to question the relevant Iraqi officials when they and their families are safely outside of Iraq. I wonder what would have happened if Saddam had let the officials and their families leave, and their testimony had been that the weapons were all gone.
I suspect that there was a double game being played. Saddam knew that the weapons were gone. If he could get the UN to accept that the weapons were gone and leave, then his experts could start manufacturing again, and he could recreate what he had lost. Perhaps not immediately, but if he got into another war with Iran and needed them again. But it all depended on retaining his experts. Once UNMOVIC had moved them and their families to the USA, Saddam wasn't getting them back. So maybe the point of 1441 was that the US knew he didn't actually have the weapons any more and the plan was to steal away his experts so that he couldn't recreate them in the future.
But why would insiders feel the need to fake weapons of mass destruction? They were following the legal technicalities and knew that the formal resolution was only that Saddam had to stop playing around and let them find out about the weapons for sure. And if Saddam continued to play around and got invaded, then the US would find out about the weapons for sure. All nice and legal, even if it turned out that there are no weapons any more.
Even at the time, most people following politics had no interest in the clever maneuvering of section 5 of 1441. But I'm guessing that it mattered to insiders. Legally, they were in the clear, even if no weapons were found. So faking it is double bad. First, they might get caught. Second, faking it admits that they are at fault if the weapons are not there; which is silly, because they have won the bureaucratic battle and it is technically Saddam at fault for not surrendering his experts.
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
"Rip his arm off and beat him to death with the soggy end" is part of the kayfabe of the World Wrestling Federation (now WWE after a legal dispute with the World Wildlife Fund over who is the real WWF). Your teacher's annoyance with you might well be genuine, but he is nevertheless issuing a comedy threat and inviting you to participate in an in-joke (perhaps forgetting that you are too young to get the reference)
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
Fauci managed to do his gain of function research under the nose of both the US government and the Chinese government and they didn't stop him. The US government wanted to stop him, gain of function research was forbidden in the USA, which is why he had to send money to China to do it there. I'm pretty sure that the Chinese government would have stopped him if they had been keeping up with the technology and realized the stakes.
He managed it by being high-ranking insider. Applying that insight to "secretly develop a fleet of autonomous killer robots", if you are an insider working for DARPA, the Pentagon will help you keep it secret. The top people are politicians in the Joe Biden electoral sense. The level below that are politicians in the bureaucratic maneuvering sense. If you are the highest ranking technologist, who understands the details of the authorization mechanisms that confer control of the killer swarm, you are exposed to serious temptation.
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
sacred
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
This is why I hate meta-moderating. I'm given your comment. It's vulgar mockery is excessive. "Bad" or "deserves a warning"? Being conscientious I check the context first.
Oh! I read the "self correcting problem" comment myself yesterday. It struck me as incorrect. Dangerously incorrect. But how to phrase my disagreement? What would crisply convey the tragic truth that there is nothing to guarantee that it will actually self correct. Everything could collapse, like when the Romans left Britain in 410 AD. I fail to reply to it.
Your comment crisply captures the sense of "Look around you! The people you see running towards the cliff edge may well fail to stop." I go with my gut, tick the "Good" box, and click submit. May God have mercy on my soul.
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
It is not the exact same argument; you are missing a scale factor.
Imagine that a collection of nation-states has free movement within each state, and restrictions on movements between states. What works best? A world with 8 huge countries, each with a billion inhabitants, or a world with 800 small countries, each with 10 million inhabitants? Scale matters and there is something real to discuss. It is not the exact same argument at the different scales. There may well be a right size for a country, with strong borders and free movement inside.
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
That is an important distinction and worth up holding. The underlying issue is that the economic logic of copyright leads to an awkward compromise. Copyright terms long enough to liberate the Artist from the tyranny of the day job, but not so long as subject the Artist to the tyranny of the copyright office. (Where there's a hit, there's a rip!). Meanwhile the economic logic of trademarks suggests that they should be eternal.
The culture war aspect is that copyright eternalists love the term "intellectual property" because it fudges the distinction. They hope to use the unlimited life of trademarks as an argument for eternal copyright because they are "the same kind of thing".
felis-parenthesis
7mo ago
The COVID lockdowns in the UK point to a darker problem with expertise. Life is short, people grow old and die; it takes about 70 years. Suppose that being locked down causes a 10% reduction in quality of life (I'd prefer to say 50%, but I'll err on too low because I want to focus on a different controversy). Government locks down 70 million people for a year, which costs 7 million Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs). Actual deaths, if spread across the age range, cost 35 QALY's each. The lock down needs to be saving 200 thousand lives to break even. But deaths from COVID were concentrated among the frail elderly. Say 7 QALY's each. To break even the lock down needed to save the lives of one million frail old people. It is not remotely plausible that it did so.
The lockdowns were a national disaster on the scale of 200 thousand dead. Compare that to American loses in Vietnam at 50 thousand. The lockdowns were a huge national disaster.
But how did it happen? The experts were socialized into an "identified cause" model of morbidity. If something specific kills you, that counts. If something makes you a year older, that counts zero. Since zero times anything is still zero, it doesn't matter how many people are affected. Basically expertise here was so narrow in scope that the fact that people grow old and die lay outside of its scope and was neglected.
The darker problem is that growing old and dying is basic to the human condition. The experts let themselves be socialized into collective insanity. I don't see any way around this. Experts are dangerous in much the same way that fire is dangerous. Essential despite being dangerous. You have to be able to spot that experts have gone mad and flat out reject what they say.
felis-parenthesis
7mo ago
I think I muddle together various issues
-
the inaccessibility of truth. I never get to the real truth, but there is wide variation in how hard I try and how close I get.
-
fear of the future. Will it be A or B? I make my choice. It turns out to be C.
Should I pursue "Epistemic Rationality" and seek the truth just because it is true. That is a reckless path that probably leads to nihilism, despair, and suicide. Not a good idea.
Should I tackle the problem above by being more pragmatic? I could compromise the concept of truth by asking "is this true for me" where I'm sneaking in the idea that things can be true because they make me happy or help me cope.
But the two paragraphs above get greatly modified when I contemplate that I'm not actually getting close to the truth, sometimes because it is hard to find, sometimes because I slack off and don't really try. Since I'm not actually getting close to the truth, the stuff that I believe to be true doesn't stand the test of time. My pragmatic approach fails because times change and the things I believed would make me happy and help me cope, turn out to make me sad and become new problems to be coped with.
My attempts at "Epistemic Rationality" fail twice. No God, no joy, no hope. I buy my rope and my bucket. But this first failure is followed by a second failure. I don't believe that I have gotten to the bottom of things. What if I'm wrong? What new horror will 2024 bring? Disabled by doubt, I fail to kick the bucket. I wait with anxious curiosity to find how how I was wrong this time.
I lean more towards "Epistemic Rationality" because I hope that the things that I accept as true will be closer to the truth and hence last longer. I guess that it is easier to come up with coping strategies for unpleasant truths that last, than it is to cope with the endless churn of pragmatic truths that don't last.
tldr: my version of pragmatism is a shoddily constructed thing that wobbles, breaks, and falls over.
felis-parenthesis
7mo ago
There is a pragmatic version of the argument about epistemic hygiene that is summed up in this cartoon.
Pragmatic arguments make me uncomfortable, nearly as uncomfortable as the replication crisis does.
felis-parenthesis
7mo ago
Help! I'm old and not keeping up
you don't join
Who is you and what do they not join?
into the pit with the rest of us
Who is us? What is the pit?
felis-parenthesis
8mo ago
I loved this article and believe that the preamble to the paragraph that you quote, was the correct length.
This issue is that our notions of "intuitive" are rather vague. We don't have specific words to single out the particular nuance of "intuitive" at issue. The author is forced to give examples to ground his use of the word "intuitive". The quoted paragraph appears intuitively obvious, but only in the context that was skillfully prepared for it.
felis-parenthesis
8mo ago
That essay (I found an online copy) is a fascinating insight into intellectual history. It has stood the test of time well and one may read modern ideas written in the language of one hundred and fifty years ago
We know, further, that the lower animals possess, though less developed, that part of the brain which we have every reason to believe to be the organ of consciousness in man; and as, in other cases, function and organ are proportional, so we have a right to conclude it is with the brain; and that the brutes, though they may not possess our intensity of consciousness, and though, from the absence of language, they can have no trains of thoughts, but only trains of feelings, yet have a consciousness which, more or less distinctly, foreshadows our own.
I confess that, in view of the struggle for existence which goes on in the animal world, and of the frightful quantity of pain with which it must be accompanied, I should be glad if the probabilities were in favour of Descartes’ hypothesis; but, on the other hand, considering the terrible practical consequences to domestic animals which might ensue from any error on our part, it is as well to err on the right side, if we err at all, and deal with them as weaker brethren, who are bound, like the rest of us, to pay their toll for living, and suffer what is needful for the general good. As Hartley finely says, “We seem to be in the place of God to them;” and we may justly follow the precedents He sets in nature in our dealings with them
I see two directions in which one may wish to update the thinking. The first is in response to GPT-4. If there is to be no limit to the intricacy of mechanisms and the smallness of their parts, there is then no limit to the number of their parts. We may foresee all of consciousness, even its most elevated applications, swallowed up by the concept of mechanism. We are all, in every way, machines or automata. The concept of being a machine or an automaton lacks boundaries. It does not reproduce the boundaries that we believe to be important and is thus revealed to be a weak and unhelpful concept.
The second is in response to computer viruses, and the possibility, in a world of insecure computers, of a free living virus. It circulates in the computer network, thinking and changing itself, but also subject to copying error and natural selection. It constitutes a form of life, but living in an artificial and constructed realm; that of the copying of information and the running of programs. But we humans copy information and if we are automata, we are sophisticated ones that download and run programs. So our mind-viruses/meme-complexes/egregores also constitute a form of life, but living in the artificial realm of human culture, that some call the noosphere.
if Culture is directed by stigmergy rather than conspiracy that has implications which are far too important to ignore.
Perhaps grass is to rabbits as humans are to egregores. We are the grass on which the egregores graze.
Or perhaps rabbits are to foxes as humans are to egregores. We are the meat on which the egregores feast. But without hope of organizing a defence.
Or perhaps humans are to tigers as humans are to egregores. We are the meat on which the egregores feast. But the creatures are not beyond our understanding and we may organize defenses.
felis-parenthesis
8mo ago
I only heard of the Polish-Ukrainian War two weeks ago, from this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DVZARacjKGI
The axe being ground in that video is a little complicated. Poland has a law making it a criminal offense to talk about "Polish concentration camps". I thought that I understood where the Poles were coming from. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact kicked off WWII with the Germans and the USSR dividing Poland between them. The Germans set up some concentration camps in the part of Poland that they occupied. Calling these "Polish concentration camps" blames the Poles for what the Germans got up to.
But the Polish law also bans talking about the Polish concentration camps that the Poles set up in the aftermath of the Polish-Ukrainian war. The law against blaming the Poles for what the Germans got up to, turns out to be a sneaky law against blaming the Poles for what the Poles got up to.
That leaves me rather against any law limiting freedom of speech; you never know what kind of sneaky cover up is being attempted.
felis-parenthesis
8mo ago
You are spot on and thinking about it I realise that I've seen TK's the lack of incrementalism before.
I was listening to radio broadcast about the Utopia Experiment. Dylan Evans sees total collapse coming and sets up his simple living experiment to try to get ahead of it. But quite early on, his attempts to make soap come unstuck because he has already given up the internet, so he cannot watch the "How to make soap" videos on You Tube. That is when I twigged that the story was going to turn into a mental health crisis. Going all in, rather than plotting a path and taking reasonable sized steps is usually a sign of mental illness. And so it was in Dylan Evans' case.
felis-parenthesis
8mo ago
The line about living with the Amish misses the depth of the technology stack. Every-one, including the Amish, benefit from access to high carbon steels. All the chisels and saws that carpenters use in a low-tech wooden life-style depend on heat treated steels that retain their cutting edge. Making the chisels and saws depends on hardened high carbon steel being harder than normalised high carbon steel, sufficiently harder that you can use files and hacksaws to form the blanks for your chisels and saws before you harden them in their turn with more heat treatment. It is all very delicate, depending on chemistry and metallurgy to get quench hardening to work right ("Silver steel" has added chromium to improve through hardening. Metallurgists need microscopes to see what is happening with the grains in the steel). (Things have moved on. Now-a-days you heat treat steel parts before cutting them to shape using carbide tooling,...)
I wondered if the Amish use cement. Maybe just lime mortar. It is a tough question. Yes, and attention to price and efficiency seduces you, so that you end up tied to industrial cement making. No, and your building techniques are in some ways pre-Roman; who wants to go back that far?
We are mostly ignorant of the long history of our technology stack and use phrases such as "back to nature" in ways that do no withstand scrutiny
felis-parenthesis
8mo ago
The classic formulation of your final paragraph is Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths
felis-parenthesis
8mo ago
Scott wrote an interesting post about heavy psychedelic use was making people weird https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/ In addition to the sites own comments, it was discussed on HackerNews https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16386406
Notice the comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16402462 about the cozy-weird.
I've maintained an interest in the topic, despite my own, youthful dalliance being forty years ago. So I read https://old.reddit.com/r/RationalPsychonaut/ Perhaps I still dream of opening the doors of perception and ripping away the veil of illusion to see reality. But I notice that today's psychonauts have little success. I had no success myself last century and my friends insisted that psychedelics were just for fun; there were no deep truths to be discovered that way. More troubling is the posts asking for help to recover from the lingering after effects of bad trips. Such posts meet with sympathy, but little practical help. There are rather too many for my taste, and problems seem to arise somewhat at random. Yes, heroic doses often lead to trouble, but small doses are not entirely safe. And having tasted the forbidden fruit, the curious often return for a larger bite, and bite off more than they can chew. Had I read those anecdotes as a young man, they would have put me off experimenting.
I want to return to the concept of the cozy-weird. I don't want my mind opened so that I can see the out-there-weird. I've no faith in the value of the out-there-weird. But I do want to open my mind so that I can look at the cozy-weird and see the weirdness of it. I doubt that psychedelics help. One route is to study statistics and logic and spot pervasive bad reasoning; that provides loose threats to pull on, unraveling the veil of illusion and exposing the weirdness behind the ordinary. Another route is Buddhist meditation practices. Cultivate noticing ones emotional responses and how the defense mechanisms of the mind keep you socially safe by not letting you see the weirdness of the cozy-weird. I think that there is more than enough weirdness in the cozy-weird to let you escape from your straightlaced life. There is no need to go down the route of psychedelics and out-there-weirdness.
felis-parenthesis
8mo ago
That is an interesting example of a slippery slope. Divorce has been legal in Christian countries for what? Around a hundred years? Longer in some places (America), a more recent development in others (Southern Ireland).
I think it came in on the basis that maybe 1% of marriages were wretchedly bad. Let them be dissolved and the sum of human happiness would rise, with no unexpected consequences to follow. But divorce became more common. Rich middle aged men took to trading in their middle aged wife that they had married when young, and starting a second family with a new, younger wife. That was understood as an abuse, and was tackled with alimony laws that were generous to the old wife. Those generous payments encouraged wives to divorce their boring middle-aged husbands, in the hope of a more exciting sex life, as an independently wealthy women. Divorce rates soared towards 50%. That in turn soured men on marriage. Men are reluctant to marry, and some countries (Canada?) have tackled this problem with marriages of adhesion (usually called common law marriages). Live too long with your girlfriend and bam, married.
Slipping further down the slippery slope, we are eradicating financial privacy to tackle the problem of men hiding their assets from ex-wives. Ponder how strange that would have seemed in the early days of divorce, when the idea was that the husband was perhaps an abusive drunk, probably unable to hold a job. Of course we want the woman to be able to escape and start a family with a hard working, good provider husband. Imagine if the early divorce law reforms had including the full range of legal changes. People who doubted that permitting divorce at all was wise, would have been confronted with the idea that the husband might be rich, and financial secrecy would have to go so that the ex-wife could be guaranteed her big share of the dosh. I think that people would never have started down the road of permitting divorce.
felis-parenthesis
9mo ago
I'm reading a biography of Oliver Cromwell by John Buchan titled simply Cromwell. I don't really have the prerequisite knowledge of English History. Buchan drops names and I am like: who? But Wikipedia to the rescue. I type "Pym" into the search bar and navigating the disambiguation page to John Pym turns out to be easy.
Why am I reading about political turmoil and civil war? Because the book was only 50p in the Cat Protection League charity shop. Definitely nothing to do with contemporary resonances or grim forebodings.
You have only grasped half of the reason why open borders are bad. There are deeper problems with open borders. The way you frame it, with "bad guys" crossing the border, suggests that the problems are fixable. Just dial it down a bit and have a semi-open border, closed to "bad guys", porous to "good guys". But open borders is a path to catastrophe, even on a homogeneous clone world, with no races and just one culture.
I've made two lengthy attempts to explain the point, one as a modernized version of Malthusian Immiseration, the other in response to a discussion of Bryan Caplan's ideas.
Did I manage to distill the essence of the issue here? Lightly edited, it reads:
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