felis-parenthesis
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User ID: 660
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
J D Vance's new book is a second data point and specifically Catholic. As the reviewer says
What draws Vance towards a specifically Catholic identity is the need to see grace as being absorbed and assimilated over and over again in a long history of learning and growing – in contrast to the quick spiritual fixes he sees in the evangelical world of his childhood.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
I've just asked Google's search engine LLM about Crowe's Law of Sarcastic Dismissal and got a terrifying response
Crowe's Law of Sarcastic Dismissal is an informal internet maxim that states: "Any explanation that is subtle enough to be correct is turbid enough to make its sarcastic dismissal genuinely funny."
It essentially highlights the tension between accuracy and comedy. The more nuanced and detailed an explanation is, the easier it is for someone to mock or dismiss it with a clever, sarcastic punchline.
The Core Concepts
Subtlety vs. Simplicity: True explanations for complex phenomena (like human behavior, physics, or philosophy) often require heavy nuance and caveats. The Sarcastic Edge: Because these explanations are complex, they can come across as confusing (turbid) to a casual observer. This makes them ripe targets for a quick, witty, and dismissive joke that ignores the nuance for a cheap laugh.
LessWrong
The LessWrong Origins: This law was coined in community forums like LessWrong to describe why rigorous intellectual debates can easily be derailed by people utilizing humor to dismiss legitimate, well-thought-out positions.
Would you like to explore how this applies to modern online debates, or perhaps share a specific complex explanation you've been working on to see if we can "stress-test" it against this law?
I was an LLM sceptic, but now I see that even a basic, free LLM gets it, in a way that leaves highly intelligent mottizens trailing behind in the dust. I'm shocked because Crowe's Law of Sarcastic Dismissal is my own lame coinage. It got no traction. There is no exposition in the training data for the LLM to plagiarize. The LLM has managed to understand it, all by itself. Terrifying!
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
Am I misunderstanding that "cozy weird" is believing something false or ambiguous?
You are misunderstanding.
Since life is about seventy years long, and science grinds slowly, taking hundreds of years, we all end up in forced choice situations, forced to guess. We guess wrong and believe something false. "Believe"? Maybe we knew at the time that we were guessing, but we still acted upon the false "belief"; that is the main part of believing. Shrug. Believing something false is built-in to the human condition. It is part of the solid-normal. It is not part of the cozy-weird.
I've an essay to write, provisional title: "Life is more complicated than language, nothing that needs saying can be said briefly." Since life is more complicated than language, ambiguity is inevitable. We can push back a little, by writing at greater length, using the extra words to disambiguate. But watch out for two dangers. First, wittering on at great length usually muddies the waters; more words, more ambiguity. Second, the seventy year thing; we don't have the time. So again, ambiguity is built-in to the human condition and part of the solid-normal, not the cozy-weird.
I'm hoping that we share a common understanding of the out-there-weird. One kind of out-there-weird is when you fry your brains with LSD. But humans are flaky. There are a lot of beliefs that are crazy, and the people who hold them just latched on to them with no chemical assistance. "flat earth in 2026 AD" is out-there-weird. "flat earth in 700 BC" is solid-normal. Why is "flat earth in 700 BC" solid normal? Wikipedia has Eratosthenes of Cyrene measuring the size of the Earth in around 200 BC, and tells the tale
The distance between Alexandria and Syene was reported to be about 5,000 stadia, as measured by professional bematists.
The Earth is big enough to be locally flat, and few people in 700 BC were travelling far enough to notice that something was off. (Wait! I'm forgetting the long distances involved in the Bronze Age tin trade. Shit!)
Back to the cozy-weird. How does inter-generational transmission of culture work? As a child I wanted to grow up and become an adult and that meant copying the adults around me. My father would tell me "You will understand when you grow up." and I would accept what I was told, trusting that I would indeed understand when I grew up. It is worse than that. My father was a Yorkshire man and proud of his deadpan irony. I was a socially incompetent child and did not get the joke. Looking back I think that some of my world view was formed by the following route. My father would attempt to tell me that X was false, by stating X ironically. I would miss the irony and learn that X was true. I think that inter-generation transmission of culture works badly in two different ways.
First, culture is transmitted faithfully, but the "You will understand when you grow up" bit doesn't happen. Father passes belief to Son. Son never does understand, but Son passes belief to Grandson with the words "You will understand when you grow up". There is no error correction.
Second, beliefs are flipped due to too much irony. Young people are not in on the joke. Old people do not notice that young people are not in on the joke and are getting the opposite of the intended message. The message gets corrupted.
The idea of the cozy-weird is that there are many beliefs that an outsider (to our culture) would consider out-there-weird (not false, not ambiguous, but crazy and weird) that we are brought up to believe and which pass for normal inside our culture. I'm claiming a disastrous failure of culture transmission with crazy rubbish being passed down the generations so well that the craziness is invisible to those inside that culture. Hence my subdivision of normal into solid-normal and cozy-weird.
Do we all live in a single global culture? Not yet, but things are heading that way, and it is hard to find an outsider. Or maybe talking to an outsider doesn't help. The details of the cozy-weird are culture bound, but the phenomenon of the cozy-weird is universal. You could go to Tehran and talk to a Mullah. He would point out the craziness of Western Culture. But he cannot show you the cozy-weird that both cultures share. Worse, he is embedded in his own culture. He may be quite convincing that the important thing is to submit to Islam, because he sincerely believes it, but that is his own culture's cozy-weird. His sincerity and conviction are warning signs of the invisibility of the cozy-weird details specific to a particular culture, to those within that culture.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
Abstractly the difference between the solid-normal and the cozy-weird is that the cozy-weird is indeed weird.
Artistically, https://youtube.com/watch?v=4mdiZ9rwoSQ is a scifi story about hi tech perceptual filters leading people astray. Err, it is over long and clunky, but it does have an interesting, oblique take on the dangers of consensus reality.
Concretely one wants examples. But this is where it gets self-defeating. If X is genuinely cozy-weird in our shared culture, you will not accept X as an example of the cozy-weird, because it appears normal to you. Worse, I will not suggest X as an example of the cozy-weird because it appears normal to me. One only catches glimpses of the cozy-weird out of the corner of ones eye.
I've encountered this kind of tangle, where it is impossible to give good examples, before when thinking about subduction phrases
Why think that the cozy-weird exists at all? I started down this path by reading https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/ with discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16386406 It struck me that people hoped that psychedelics would tear away the veil of illusion, and let people see reality as it really was. It was a hope that I had been warned against, but still shared. However, psychedelics tear away too much, one just ends up out-there-weird. Meanwhile I read some economics and noticed that people believe strongly in folk economics. Some folk economics is both weird and not out-there-weird. Early psychedelicists could believe in folk economics and no-one would include that as evidence that they believed weird things, because the weird things appear normal.
One example is that people talk confidently about raising and lowering taxes. If raising, do they mean raising taxes rates? Or raising taxes revenues? Taxes rates are directly within the power of governments, so it is tempting to assume that the discussion is about raising raising rates. But following the discussion one notices that it is about what the money gets spent on. There is an assumption that raising rates brings in more money. That is not in itself a problem. But people are also comfortable with the idea of punitive taxes. Protect people from lung cancer by taxing cigarettes so heavily that they smoke a lot less. Shame about the tax revenue, which falls due to people quitting. So the cozy weird bit is a belief. We can infer that people believe that government ministers have psychic powers. When they intend an increase in tax rates to raise additional revenue they hypnotize the general public to keep paying. When they intend an increase in tax rates to change behavior at the cost of lost revenue, that works too. No discussion needed. Nor even permitted. People don't actually believe that government ministers have psychic powers, but people do have psychological defense mechanisms. They will push back angrily against the idea that tax rates and tax revenues are two different things. There is a tangled mess of weirdness here, but it is cozy, people like it and will defend their cozy fuzziness.
People also talk about raising and lowering the minimum wage. That is bizarre. The minimum wage is a prohibition. It is parameterized. One might prefer to call it a restriction. Whatever. It is the kind of thing that you make tighter or looser. If you like brutal and disturbing satire, the Manifesto of the Nasty Fascist Party might help you get the point.
I realize that the previous paragraph is a flawed example of the cozy-weird. Arguments are soldiers, and words are the uniforms they wear. "Raise and lower" are the dark blue words worn by the good guys, and "Tighten and loosen" are the gray words worn by the bad guys. It is natural to dress your arguments in the uniform words of ones own side.
And yet dressing your arguments-soldiers in the appropriate color uniform-words is perhaps a good example of the cozy weird. We are supposed to be helping the poor. Instead we play elaborate word games. As the Nasty Fascist Party would put it " The booze and TV addled brains of the comfortably off are actually too feeble to distinguish between these two opposites."
I've tried addressing the distinction between solid-normal and cozy-weird abstractly, artistically, and concretely. Concretely is the important one, but articulating good examples is too hard for me. Fourth option: Praxis. What can one do to improve the chances of catching sight of the cozy-weird?
I think that psychedelics hinder, by leading you towards the out-there-weird and away from the cozy weird. The invisibility of the cozy-weird is policed by emotional reactions and defense mechanisms. Perhaps Buddhist meditation practices can help. One learns to notice the flickering play of emotions. Notice and let go rather than getting sucked in by the illusion. Maybe cached thoughts are important. Re-reading Eliezer Yudkowsky's "cached thoughts" essay, to check the relevance of linking to it, I notice that his examples have a vibe of "cozy-weird thoughts sitting in the cache". There are strong emotions telling you not to clear the cache, because you must Never Question Conventional Wisdom. Noticing the unreasonable strength of the strong emotions telling you not to clear the cache leads you towards noticing the cozy-weird. Getting stale answers straight from the cache leads you away.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
Whoops! I didn't bookmark where I got that version of Romulus and Remus from, and cannot now find it. I've probably got that wrong.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
... it is the lamestream that is weird.
It is not really normal versus weird. normal covers both solid-normal and cozy-weird. If you grow up with something you treat it as normal, as do the people around you, and some of them work for main-stream-media, so you see it on TV too, treated as normal. And some of the stuff that falls into that category really is weird, you just cannot see it.
For example, I was reading an article in The Economist about food distribution in India. Back in the early 1950's there was a famine and hoarding. Disapproving of horading they banned ware-houses and cold-storage to stop it. Not completely, but enough to cause trouble. Obviously that is a bit of a disaster. Agriculture is notorious for having good years and bad years and you need plenty storage to smooth things out and make sure people don't starve.
Here is where it gets weird. You'd think I was going through the archive, reading a story from the late 1950's about the repeal of the anti-storage laws (complete with little box explaining about how such a totally whacked out law got passed in the first place). No, the article was from June 27th 2015 and was lamenting that the law was still in place. So it is not just weird. It is cozy-weird. People are trying to combat the volatility of agricultural production with laws against warehousing and cold-storage and it has become normal, just the way you do it.
Second example: Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome were born to a virgin, Rhea Silvia, who had been forced join a virgin priesthood. Her wicked uncle Amulius had stolen the throne from her father Numitor, and didn't want any grandsons turning up to reclaim their grandfather's throne. So no sex for Rhea Silvia. The God Mars helps out and soon Romulus and Remus are born to a virgin.
I'd always imagined that when Christianity was getting popular in 300 A.D. it was a case of "virgin birth, wow, like man, that is so totally amazing, nothing like that ever happened before. That is sooo cool, count me in, I'm a believer!". Now I've learned a little more history. The Christian Virgin birth is looking like a me-too story. "Our hero-founder was also born of a virgin, so there!" In 300 AD virgin births are cozy-weird not out-there-weird.
Example three: People believe that if a scientific result is statistically significant at the p=0.05 level, then the probability that it is true is 95%. This weird belief is so cozy that some readers will not know what is wrong with it. Which brings up a deep problem: I shouldn't be able to give any examples of cozy-weird at all. I say "X is cozy-weird" and every-one dog piles on top of me insisting that X is normal and every-one agrees that X is normal.
Having renamed weird to be out-there-weird and divided normal into solid-normal and cozy-weird I can now state my thesis succinctly: the lamestream is mostly cozy-weird.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
Fixed the link: radical leftism and Cuba.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
There is an alternative steelman of homophobia based on refusing to memory hole the AIDS crisis.
First, the AIDS crisis made every-one notice that homosexuality includes both Love is love nest builders and bath-house high scorers. That matters because lots of people go along with gay lib on paradigm of Love is love nest builders. Noticing forces a rethink.
That rethink may include a father deciding
It is OK if my fine young son turns out gay and builds a nest with the man he loves. It is not OK if he gets sucked into the bath house scene, gets trains run on him, and dies young when antibiotic resistant syphilis turns up. Let us have common sense gay control.The AIDS crisis had libertarians and gay friendly people saying "Unholy shit, that is a lot of sodomy!"
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
Thank you for the links. I've gone for the first link link, document no 1 (main) and clicked Text rather than PDF.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71664415/1/united-states-v-arnold/
Search quickly finds me
19, Atthe same time, around 10:59 p.m., an Alvarado Police Department (“APD”) officer arrived in the parking lot at the Prairieland Detention Center in response to the 911 call by the Correctional Officers in order to assist the Correctional Officers in their official duties. Immediately after the APD officer got out of his vehicle, an assailant in the woods opened fire, shooting the APD officer in the neck area. The assailant in the green mask, standing near the woods on Sunflower Lane, then also opened fire at the unarmed DHS correctional officers, In total, the assailants shot approximately 20 to 30 rounds at the Correctional Officers. Police later recovered spent 5.56 caliber casings at the locations of both of the shooters. That caliber is typically used with AR-15-style rifles.This is so much worse than what I was expecting from the discussion that I'm having to re-calibrate my opinion of following online discussion
It is already happening. Here is Farage. And also Jacob Rees-Mogg
Edited to give two examples, not just one.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
The interface between intelligence and instinct is the reward system; pleasure and pain. I think that the intensities of pleasure and pain are about right for the ancestral environment, especially if intelligence is directed outwards to solving the problems of daily living. Directing it inwards to game the reward system is a problem.
For example, in the ancestral environment hunting and gathering is tough. Want meat? You are not leading a lamb to slaughter, you are hunting a wild animal that can fight back and may kill you. Want vegetables? There are no crop varieties, you are gathering wild plants, with chemical defenses and few calories. You could stay home and fail to fatten up in autumn. That risks dying in a hard winter. The future belongs to those who really enjoy their food and take their chances and enjoy their wild fruit and berries.
Fast forward 100000 years and humans game the reward system with calorie dense, hyper-palatable snacks and Chili Heatwave Doritos. It is supposed to make people happy, and it kind of does. But it also leads to morbid obesity. Using intelligence to game the reward system is an auto-monkey-paw.
My example illustrates the idea of having a reward system of about the right intensity, and how it can get subverted by modernity. But the example isn't about sex. Maybe sex is different.
Sex is about reproductive success. Success against nature, success against other species, but also success in competition with other humans. If Alfred has a higher sex drive than Boris, he has more descendants. Natural selection increases the strength of the sex drive until it is so intense that the problems it causes balance the boost to reproductive success. That might mean that Carol blows up her happy marriage to Boris with an affair with Alfred (he is so sexy) and Boris stabs Carol and Alfred to death (natural selection has imbued Boris with maximum jealousy and lust). More commonly it gives humans lives that are driven by lust, obsessively so. And people are psychologically defenseless because it feels so good. My thesis is that natural selection naturally leads to sex drives that are too strong for humans to have happy lives. At the very least, unbridled lust leads to lying and deception, which leaks out into other areas of life, creating a low trust society.
In modernity, we game the reward system because not only is sex pleasurable, but more is better. Vibrators and pornography, obviously. Contraception allows a more fleshly contact per child conceived. We deploy our intellect and game the reward system with "a midnight nude pool party and a designated sex tent". Does turning it up to eleven make us deliriously happy or jaded, coarse, and insensitive. That is a tricky question; humans have weak psychological defenses again the pleasures of the moment. (Whoops! I'm back again from scrolling YouTube shorts, I nearly gave up on writing this comment, seduced by the pleasures of the moment. That damn algorithm is good at gaming the reward system!) We are unlikely to choose wisely between more is better and the counter intuitive more is worse.
My intuition is that a happy society is one with taboos around sex, and a general reticence that promotes childhood innocence, and late sexual awakenings. The basic instincts are already too strong. Directing our intellects inward to game the reward system is making them stronger still, and we are naturally inclined to fail to notice the auto-monkey-paw.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
My flatmate injured his rotator cuff. Since I'm also getting old and frail, I made an effort to learn from some-else's experience. I bought some dumb-bells intending to do a variety of arm exercises to strengthen the stupid little muscles that hold the ball in the socket before anything bad happened. I took it steady, starting with just the two kilogram bar, only adding a one kilogram plate when I could do twelve repetitions with just the bar.
I followed the instructions in the booklet that came with the dumb-bell. Start at seven reps. Work up to twelve. Return to seven but with a slightly heavier weight. As I increased the weights, I noticed that I needed to brace my core; I was exercising a lot of muscles, not just my arms.
My back grew stronger and stopped aching. I found that to be a memorably excellent result, worth passing on in a comment in theMotte :-)
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
The mention of "water purification control chips" reminded me of Poland using clams for this: https://www.johnfhuntwater.co.uk/resources/news/how-clams-keep-water-clean-in-poland/
The question of minimum population sizes for different levels of technology is tricky. One has the whole of Earth researching and developing clever hacks to help keep things simple on Mars. I expect a lot of clever dodges making it possible to obtain adequate outcomes on Mars without needing a deep technology stack and a large population.
Searching the article that you link to, the text has eleven instances of "work" and zero instances of "tourist". Also zero instances of "holiday". I've checked all sixteen instances of "visa" and none are "tourist visa" and none of them reveal a synonym for "tourist".
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