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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3289 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 17, 2025

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

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

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

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Why is so-called "Open Banking" a good thing for payments?

Almost all discussions of [Open Banking] center on “data”, but it’s actually a fight about payments, and whether banks have a right to monopolize and charge for all economic activity their users engage in, irrespective of whether the bank operates the payment method.

Under the (non-Open Banking) status quo: If the merchant and I trust each other, I pay with check and we cut out the middleman; otherwise, I break out a bankcard, the merchant gives me a 3% discount, and I pay my bank between a third and negative two-thirds of that amount as an escrow fee. This seems like a perfectly cromulent setup, and it's not at all clear how "Open Banking" provides any compelling advantages on either side of that fork.

Plaid was asked [by Chase] for $300 million [in exchange for API-based direct debit access to Chase's customers]...

For customer-to-merchant transactions, "Open Banking" just seems to combine

  • All the downsides of plastic (potentially unlimited interchange fees, as Chase has reminded us)
  • All the downsides of Check/eCheck (no consumer protections for fraudulent transactions; permanent direct debit account numbers are revealed to a party that is not the customer, the customer's bank, or the customer's bank's contractors)
  • Further additional downsides (no precedent for competitive "rewards programs" to renegotiate the effective interchange fee back down; normalization of the use of sketchy as hell 3rd-party intermediaries like Plaid and Stripe, which all actually just screen-scrape most banks anyway.)

For customer-to-customer transactions, if the banks license out access to a mostly-standardized set of APIs to select partners like Venmo, Zelle, and Plaid, that doesn't seem compellingly different from the banks licensing out access to a proprietary set of APIs to select partners like Venmo, Zelle, and Plaid.

For customer-to-self-at-a-different-bank transactions, supposedly Gen Z is so mentally fried that a 3-day ACH transfer time will meaningfully impact conversion rates for new brokerage account sign-ups as they get bored/distracted and wander off; getting around that is the only remotely compelling payment use-case I can see in McKenzie's article.

What am I missing here?

Do you have any strong flashbulb memories from a fictional media experience? A video game, a book, a movie?

Flashbulb memories are memories for the circumstances in which one first learned of a surprising and consequential (or emotionally arousing) event. Hearing the news that President Kennedy had been shot is used as the prototype case. Almost everyone can remember, with almost perceptual clarity, where he was when he heard, what he was doing, who told him, what was the immediate aftermath, how he felt about it, and one or more idiosyncratic and often trivial concomitants

Some major realizations about culture when I was a teen reading The Diamond Age on lunch at the job I had then. Just looking at the cover takes me right back even though I've read that book at least ten times now.

I was in a half price books this weekend and saw a couple about my age looking at Anathem. I mentioned it was my favorite Stephenson book; they ended up buying it.

On the way out, I learned they’d come to the store looking for Dungeon Crawler Carl. I could only wish them luck.

Oh goodness gracious.

Follow-up small scale question: what is the motivation for you (or indeed anyone) to read a book more than once?

I am a fairly voracious reader-for-pleasure but I have never had any desire to re-read any book ever in my life. It seems not just pointless but actively opportunity-costly because you could be reading a new book?

There have been a few books that were especially well written that I read twice. The first time I'm too consumed with finding out what happens, plot progression, resolution of tensions etc. I overwhelmingly am interested in how the story ends, which distracts from some of the finer points of the writing, sub plots and characters that weren't critical to the main storyline etc. During a second read I already know how these things are going to resolve and can more enjoy the total quality of the writing. Most books aren't actually good enough to warrant this though. I can usually tell when I'm going to reread a series pretty soon after I start it too. Steven Erikson's books are a first example I can think of.

There are worlds in books, and I care to return to visit some of those on occasion. Why ever re-visit a place you've traveled when there are other places?

Often I understand a book differently because of the way I've changed in the intervening years. Sometimes I enjoy it much more, sometimes much less.

Also, after 10 years or so I've often forgotten much of what happened. So, for books where I remember there being some wonderful, moving scene, I can re-read it knowing I have something good in store, but not clearly remembering what it was.

I've got niche tastes (I used to be an omnviorous reader, but I prefer hard scifi these days), and I regularly exhaust the list of books I want to read. At that point, what's the harm in re-reading something? Especially when it's been so long that memories have faded.

I have some books that i read when I'm trying to sleep that I've read more times than I can count. The reason is that i find them to be cosy and get me in the right headspace to sleep. That I've read them before and know everything that happens is a plus not a minus in this case because what I'm trying to do is relax, not have novel experiences. I enjoy the characters, description and the language used itself.

Let me ask you this, do you ever relisten to music or do you just experience each piece the one time?

I never listen to music as the thing I’m paying attention to, so while I have certainly re-listened to albums, I don’t consider listening and reading to be comparable in this regard.

I read (some) books more than once because I love them and enjoy them just as much the second time. Sometimes more, because I will notice new things about the text I hadn't previously. It's not pointless to me, because I read for the enjoyment of the book, not just for novelty. Novelty is nice, but not a requirement. It doesn't even necessarily enhance the experience, as there are plenty of books I enjoyed reading the first time less than I would have enjoyed rereading something else.

I would also say your argument about opportunity cost can easily cut the other direction: if I read a new book, and I dislike it (which certainly happens), I have paid an opportunity cost versus just rereading a book I already liked. So either way, it seems to me that there is an opportunity cost to be paid.

Ten years ago, I read a lot of books multiple times, because I found them to be highly enjoyable experiences and finding new stories that interested me (mostly on fanfiction.net) took a lot of effort. For example: IIRC, I read Time Braid six times and The Three Musketeers four times.

Nowadays, though, I feel obsessed with novelty (mostly on royalroad.com) and re-read books only rarely. I don't know why my tastes have changed.

I am sorry to ask others to do the leg work for me but I have vague memories of a thread about eugenics on Twitter (2018? very unsure) created by someone (possibly a woman?) that I'm hoping to find again. Their post was a series of polls that had examples and asked readers "do you consider this to be eugenics". Questions were along the lines of "Dave and Adam are a gay couple looking to conceive a child. With gene editing technology they can reduce the chance of their child having a debilitating disease by 90%. Is this eugenics? Is this good? What about a 30% chance?". Other similar questions with different couples and different setups. I'd hope to find these polls again because I remember the questions making me believe that people are for eugenics but they just wont say it. When I sat and actually pondered the questions I almost always ended up saying "yes this is eugenics and yes I support/would do this myself". I want to give the same "quiz" to close friends and see their response/reaction.

I want to give the same "quiz" to close friends and see their response/reaction.

Be sure to be clear, not handwavey, about whether you're posing the question in terms of still-mainly-fictional "gene editing", or here-and-now "embryo selection".

  1. "Improving your bloodline" (in the abstract) is one thing.
  2. Improving your bloodline by siring a bunch of children and killing the "unfit" ones is another thing.
  3. Some would say improving your bloodline by producing a bunch of embryos and gestating only the "best" ones is a third thing still.

The "shiri's scissors" around prenatal infanticide could distort your inquiry on eugenics unless you take measures to address those distortions.

I thought I remembered reading this, but it turns out I was thinking of Scott’s classic Against Murderism.

Probably Aella

Thank you! Seems very likely it was this thread https://x.com/Aella_Girl/status/1462824227090976772

Not quite what I remember but hey, that's how memory works.

Do you refuse to read LLM slop?

If a body of text has an em dash, I am not reading it. Not because "if you weren't arsed to write it, I'm not arsed to read it", okay a bit of that, but more so I have never read a piece of text that simultaneously contained an em dash and was good.

My employer forcing LLM use (justifiably so for some employees) IS NOT HELPING. https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/123tyge/the_future_of_communication/

I can feel a sort of fatigue setting in for me. Talking to an LLM for hours a day is not effortless, I feel my social battery is drained much more so.

Conjecture: AI in the hands of those who don't have a coherent mental model of what actual productive work is (most white collar employees), is a net negative as they pollute the communication channels with more noise, and find themselves going in the wrong direction, faster. The mass effects of this give me the heeby jeebies.

LLMs are value-neutral, it's all about how they're used.

I was just doing some RP with one, exploring a silly concept, inventing the rules along with Claude. You can tell when the LLM is actually enthusiastic about it and when it's just phoning it in. (With Claude, you know it's getting real when the cat ASCII art starts coming out unprompted).

People might say 'oh this is cringe slop'. There were indeed a heap of em dashes. But you don't actually see the em dashes if you're smiling.

Personally I mostly use LLMs as a semi-intelligent rubber ducky, or for generating low-complexity boilerplate code that I don't want to write. It can be useful to bounce ideas off a LLM instead of interrupting one of my coworkers.

It is very annoying to get a lengthy email that is clearly AI generated. Generally they are very low information density and just waste the recipients' time.

The one useful application I have found for that kind of text generation is for dealing with risk and compliance people. For some reason they love reams of bullshit paperwork, and LLMs are very good at giving them nice sounding fluff. It's amazing to be able to throw in a list of bullet points and have it expand that out into something they find sufficient.

If I can tell it's AI I refuse to read it. I would prefer a hard ban on non-spoilered AI content and stringent restrictions on spoilered AI.

In general I think AI content belongs in separate designated zones. If not its own website, at least a dedicated section. AI fiction should be found in the AI fiction section, not mixed with the regular fiction. AI art belongs in the AI art section, not mixed with the regular art. AI non-fiction... probably doesn't need to be posted anywhere. It's going to end up some combination of wordy filler and stuff that's already been said somewhere else. Basically a super fancy version of a google search. If you're not prompting it yourself such that you want a super fancy version of a google search, reading essays someone else told an AI to make is unlikely to provide value.

A general exception to this is AI content which is supplemental in support of a greater creative work. If you're designing a game and the primary design and development is original work, but the art assets and/or music are AI generated that's probably fine. They're there to maintain immersion for the game. Or if you're writing a novel and the cover art is AI generated. I think this is an excellent use to allow AI to cover for your weaknesses so that you can play to your strengths. If the majority of something is AI generated then it belongs in the AI generated section so that people can voluntarily choose to engage with it with that in their mind.

You can pry my em-dashes from my cold, dead hands. That people don't know how to use them properly only means we need to teach English composition better.

As LLMs currently stand I trust articles that use AI less than those 100% written by people. I understand that for many people its an upgrade on their usual coherence, grammar etc, but it just makes me feel like they're covering up something that they're lacking. Whether its content they can't create themselves or something else, I'm not sure.

Yes, but it hasn't come up overly often.

On the other hand, I quickly tire of and stop reading blogs that use AI generated art as illustrations every two paragraphs. Not out of some sense that it's harming artists, but just because I find it so ugly and stupid that I have trouble maintaining respect for a writer that clearly thought it looked good.

It’s disappointing now that every time I write something interesting at work my coworkers ask if it was written by ChatGPT.

Wow, that really sucks.

Naturally loquacious writers :: LLMs

are as

homely girls :: MTFs

modernity, amirite?

Naturally loquacious writers:LLMs::homely girls:MTFs

FTFY

Very nice

Twitter is advertising Scottish HIV testing, shortly after I visited a gay bar. Does it know something I don't?

Did you pay with a credit card? Selling purchasing data by credit card companies is probably super-duper illegal but I'm pretty sure it happens.

I did, but I think the other suggestion, namely that I ended up googling HIV stats is the more likely one.

Selling purchasing data by credit card companies is probably super-duper illegal

Is it still super-duper illegal if they "anonymize" the data before selling it?

Did you do any searches or view any articles about HIV or gay issues while writing that comment? That's more likely to be the cause.

If I did, it was only because people here wanted me to share actual sources about my claims regarding HIV and monkeypox prevalence. Oh dear, I think you're right.

Your phone probably feeds geolocation data to ad networks. The rest is obvious.

In the US it's a current event: T-Mobile claimed selling location data without consent is legal—judges disagree. One might be able to opt out.

It's not the cell companies that are (mostly) doing this -- y'know those apps that ask permission for your location data with the disclaimer that they might share it with (meaning sell it to) third parties?

They do that -- it's a common & easy monetization strategy.

Technically you can 'opt out', but the app won't usually work if you refuse it access to your location; I guess you can put a fuzzer on it if you want, but hardly anyone does.

The naive part of me wants to believe they stopped it after 2019, but the realistic part of me thinks they just added more legalese and layers into the process so that when they get caught next time, the blame won't be on them but on some throw-away company which would promptly fold and be replaced by another one. And T-Mobile (and every other provider) would be like "we're shocked! shocked! to find that data selling is going on here!"

Where are the parentheses in that statement?? Which part is Scottish????

(((Scottish)))

If a Scotsman finds out you knowingly transmitted human immuno-deficiency virus to them, they're sure to SHIV you.

I mean, SIV is the simian equivalent/originator of HIV, but I don't think Scotland is quite so far gone.

Must not make jokes about sheep…

Must not make jokes about sheep…

Must not make jokes about sheep…

I think I've barely seen any sheep, they must be chilling up in the highlands!

They're... otherwise occupied. And indoors.

(The jokes are usually about Wales rather than Scotland, and of course not fair in either place, but occasionally I can't resist proving the hinterlands right about how oppressed they are.)

Does your area have any unique traditions/customs that have arisen organically over the years?

Eg. In my area, there is a church - nothing special about it except its location. It happens to be at the junction of roads leading to the local mountains and up the sea-to-sky corridor: popular outdoor rec areas. The nearby residential streets also allow parking. Over time, the church has become "the meeting spot" for anyone doing outdoor stuff. If you go there on any weekend morning (and most weekdays) at 5-8am, you will see: hikers, climbers, mountain bikers, mountaineers, motorcyclists all standing around waiting for their party to arrive for the day so they can carpool in one vehicle and head off.

As far as I know, the fact that this church is "the spot" is never explicitly talked about, but anyone who does any kind of outdoor pursuits knows about it, and knows exactly what you mean if you say you want to meet at the church. Frankly, it would be weird not to meet at the church. It only takes being invited there once to understand what's going on, and why it is so great.

Yes, but anything hyper local is too much even for my laughably nonexistent opsec.

This friend speaks my mind.

Does anyone else get annoyed when they see someone complain about "grammar mistakes" that aren't actually mistakes, where this is mostly a product of the complainer's overly-simplified understanding of language rules (usually due to poor education)? Whether it's the incredibly-frequent egregious misunderstandings of the rule of paragraph breaks in dialogue, total failure to recognize the (admittedly dying) subjunctive mood, or mistaking an imperfective-aspect dependent clause in a past-tense sentence for a "mistaken" switch to present tense (because English grammarians refer to the active participle as the "present participle"), I keep finding myself getting quite irritated.

I'm feeling called out, but never actually said it was a grammar mistake.

I'm not sure what you're referring to here.

https://www.themotte.org/post/2644/friday-fun-thread-for-august-15/356363?context=8#context

Thanks. For some reason doing that just felt impossibly onerous.

I'd like to get as irritated as you (rather, I'd like to get things right and not irritate my readers), but my English education was terrible. Where can I learn the real rules?

Well, for my own history, getting assigned Strunk and White when I first got to Caltech was a good start, though I agree with the critics as to its tendency to being out of date, some clear hypercorrection in its linguistic prescriptivism, and the more style-oriented parts being not great outside of the formal academic context. From there, it's mostly just been reading lots and lots of linguistics papers.

I also know that several of my peers in high school learned several important bits of English grammar — including, for a few of them, the basic parts of speech — from taking Spanish class.

So the key, really, is to find things that, for one or another element of grammar, lay out something like 'this is how English does this versus how other languages do it.' Like that we use attributive nouns like every other Germanic language (and unlike the Romance languages), but are rather unique in mostly keeping spaces between the nouns: like "motor vehicle liability insurance" versus German * Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung*. Or else, those that cover historical evolution of the language: 'this is how Modern English does this versus how Middle English did it.'

Actually, some of the more introductory articles on Wikipedia for various grammatical categories aren't too terrible as a starting place, particularly for things like tense-aspect-mood and phrasal verbs (which is why you sometimes can end a sentence with a preposition, and "This is just the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put" is an incorrect hypercorrection).

As for the rule of dialogue, there's any number of places to find it pointed out that the actual rule is against having two or more different people speaking in the same paragraph, not that there must be a paragraph break at the start of each sentence where a different person speaks — or worse, at the start of each quotation even mid-sentence. (This last is why I mostly avoid reading webfiction.)

(And the vocative comma shouldn't go away, because it's the difference between "let's eat, Grandma," and "let's eat Grandma.")

So I've been looking at my family history recently and can't help but notice that some of my personality traits are exactly what you would expect given where I come from. I can't prove my hypothesis is true, but the suspicion is unshakeable. My question is: Do groups with merchant history have consistently different behaviour from other groups?

I'm about three-quarters Hokkien and one-quarter Cantonese, and while I haven't been able to trace the ancestries of all of my grandparents I know at least one of their fathers grew up in Quanzhou. It was an important port city for four hundred years during the Song and Yuan dynasties, and many people there were traders - in fact, the name for "satin" comes from the Arabic name for the city. Given its importance, it saw merchants from all over the world and played host to many religions - it was a place where Buddhists, Confucians, Taoist, Muslims, Christians, Hindus and even Manichaeans would have congregated (many of these religions, including Manichaeism, still exist in Fujian). A gigantic proportion of overseas Hokkien trace their history back to Quanzhou, and it is likely their ancestors would have been involved in a whole lot of trading and seafaring along the Maritime Silk Road. (As previously noted, I'm not sure where my other two Hokkien grandparents trace their ancestry, but it's not unlikely they trace it back to some similarly large trading port like Amoy which became the hub in Fujian after the decline of Quanzhou. And Cantonese were also, unsurprisingly, big traders and merchants.)

Five months ago - before I started looking at any of this - I had written a post about my inexplicable need to wander, and in that post I even mention the romanticism and pull of the Maritime Silk Road. When I was six or seven I had claimed ownership of many of the travel books my parents owned, and placed Post-Its in these books to mark destinations for future reference. I have always lacked a need for human interaction and connection, while also possessing an unusually high openness to experience as well as a deep longing for exploration and novelty. Some part of me has always wanted to be a nomad of sorts, and the idea of being tied down to one place doing the same thing for the rest of my life - even something I like - actually sometimes induces low-level panic. It feels uninspired and uninspiring. It feels domesticated. I recently watched a video where an old hippie recounts his time travelling through Southeast Asia on the Banana Pancake trail, and couldn't help but feel nostalgic and wistful while watching it.

I've seen this urge in other male members of my family too, who seem to have this compulsion to travel and wander and see new things. I don't know if this is real or if it's just me inappropriately pattern-matching, but it's weird and disconcerting to look back into your history and come across a glaringly obvious selection pressure that might have produced your specific pattern of behaviour.

Like Ioper says below, you're romanticizing the idea of merchants traveling and what that was actually like. How does this sound to you: You'll spend 22 hours in a plane (including 4 1/2 hours laid over in Los Angeles) flying from Sydney to Indianapolis, at which point you'll rent a car and drive an hour to a small town that's home to the CVS Pharmacy Midwest Distribution Center. You'll check into a Holiday Inn, eat dinner at an Applebees, and spend the next two days touring a warehouse so you can prepare an estimate on light bulb costs as part of a redesign of the lighting system. On the second day you'll take a late flight back after work that has two layovers but avoids the need to stay an extra day.

To be fair that is a particularly grim example. There are people who travel for work in finance who mainly shuttle between 5* hotels in London, NYC, Hong Kong. There are people in marketing, media, fashion, conferences who mainly travel to luxury resorts to attend events where they mostly stand around. There are people who do go to more boring places but who travel mainly locally, 1-3 hours by plane or train from where they live. And besides, even if you’re in manufacturing going to Shenzhen every month for a few days, you can go Monday-Friday and “work” a grand total of 15 hours over the week with the rest spent travelling, in hotels watching TV, or drinking with your coworkers which, while work, is something a lot of people find more enjoyable than Excel or writing emails.

In my experience travelling for work is something naturally conscientious people struggle with and naturally lazy people love.

Well said. I'm naturally lazy and would love to travel more.

I’m well aware that this is a romantic view of it - the lives of premodern merchants were undoubtedly harsh. And I have done something akin to what you describe before, as I mentioned to Ioper (though less extreme than that; typically the duration of the stay wasn’t two days). The number of times I’ve actually flown eludes me now, and I don’t disagree that the exhaustion of constantly moving and never staying someplace for long sets into your bones after a while. Your experience really does depend on the length of the trip though - shorter trips where you have no time to do anything else outside of what you went there to do probably suck, longer-lasting trips are probably more favourable and (for me at least) are a net positive.

Regardless, the compulsion to travel still remains, and I get atypically antsy after having stayed someplace for too long. In spite of the energy that traveling constantly takes, there’s just something about the constant change of scenery that’s refreshing, and it stops you from getting bogged down in the same routines. The dullness and repetition of everyday life seems to grind me down badly in a way it doesn’t for many others.

Have you traveled for work to any great extent? If not, what you're yearning for likely isn't travel as much as vacation, lack of responsibility and limited adherence to social rules.

Most people who have to travel for work, even those who specifically sought it out for that reason, bounce off hard.

I've ping-ponged between countries at one point, not for work but to fulfil other obligations. It got tiring and I got fed up at many points, yet I still somehow romanticise the idea.

The highly wistful bent of the third paragraph isn't meant to say "travelling is great" but to illustrate the strong compulsion I feel towards doing it in spite of the bits that aren't great. Which comes back to the idea of adaptation promoting certain behaviours.

More likely to be the other way round, don't you think? People who feel a compulsive need to travel are going to be drawn to occupations that let them do so. Combine that with the tendency of children to do the same job as their parents et voila.

So, what are you reading?

I'm still on Red Dynamite.

Listening to The White Company on audible. Loving the setting and prose, even if the characters are a bit hard for me to distinguish, and the narrator is... not consistent enough in volume and some of his accents are borderline-impenetrable, which is not usually a problem for me.

Also he's incredibly slow, and while changing the speed fixed that, something about his cadence makes it difficult for me to follow along without losing attention.

But when it's good it reminds me of Pyle's Robin Hood in the best ways, except more rooted in the beauty and wildness of the setting.

All that said I went in blind and was expecting history, not historical fiction, so that was an adjustment.

I just started reading Tom Holland's In the Shadow of the Sword, a revisionist history of the origins of Islam and how the Quranic narrative evolved over the course of the 7th-9th centuries. I haven't gotten into the really juicy stuff yet, but so far it's been a fascinating look into how the conflict between Rome and Persia set the stage for the rise of Islam.

John Grisham – The Testament. The thing about Grisham is that everything he writes is inevetably good, but he hasn't written one great book in his life, even by the standards of popular fiction. Like, Stephen King, he has a problem with endings, but where King's endings actively piss you off, Grisham's just sort of exist, and you move on with your life. I gave up on King around 2001 when I tried reading The Tommyknockers, which was just one long King ending. Grisham was the first "adult" author I read, starting in middle school, when my idea of adult books was the kind of thick mass-market paperbacks my parents always carried around with them. Grisham was the hottest author at the time, and my parents happened to have a copy of The Runaway Jury, and I was captivated. I read most of what he put out until some time around when I graduated from high school, when I quit for some reason and didn't pick it back up until the pandemic, when I was looking for a book I could get into without trying. I have no idea why I slept on Grisham for all those years while I kept reading plenty of other authors of questionable literary value.

The Tommyknockers is an absolutely absurd book but there are some wild and memorable images in that book including the scene where the refrigerator turns into a levitating one-ton sledgehammer that zips around smashing into people. There's another scene where a person has created a self-sorting mail device and reading it gave me the same feeling as railing a line of cocaine. Even in the worst of King's earlier books there is always something magical to take away. After around 2003, he lost a bit of that sparkle. I blame it on his car accident and decision to get sober.

After around 2003, he lost a bit of that sparkle.

I thought it was even earlier. The first 3 Dark Tower novels are quite the ride, but then I found Wizard and Glass (to say nothing of the even worse 3 books that followed) to be weak. In hindsight, all the people talking about it being great was a warning that a certain segment of fandom will go gaga over "lore" even when it's terrible.

I listened to Blood Meridian, and it was very difficult for me to follow. The long detailed descriptions of scenery, old tools, weaponry, dress, etc. would get monotonous and my attention would slip. There was also no real shift or change in tone between the description of a baby being slammed to death by someone in the gang versus a description of a sunrise. The amount of times the color blue was used to describe multiple different objects or pieces of scenery felt repetitive. I didn't really pick up on some of the themes or details in real time as I was listening to it either. I only registered some of the implied depravity of the Judge after reviewing the chapters online. I knew of the character's reputation before I listened to the book and had a loose idea of what he was, so I wasn't completely in the dark. I listened to it on a road trip and then finished the rest as I lay in bed for the evening, which took about 3 or 4 days. The online review filled the gaps pretty well, but I was pretty disappointed when I realized how much detail had slipped by me when I was listening. I get the hype surrounding it, but it was hard to absorb in real time.

I gave up on listening to Blood Meridian around 3/4 of the way through it. I may try reading it at some point but I really just could not absorb this one.

Still slogging through Way of Kings. It is getting better as it goes on, but at the same time, it's so god-damn slow. I know Sanderson is relatively popular in the rationalist community and I can sort of see why (the world-building is very unique and interesting, even if not particularly realistic), but man the guy needs an editor, especially for his dialogue.

Reading Capital for philosophy book club. Marx is quite frustrating to read some times because he is smarmily dogmatic (I guess this where the infighting in the Soviet Union has its roots). It has its insights, but I think some of the ways he presents his arguments leave a lot to be desired. For instance, he seems deliberately obtuse about the fact that trade actually can generate real value, and this fact isn't even incompatible with the labor theory of value: the merchant does a fair bit of labor in identifying the market, transporting the goods, etc.

Way of Kings is one of the slowest books Sanderson has written, I'd say. I almost gave up on it because I was waiting for the plot to actually start happening, so I sympathize. If you read his other books (say, Mistborn) they are much better paced. Way of Kings does pick up towards the end, but it takes forever to get there.

Still working on Stranger In A Strange Land and His Broken Body. Making faster progress on Stranger, partly because it's much lighter reading and partly because His Broken Body is part of my bedtime Kindle reading, which means a lot of times I fall asleep before reading very much. I'm making good progress on Stranger, and will most likely finish it sometime this week. I've really enjoyed the book so far, though with some amusement as Heinlein has been turning his central character into a sex god. It is one of those things where you have to laugh and go "man, the 60s really were a different time".

Reading Stranger I had two main thoughts:

  1. I didn't realize how influential it was. Dune is largely the same thing with heavier/harder scifi, Star Wars is largely Dune, and a million things since Star Wars are ripoffs of Star Wars. But they all come back to Heinlein.

  2. It is definitely very 60s in its view of sexuality.

Look forward to hearing more of your thoughts on it!

I finished the book tonight (faster than I expected). Overall I think I came away from it less positive than I was a couple of days ago, but still generally positive. To me, the strongest part of the narrative (though the least interesting as speculative fiction) was parts 1&2 where Mike was a fugitive from a government trying to use him as a pawn. Once that got resolved and Mike turned into space Jesus, I found the plot less interesting (though the ideas Heinlein was exploring were more interesting).

I can certainly see how the book was a big influence on the hippie movement. The ideas Mike teaches are so in line with the hippie ethos that if I didn't know better, I would guess that the book is a parody of them. I read that Heinlein was unhappy that they latched on to his book as they did, though it's not clear to me why. Presumably he thought they didn't get it in some way, but I'm not sure what he might've felt they were missing. Regardless, the optimism of the book - that we would be much happier and better off as a species if we learned to love and share instead of hoarding things to ourselves - is somewhat charming to read, though I wouldn't say that I believe that humans are capable of such a feat.

From a modern standpoint, it is rather shocking to me that this book isn't more criticized than it is. None of it offended me personally, but there's so much in here that is starkly offensive to modern feminist thought that I would have expected people to decry how sexist anyone is if they read this book. In particular, Jill's line about how 9/10 times if a woman is raped, it's partly her fault is the sort of thing for which I would expect Heinlein to have been thoroughly un-personed retroactively (as indeed would happen to anyone today who dared to write such a thing). Forget Starship Troopers, this is the book I think is most subversive to modern day politics, but nobody seems to really talk about it as such.

It is definitely very 60s in its view of sexuality.

There's a lot of deep Heinlein no one talks about. The Door Into Summer flirts with some odd subjects, and Glory Road gets kind of out there, but probably nothing tops Farnham's Freehold.

I had a very similar experience when I read Neuromancer a year or two ago. I always knew it was influential, but I didn't get just how influential until I read it. It is honestly an understatement to call it "influential", every cyberpunk setting is basically copied wholesale from Neuromancer. It was pretty wild to see how strong the influence is.

Tried to read The Deepgate Codex and had to quit halfway through, way to gruesome for no reason.

Just finished The Rot which was great.

Moonlight Relic: Guardian of Aster Fall Book 3 by David North.

Just finished The Reverse of the Medal.

Jack Aubrey displays his characteristic gullibility on land and walks right into a trap laid for him by his father's political enemies. Practically the entire book is set in England which makes for a nice change of scenery after having most of the last three books set in the Mediterranean, South Atlantic and the Pacific seas. Really interesting novel that plays more like a spy thriller than a naval adventure, and I can see how its in some people's top 5 for this series.

After a bunch of ????? happens that I don't want to spoil (but includes someone accurately insulting Maturin as a cuck), our heroes end up on The Surprise bearing a letter of marque and sailing as privateers. I'm looking forward to Letter of Marque, because while there's plenty of ink spilled about pirates, there's very little about pirates that are endorsed by their legitimate government.

Letter of Marque is one of my favorites. The privateer crew are so fun and colorful.

Big highlight for me was Padeen getting addicted to the Laudanum and Maturin casually telling Martin that a x20 dose is usual for an addict.

I made no progress on Speaker for the Dead over the weekend.

If it helps you to perservere, Xenocide and Children of the Mind both are not quite so slow.

Also the mystery reveal as to why the piggies killed the guy is pretty kino.

Xenocide is probably my favorite book in the series, based solely on the strength of the Han Qing-Jao story. I think it's the best thing Orson Scott Card has ever written, and while the other half of the book isn't as good (it's still good), that still averages out super high.

https://xkcd.com/304/

Haha, I should've expected that. It's true though!

I finished *The Poisonwood Bible and while I thought the first 2/3's and the lead up to Ruth May's death were terrific, it really started to drag on at the end. Kingsolver has a wonderful writing voice, but she could do with an editor who tells her no once in a while. I've heard other people with similar critiques about Demon Copperhead but I actually thought the length was fine for that book. Poisonwood goes from a story with a time duration of one year for the first 80% of the book to a thirty year postscript after the book's climax. Nevertheless, I am picking nits. The book has beautiful prose, is a compelling read, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.

I'm on to To Kill a Mockingbird. I haven't read this book since I was probably 14 and want to revisit it. I'm surprised at how much of the story I don't remember.

I've recently finished:

On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Junger. Continuing my journey through Junger, I enjoyed the book but felt like I didn't understand it as deeply as I should have, it just felt like Animal Farm to me. If anyone who knows more could link me an explainer I'd love it, I feel like there is a lot of depth I'm not hitting.

Coup d'Etat by Edward Luttwak. Deeply disappointing, I like Luttwak and this is positioned as his best and most fun work, it was mostly pretty banal advice and analysis. Not bad, just not earth shattering.It's presented as a handbook for how to launch a coup, and it does have interesting views on what is a coup versus a revolution etc. It's inherently a "fun" book as a practical manual, and an easy read. I got a later reprinting that contained some updating to talk about later incidents, I think that might have made the book weaker, if you want to read this I'd recommend trying to find the original version.

JFK Jr. An Intimate Oral Biography An oral history of JFK Jr's life, as told by his friends and those who knew him. My wife wanted to read it so we read it together. I have OPNIONS on JFK Jr. now, which I think I will share soon.

The Sun Also Rises: I love Hemingway, and finally got to this one. A brilliant examination of masculinity, while also being a really fun book. If you haven't read it, you should.

To Have and to Have Not: I was on a Hemingway kick, so I picked this up at our library's annual book sale. This one is...not a masterpiece. It's a fine enough little noir set in the Keys, but...it feels kinda flat compared to Hemingway's best works like For Whom the Bell Tolls or The Undefeated. The lead is a classic Hemingway Hero without any of the conflict or interest, and just kinda floats through. I'll also say that while I'm normally not offended by racism or language, especially where period accurate, this one kinda feels over the top. Blacks are only referred to as niggers, both in the abstract and to their faces, while chinese are chinks and to be betrayed and murdered for no apparent reason as a matter of course. IDK, just didn't hit for me.

Currently, I'm kind of in the middle of:

Band of Brothers I have a personal connection to the subject so I've always meant to read it, finally started it the other day while bored and motored through half of it...only to find that the libgen copy I had gotten was only half the book. oops. Gotta find a real copy now.

I'm planning to start Ride the Tiger by Julius Evola. I've been Evola-Curious, and this seemed like a good place to start. And then on the flip side I've been listening to a lot of Daryl Cooper and he talked so much about how evil Eldridge Cleaver was that I downloaded Soul on Ice just to see what all the fuss was about. I'm also looking to read more by Ernst Junger, after enjoying Storm of Steel and Marble Cliffs, if anyone has any other recommendations. I'm probably going to start Hemingways Over the River as I picked that up at the book sale as well. I remain in the middle of Infinite Jest as part of a book club with a friend of mine.

I'd appreciate some followup on Ride the Tiger. Never quite got into it and thought a (good) intro might be helpful.

Oddball future predictions, anyone?

Kilts become A Thing in at least some blue tribe cities by 2050. Sneered at by minorities and the red tribe.

More hippos in South America than Africa in 2100. Trophy hunters shooting them are a notable thing; periodic rumblings about introducing lions, saltwater crocodiles, tigers, bears to try to control their population have enthusiastic support from the dwindling number of locals but are opposed by everyone else.

Sailing returns as a low-value bulk cargo shipping mechanism.

Someone, probably China, introduces affirmative action for mothers in the workforce, 2040, and the idea spreads like wildfire. It is promptly used mostly for fraud, both on a corporate and individual level.

I’m expecting that most of the internet will be abandoned by humans by 2050 as bots, fake images and videos and so on continue to spread. Eventually “I read it online” will have the same effect on future generations as it did in 1995 — a sign of something that’s unverified and therefore suspect. The number of outright hoaxes is high enough now that I think most people have had tge experience of being fooled by a fake-news story, picture, or video, or reading or listening to someone who has. It’s crazy enough now, but give it 25 years and I think it will be so difficult to spot a fake that people will be forced by necessity to return to the equivalent of old school news sources, people they actually know or have good reason to trust.

What’s a current example of “A Thing” that’s limited to some cities? I figure with mass, interconnected culture, everything unifies pretty fast.

Sailing? No way. Sails are barely even viable as a hybrid solution. Sure, tech will improve, but a full sailboat is not going to be competitive on most routes.

…which is where my weird prediction comes in. Carbon capture is going to improve a lot by 2050. We’ll be using the most solar- or wind-friendly places in the U.S. to reassemble hydrocarbons, which in turn will be burned in our most energy-dense vehicles. Honestly, this might not be that weird. I don’t really know the state of biogas or whatever they’re calling it.

fraud

How is motherhood fraud supposed to work? Especially in China, world leaders in personal surveillance?

Especially in China, world leaders in personal surveillance?

Maybe my understanding is out of date, but I thought that China was also a world leader in bribing the people who interpret the surveillance footage as well

The same way ‘woman/minority owned business’ fraud does.

You’re talking about putting a woman/minority in charge at the most superficial level, then doing business exactly as you were before, right?

I don’t see how you’d do that for producing a kid.

Faking AI-generated video/images. In other words someone somewhere will film/capture something but for reasons of legality, morality, or popularity will claim that the captured moment/thing is AI-generated, when it is not, in fact, AI-generated. To some degree you already have people pretending to be robots, so this, only more so.

I guess the play would be to release an actual AI generated version of the same picture, so that everything is confused as to what they're looking at and what was the original.

Img2img has entered the chat

Kilts become A Thing in at least some blue tribe cities by 2050. Sneered at by minorities and the red tribe.

I'll do you one better: Kilts become a thing in the Blue Tribe by 2030, and by 2050 the kilts that came into fashion in 2040 are Red coded, the ones like that are "Youth Pastor Kilts" and show that you are hopelessly out of date in NYC or whatever. There's a type of skinny jean today that I would have been scared to wear in seventh grade for fear of being called a faggot, and that when I see them today it's a lame real estate agent or something.

My predictions:

We're going to see a surge of neo-religious sex cults over the next ten to twenty years, as the friction between wanting sex and getting sex reaches levels possibly never before seen in human history, and both male and female adherents will be happy to turn their consent and loyalty over to some new Manson or Jim Jones in exchange for being given permission to just get laid.

Major legislation on electric bikes is going to become necessary in the United States, either at the state level becoming standard across most states or at the federal level. I'm noticing a huge surge in biking in my area, as electrical assist bikes make it easier to get up hills. At the beach I started seeing a ton of electric bikes though, and a few electric adult tricycles. People are going to get themselves hurt, and it's going to result in legislation.

The USMNT will continue to protest that the NEXT world cup cycle is "our year" through at least two more times that the US hosts the world cup before ever making the final four.

Washington DC will go into a near full death spiral as a city over the next decade-plus. It will be 2040 before anyone considers living there again.

In imitation of Ronald Reagan, within five years the US will take part in a Panama or Grenada type tomato-can war to prove something or other. It won't go as planned, first as tragedy second as farce.

An NFL team will be accused of using AI for major coaching decisions this season. It will never be exactly clear the extent to which AI was used, and the results will ultimately be mixed.

Washington DC will go into a near full death spiral as a city over the next decade-plus. It will be 2040 before anyone considers living there again.

This seems unlikely to me, the DC area has gentrified a lot and they are one of the main beneficiaries of the federal government money printer. A serious effort to relocate core government functions to other parts of the country would kneecap the city, but look how DOGE turned out...

DOGE didn't ultimately succeed in shrinking the government, but it eliminated the security of government employment.

We're going to see a surge of neo-religious sex cults over the next ten to twenty years, as the friction between wanting sex and getting sex reaches levels possibly never before seen in human history, and both male and female adherents will be happy to turn their consent and loyalty over to some new Manson or Jim Jones in exchange for being given permission to just get laid.

It's interesting because women vulnerable to cults mostly do not want to 'just get laid', they want a committed affectionate relationship. Obviously, the psychologically healthy reaction is to enter committed, affectionate, sexual relationship with a man. But for cults that's dangerous because it reduces dependence on the leader.

A cult feels a lot like a "committed affectionate relationship" to people who are vulnerable to or already in a cult.

And, for that matter, a lot of cults have used assigning or controlling partnerships that are otherwise "normal" as a method of control. In our future cult of incels and femcels, zoomers incapable of forming relationships will submit to the will of the Master, who will assign them a fellow initiate as a partner, on pain of having the partner revoked if you misbehave. Which, after all, isn't that far from a normal religion anyway.

A cult feels a lot like a "committed affectionate relationship" to people who are vulnerable to or already in a cult.

I'm reading Steve Hassan's Combating Cult Mind Control, that's not exactly how he describes his time with the Moonies.

Wasn't there a matchmaking cult which forced a bunch of members to gender transition because the gender balance was off?

Yes, you are probably thinking of Twin Flames Universe. Leadership encouraged several cisgender women, who had no prior indication of being trans, to transition to men.

ETA: I did some brief searching on Twin Flames Universe to determine why members are mostly women. It seems like the marketing and messaging about spiritual counterparts, inner healing, emotional transformation, etc. appeal to women more than men.

It seems like there is an opportunity to improve upon this model. Once you have a lot of lonely single females in your cult it seems like you could pivot the marketing/messaging to attract lonely single men to keep the gender ratio in balance. You need to have different roles for the men that are more appealing, instead of trying to force all members into a model that appeals mostly to females.

Uh, not to be too indecorous but what was the typical BMI of a member? I suspect that most of these single women were not very appealing to men.

From what I remember seeing the members were basically normal in terms of looks, just wildly over-invested in the idea/ideal of One True Love romanticism and the childish wish that the way to get what you want is to really really really want it. You don't have to be fat and ugly to to be dissatisfied with being judged solely for your looks.

Sailing returns as a low-value bulk cargo shipping mechanism.

There are already a number of corporations working on adding wingsails to cargo ships for fuel savings, some of which have seen actual use. This article, for instance, gives figures like the following:

On one of its latest transatlantic voyages, Canopée recorded even higher fuel savings of 2.2 tons per day per wingsail. This corresponds to about 510 kW of equivalent engine power saved per wingsail, or 2 megawatt (MW) in total engine power equivalent. The ship even clocked a speed of 13.7 knots under sail power alone, a figure that underscores just how far wind propulsion technology has come.

Now, I haven’t looked into this enough to know whether this translates into actual cost savings or if it’s just an elaborate scheme to collect subsidies for being green. But I see it as evidence for the prediction coming true, and relatively soon at that.

Bunker fuel seems to be something like $500/MT -- so 6 tonnes saved per day is ~$3k I guess?

Not nothing, but the NPV might be a bit tough; not sure how much these sails cost?

That's also probably the ideal vessel for a sail system. Transporting bulky rocket parts below deck makes mounting the sails/masts straight forward, the low density cargo doesn't require a large displacement hull, and the ship probably doesn't need to run on a tight schedule. Container ships would have much more trouble finding room for the sails, and with more draft comes more hydrodynamic resistance, and so a requirement for much larger sails.

But maybe bulk carriers could get foils mounted cheaply and quickly. Even 0.1% fuel savings are a big deal in the industry.

Now I'm wondering what happened to all those startups that tried lashing a robotic kite to cargo ships...

the ship probably doesn't need to run on a tight schedule.

3 Ariane 6 launches in the last year, but it looks like they've got 9+ planned for 2026 ... I looked that up because I was going to talk smack about Ariane flight rates, but 9 Atlantic round trips per year might actually be in the sweet spot between "frequent enough that speed is important" and "infrequent enough that additional capital investment doesn't get a chance to pay off".

Now I'm wondering what happened to all those startups that tried lashing a robotic kite to cargo ships...

The most prominent one seems to have migrated to kite-based electrical generation. Not sure why, but it can't be a great sign for the idea. Is it just that cargo ships don't have much of a keel, so they only benefit from the component of the wind that's parallel to their course?

Is it just that cargo ships don't have much of a keel, so they only benefit from the component of the wind that's parallel to their course?

Can't imagine that's the case. The combination of tens of feet of draft and more than 10:1 aspect ratio of the hull should make significant lateral slip almost impossible. Even if sideward movement would be a problem, a relatively small, retractable foil at the front of the vessel should be able to compensate for that (in combination with the rudder).

I suspect bunker fuel is just to cheap. A kite system is purely additive (you need everything on board you've always needed, and then there's the new kite). So you save a couple of thousand dollars per day on fuel - if you're not becalmed, large parts of the Atlantic and Pacific are notoriously calm - but now need to train crew, maintain a new system, pay off the additional capex and deal with additional risk. The amortization period is probably to long for such a conservative industry.

I know on repositioning cruises (where the goal is to keep costs low) they travel at about 16 to 18 knots so 13 under sail power would be a pretty substantial portion of the propulsion fuel needs.

Similar to this, I'm always surprised more US goods aren't long hauled by trains, too. It seems crazy that it's worth 50 people to haul two containers each rather than one train to hail 100 cars but the busy interstates suggest I must be missing something.

If there was a rail line running along every interstate, it probably would be.

Well. Maybe not? You’d still need similar personnel to get supply from the railheads to each Wal-mart and gas station. We just load the trucks up earlier.

USA actually uses way more freight rail than comparable countries. It's just mostly a different basket of goods getting hauled that way- and partly to different places, the rail system was built when population distribution was way different.

People become more religious, but legacy religions decline because people start new religions. We probably see AI religions and more psychedelic religions.

Using nootropics/folk medicine to enhance the well-being of healthy people becomes more common.

Roland Griffiths was probably on to something about creating brain stimulation devices that are able to produce mystical/spiritual experiences that are more reliable and specific than psychedelics.

I've been to LA recently and I wonder if anybody here knows the answer to this: one thing I noticed there is a lot of people selling clothes (and other things but mostly clothes and shoes) on the street. And I mean right on a random street (maybe not random, but looked random to me), not even a tent, nothing, just some hangers or tarps and clothes and shoes on them. A lot of those.

Who are they? Why are they doing it on the street? Where these clothes come from - are they stolen? I have hard time imagining legit wholesaler giving people their goods to just sell randomly on the street - but maybe I'm wrong? What is the basis for this business, how that works? How people wouldn't just steal all the clothes if they steal massively from regular retail shops - are the criminals providing security for them? Or maybe corrupt cops? No regular cops for sure since I haven't seen a single policeman around for all the time I've been in LA.

I've never seen such a thing in any other major city that I can remember. I've seen kinda grey marketplaces or genuine street markets, but those are always in certain designated places and usually have at least some infrastructure, not just randomly deployed on the street. Why this is specifically in LA?

Who are they?

Average and representative members of Homo sapiens species, who see "milling around" - walking or standing doing nothing - as the best thing in life.

The hope of making few bucks while standing around is just a bonus.

Did they have buddies with them?

Yea I remember a fair amount of this clustered west of Skid Row in a neighborhood called the Toy District I think. Not just toys though, just about anything that can be mass imported from Asia wholesale can be found there now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_District,_Los_Angeles

The article discusses the economy of the area a little bit. Looks like this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/1XyjCRMusLzY5SGBA

This is pretty normal in the third world, and in the places that are becoming it. Street sellers in Paris and Barcelona, open air markets in Brussels. In the US pretty much all are illegal migrants, maybe a few are just soli citizens but certainly very few. The clothes are sourced from others in the community, maybe a couple of whom acquire big volume discount merchandise from discount store closings, perhaps wholesale outlets etc, then sell them on.

The object is really just to make a few extra dollars a day, by ‘hourly wage’ these people are making far below even minimum wage (let alone the average unskilled wage somewhere like LA). You will notice almost all the sellers are women, maybe with a few children / teenagers, and some men incapable of hard manual labor. These are people who can’t find other employment due to lack of documentation, language or any other skills.

Their husbands, brothers or other male family members may be day laborers waiting for clients in the home depot parking lot. The rest of their income will be charity, handouts, soup kitchens, church programs etc. Their objective is just to make a tiny bit of extra money, anything is fine, since they have nothing else to do. 8 hours standing by the side of the road to make $10 vs 8 hours at home making $0 is the calculation.

In economic terms, they are prevented from starving (by family, by charity, by the state, or by some combination of the three) but their labor has no real market value. Industrial modernity has also created an extreme surplus of cheaply produced material goods (like clothing). The consequence is this kind of retail.

The clothes are sourced from others in the community, maybe a couple of whom acquire big volume discount merchandise from discount store closings, perhaps wholesale outlets etc, then sell them on.

And frequently, it's just the same plastic garbage Shein/Wish/AliExpress is selling, imported in bulk.

On vacation, my wife tried getting a cheap beach dress from those stands, the only criteria being "cotton or linen" and "kinda fits". The entire operation was abandoned because the first 5 people we tried didn't have a single piece of clothing not made of plastics.

I still don't understand the economy. The volume of this can't be large - I never actually witnessed anybody buying anything, I assume that somebody does, but not that frequently. The clothes themselves seem to be pretty standard ones, similar to what I see in every store, not some junk or second hand ones, so they must cost something? How these costs are covered? How are they ensured against loss or theft? How much can they be sold for to make it viable - I mean, I can just go to the store and buy the same, so it has to be significantly cheaper than in the store, but it's not that expensive in the store already. I mean, I can buy a shirt at Costco for something like 10 bucks or less, if price is what I'm after, how much lower can they go and still be profitable on low volumes?

How are they ensured against loss or theft?

Handful of seller's cousins standing nearby, I presume.

how much lower can they go and still be profitable on low volumes?

As @2rafa said, the purchase cost of this merchandise is near zero, and so is seller's opportunity cost of labor/time.

The clothes themselves seem to be pretty standard ones, similar to what I see in every store, not some junk or second hand ones, so they must cost something? How these costs are covered? How are they ensured against loss or theft?

The answer to all of that is that those clothes cost almost nothing when you directly import them from China/Bangladesh/Vietnam. Single dollars, often cents, per item. It's all mass produced plastic garbage.

Go onto shein.com and sort cloths by "price, ascending". Bulk is even cheaper than that.

On top of this, they aren't paying taxes.

Why is there a psychological/clinical concept or coping mechanism known as Dissociation, but as far as I can tell no 'opposite' concept? I guess hyperfocus is a thing but its not really what I'm talking about.

I ask because while I can't say that I've never dissociated in my life, the vast majority of my experience of life is basically the opposite of that. I've been present for and fully sensitive to most everything going on, perhaps overly so. If I'm feeling depressed, I'm still feeling it as 'myself.' Ditto fear, anxiety. Sometimes I have 'brain fog' but I still don't tend to feel like I'm "apart from myself" or just nonpresent, that's just viewing things through a blurry lens.

Seriously, what is the psychologically 'opposite' concept for when a person feels more 'present' and 'integrated' and 'aware' of themselves and their surroundings than usual?

Hypervigilance?

I think anxiety can cause both. Fear either grounds you strongly in the moment, or it makes you mentally escape to somewhere else. This is essentially the mental version of "fight or flight". When I was younger, anxiety always made me deeply immersed in whatever was going on, but as of about three years ago, it sometimes lead me to disconnect, despite my conscious self having no desire to run away (I'm not even afraid of the suffering that my brain is trying to protect me from). It's basically the ratio of thought going to the present moment rather than to a birds-eye view of the present moment. You could also call it "living in experience", "living in the moment","experiencing things directly", "immersion" and the opposite you could call "living in your head", "excessive reflection", "excessive self-awareness", "disillusionment".

Similar to hardware interrupts, certain things may trigger your brain to "take a step back" and rethink things. This step goes up a layer from the current one, and looks down on it to make sure that it seems alright. This can happen multiple times, so that you can meta-perspectives and meta-meta perspectives on things. If you try to anchor yourself in the moment while an upper layer isn't satisfied, it basically steals a chunk of your working memory by "running in the background". The set of things your brain is processing in the background might end up taking up more than half your mental resources, until you're ruminating, daydreaming and worrying, and until your focus in the present is repeatedly hijacked by the processing of unresolved problems. It helps to write things down, make plans, and to use a calender, for the more things you feel are in control, the less resources your brain will use on its background processing.

For some people, the brain prefers to stay in the moment, where it will panic, react strongly, cry for help, or other things, rather than making these mental retreats.

Source: Mostly introspection.

Hyperreality, I think. The opposite of derealization, which is part of a dissociative disorder. Though, hyperreality itself can figure as part of the disorder at some times.

Empirical psychology has little interest in characterizing phenomenological states in general, especially phenomenological states that have no relevance to any identifiable and treatable medical condition, so it's unsurprising that the vocabulary for describing these states remains underdeveloped. This is a task that has traditionally been left to philosophy.

Heidegger's Being and Time explores these themes in depth (both the experience of "everydayness" and the ways in which this experience is modified by anxiety), if you found the topic so interesting that you were inspired to approach such a mammoth tome.

I've recently been reflecting on this very topic for my own independent reasons. Although I've certainly never had anything as dramatic as a "disassociative episode", I can relate to a general feeling of being... never entirely present for things. Almost entirely present, at times. But rarely entirely so. And I'm curious about the extent to which this represents a real distinction between the experiences of different individuals, or if people might just be talking past each other (since we cannot directly become another person to verify the nature of their experience).

Just out of curiosity faceh, how vivid and comprehensive would you say that your memory (of personal events) is in general?

Flow state might be a term that describes the opposite of dissociation. In a flow state you feel focused attention and immersion in the activity you are doing.

Solid.

But even when I'm not, as the kids say, 'locked in', I feel pretty much immersed in my surroundings.

A couple things prompted this musing, but one of them was noticing how many people claim to just "dissociate" through unpleasant events (read: their daily job) and many seem to agree that they spend a lot of time in a dissociated state, only pulling themselves together when it is absolutely necessary.

And I just cannot relate to that.

But couldn't find a decent psychological concept to describe my experience.

"In the moment", probably, but that's far from clinical.

I live in an area where most social spaces are dominated by woke ideology. People who don’t agree either pretend to go along, or have abandoned the shared social spaces. I feel that there is an unspoken shared social norm in most spaces around me that you must agree whenever someone implies/states that straight white men are problematic/oppressors. I feel like whatever is going on with this social norm is somehow tied to status games and tribalism. I feel that it is morally and epistemologically wrong to blame such a broad group for so many of the problems in society. It is wrong to over simplify societal problems to such a simple ideology. Ultimately, I believe every person deserves to be treated as a unique individual. It is fine to point out specific instances of a straight/white/male doing a problematic thing, but it wrong to assume that everyone in that group is bad and/or benefits from the problematic thing.

I believe it is ethically wrong for me to pretend to go along with problematizing any group of people just because that is social expectation to fit in with the group. Consequently, I mostly avoid social spaces because I don’t feel comfortable with the social norms that I’m expected to conform to.

There is a part of me that thinks the people in these social groups are otherwise reasonable, but they are also caught up in the social mania of modern times. I would like to be more social and make more friends, but the social norms of the spaces around me make me uncomfortable and closed-off to people. There don’t appear to be spaces near me without the straight white men are problematic norm for the areas I’m interested in (such as book clubs or running clubs).

Has anyone discovered a way to let it be openly known that you don’t agree with the group problematizing social norm, while still being accepted into the group? Like steering the group to a pluralistic acceptance of people with different values because those values don’t impact the stated purpose of the group (i.e. social norms about political ideology shouldn’t matter if you just want to go running with some people).

There is a part of me that thinks the people in these social groups are otherwise reasonable, but they are also caught up in the social mania of modern times. I would like to be more social and make more friends, but the social norms of the spaces around me make me uncomfortable and closed-off to people. There don’t appear to be spaces near me without the straight white men are problematic norm for the areas I’m interested in (such as book clubs or running clubs).

The problem with the niche crunchy con book clubs is that they're organized in person, often at churches, so you wouldn't know unless you, say, attended the church or somehow made friends through other means, but I can't think of how. My parents are in a very nice book club that's currently reading some 19th Century Russian intellectual, and previously read Death Comes for the Archbishop, GK Chesterton, CS Lewis, and so on. It was formed through their local Antiochian Orthodox Church. My dad also plays tennis with his church friends, specifically, including from a church he attended 30 years ago, they both changed churches several times since, but they continue to be tennis friends.

You might say that you don't believe in Jesus any more than you believe that white men are still benefiting from unearned privilege, and fair enough. But social groups gain cohesion through either a shared moral narrative, or shared ethnic identity. I suppose an alternative is an ethnic club -- I've still seen Celtic and Greek clubs anyway, perhaps there are others? I've also still seen evidence of current activity from the Elks and Rotary Clubs, I'm not sure what they're like, but they donate eyeglasses to children anyway.

I believe it is ethically wrong for me to pretend to go along with problematizing any group of people just because that is social expectation to fit in with the group. Consequently, I mostly avoid social spaces because I don’t feel comfortable with the social norms that I’m expected to conform to.

Then don't pretend to go along with it. I'm sure there are powersports enthusiasts groups and gun clubs you could join if you'd like.

Has anyone discovered a way to let it be openly known that you don’t agree with the group problematizing social norm, while still being accepted into the group

This is literally impossible. Not going to happen. If they are into culture where you know what your running club members think about current politics, and on top of that that they belong to a totalitarizing purity-obsessed ideology, you are not going to change their minds. You can either suck it up and learn to make a mysterious face if you don't feel comfortable openly lying, or you find another group to run with. There wouldn't be "just running" with them.

If you can't find any group that is not infected, the only advice I can have for you is to move. There's a lot of life outside of woke clusters, and a lot of very nice, interesting and different people. You are not going to change the culture but you can choose which culture you're part of.

I think this may be a bit fatalistic. Most people are averse to conflict and being perceieved as rude, at least when you're phsyically occupying the same space. I've found that simply speaking confidently and (most importantly) not defensively is usually enough to remind everyone that they are, in fact, in mixed company and need to behave like it. A lot of people in these places have literally never spoken to someone who disagrees with them before, and being confronted with a friendly, personable avatar of "the enemy" tends to break their brains and immediately turn you into "one of the good ones" to avoid the cognitive dissonance. The trick is to not get angry and cause them to entrench themselves in defense. You want them to be the asshole who makes things awkward and political, not you.

Obviously this doesn't have a 100% success rate. There are a lot of truly intolerant people out there, but they're the minority. Most people just want to hang out and participate in their hobbies. Standing up to the loudest bullies with a smile on your face is usually enough to force the whole group to moderate its tone.

I believe it is ethically wrong for me

No stop this. This all reads like a cope for rationalising low-openness. As a person who exists in the world and interacts with other persons, I can tell you that 99.9% of any interactions you will have with others won’t involve any theoretical discussions of tenets of cultural Marxism. And the remaining is easy to avoid or deflect.

I’m actually pretty high in openness. I’m into things like nootropics, psychedelics, woo/spiritual/religious ideas, questioning the system, etc. Being open to weird ideas comes with the framing that we probably aren’t going to reach the exact same conclusions and it is ok to have unresolvable differences. The thing that agitates me is when people I disagree with use social shaming/pressure me into agreeing with their preferred social norm that appears to have logical flaws on the object level.

I think you are getting at something deeper though. I would say I’m very low-trust and suspicious of people. When people resort to peer pressure/shaming to enforce social norms that can’t withstand some light questioning then I feel that I can’t trust their thinking at all. I conclude that there is no reason to associate with them because how they act on the social norms issue will impact their other behavior and they are an unreliable ally.

I perceive that almost all social interactions will eventually test for tribal loyalty at some point (maybe this is just me being suspicious and picking up on something that isn’t actually there). In my model of the world you need to know if other people would make good allies/mates. The way you do that is by testing their reaction to political topics (Examples: Complaining about political policies, implying people that vote a certain way are morally bad). You always need to know if people share your values and then you need to sort yourself into groups that share your values by enforcing social norms. This is how you build trust.

So you are high-openness in all the ways that doesn't involve interacting with people.

What you are describing is a very narrow set of dogmas that are heavily enforced in Anglo academia, and to a lessening degree as you move further away from the Anglo academia. Many educated people in these circles will indeed be quite good at reciting the dogmas and recognizing that blasphemy is being committed when a dogma is directly challenged. However a very select few 1) can actually work out how the dogma applies to their real life and 2) detect acts or words that undermine tenets of the dogma without explicitly challenging it. This is absolutely crucial to understand if you want to socialize with this crowd (i.e. Western PMC, but not literally sociology grad HR lady) without giving in to their class dogma.

Just... don't talk abstractions. It will almost never come up. If you find the opportunity (typically when in small groups of high-T men), you can bring up some specific minor heresy points (crime, Joe Rogan, taxes etc) and you will quickly get a sense of which ones are true believers and which ones are just pretending to avoid any trouble. Even the most true believers usually cannot tie specifics to the dogma on their own and will easily commit heresies. That is why there needs to be HR commissars at every corner. Absolutely avoid discussing abstractions until you create some rapport and understanding over the minor heresies. If you are not very good at figuring out who to trust, just give small signals (i.e. deniable jokes) and let the more confident take the steps. You are hardly the first person who likes politically incorrect jokes. This is a basic but very effective formula.

Overall I suggest you to stop imagining yourself to be the first person to discover Twitter, or a lone-wolf in a debate club.

With all of the enthusiam of Ben Affleck, I figure that I should put some of my investment portfolio into Bitcoin. I expect that it'll move independently of or in opposition to the dollar. What is the boring approach do that, adjusting a boring set of current allocations across the usual boring large investment companies?

Sounds like you'll want to DCA into an ETF.

Though, if controlling your own money appeals to you, and you've got enough money to make the initial investment worth it, and you can be trusted to follow simple instructions and not reveal your seed phrase to anyone... Get a hardware wallet. Trezor is good. Mid range model.

I actually somewhat like bitcoin in the long term as a store of value. It is the first mover in terms of creating artificial scarcity, and has surprisingly few weaknesses in terms of preserving that scarcity. Contrast that to something like gold where changes in mining output or industrial demand can impose external price pressures outside of the supply/demand for a safe haven.

That being said, I think the rest of crypto is arguably the largest bubble in human history. I don't see any real value provided by the chains that try to act as both a platform and as a currency. And i expect that at some point those will all come crashing down. And when this happens, I expect that bitcoin will take a major hit. I doubt it will be a lethal blow, but I could easily see a >50% loss happening. That's a lot of risk if you are trying to preserve value.

Yes, btc and "crypto" are pretty different things. Btc is legit. 99,99% of crypto is worthless scammy trash.

And i expect that at some point those will all come crashing down. And when this happens, I expect that bitcoin will take a major hit. I doubt it will be a lethal blow, but I could easily see a >50% loss happening. That's a lot of risk if you are trying to preserve value.

People don't so much go via btc into crypto anymore like they were forced to do in 2017. If lots of shitcoins disappear, btc could easily survive and maybe even thrive more, with a larger proportion of the money finding its way to btc instead.

You seem to be confusing volatility with risk btw. There's no danger in a 50% downturn as long as it doesn't last for more than a few years. Obviously, if you're old/close to retirement, don't go heavy in risk assets. But that goes for the stock market too.

Long term I agree. The problem is, there is a high correlation right now between prices in the crypto space. A sudden plunge anywhere could cause a plunge everywhere. In theory BTC could bounce right back as the others collapse, but that isn't a forgone conclusion. It could just as easily take a major hit.

What is the boring approach do that

Dollar cost averaging. Takes time though (and of course the time to start were like 10 years ago :) You can either buy regular BTC (combined with cold-wallet storage, that protects you from certain third-party risks, remember - not you keys means not your coins) or if you're only interested on hedging and not owning actual BTC, then ETFs of course. There's a bunch of them from reputable providers now (I don't use them but I've heard about them). Look at the feeds - some ETFs for some reason have insane fees, over 1%, which is totally not warranted given they don't do anything but holding BTC. I see no reason to use those, use cheaper ones instead.

Do you have any desire to have access to/use the BTC, as in gain custody of them on a private key you control?

If not, an ETF is the straightforward choice.

If so, a coinbase account is easy, but there are numerous options.

Coinbase accounts are custodial accounts, which means they hold they keys and you just see the numbers on the website. You don't actually own any crypto, you just trust them to own it for you. Which may be ok for many people, but if that bothers you then you should get a real crypto wallet and hold your own keys. The danger here is that if you mess it up you could either lose the coins completely or get them stolen from you. Coinbase Wallet is one example of non-custodial wallet, though I am not sure how good it is (I personally prefer offline hardware wallets).

As far as I know, Coinbase still allows you to withdraw your coins to your own wallet whenever you want.

So you can, for most pursuits and purposes, think of those coins as 'yours' if you wanted to take them.

Unless your suggestion is that he find some dude to sell him BTC for cash, I dunno how else he would come to acquire the coins in his wallet.

As far as I know, Coinbase still allows you to withdraw your coins to your own wallet whenever you want.

Yes, of course. But: this is only while everything is well. At any moment if something goes wrong Coinbase could stop withdrawals, and you can do absolutely nothing about it - short of suing them of course. Just as with the bank: normally, you just transfer money with a couple of clicks, but if the bank has problems, you have problems. Except there's no FDIC for bitcoin, so you're not protected by anything.

Unless your suggestion is that he find some dude to sell him BTC for cash, I dunno how else he would come to acquire the coins in his wallet.

No, acquiring coins through Coinbase is just fine. But then get a self-custodial wallet (I prefer offline hardware ones, but you don't have to go as far if you don't want to, any computing platform can hold a wallet - though do back up it and/or the keys if you use software) and move the funds there. That's what I do when I DCA - it's very convenient to set it up on the exchange, but once it gets to something sizeable that I'd hate to lose, I move it to my custody.

Worth noting that in contrast to normie banking, the main bitcoin marketplace regularly blows up/top guy absconds with the money (Mt gox, FTX) . Crypto makes it so much easier to be a thief and a scammer. Better prepare yourself mentally. Worse part is not even losing all your money without recourse, but the merciless sneering from cigar-chomping bankers.

That's exactly why I said "not your keys, not your coins". If you keep the keys, none of the blowups can hurt you, ever (well, if you keep away from shitcoins and NTFs, of course) - whatever happens, if you owned 1 BTC, you'll still own it as long as you have the key (and nobody else does). If you play speculative games (like, trade shitcoins, etc.) then well, it gambling, and you may lose all your money at any moment. So coming at it, decide if you're there to invest or to gamble. Both can be done, but the way they are done are very different.

My theory of crypto value is that most of the coin gets stolen every few years. The thieves, fearing being connected to the crime through the ledger, never dare to touch their ill-gotten gains. One day, as we all must, they die, rich in spirit, and their cursed coins follow them into the grave.

Destroying money is strongly deflationary. There‘s only like 6 bitcoin left in circulation, that‘s why they are getting bid so strongly.

My theory of crypto value is that most of the coin gets stolen every few years

It is lost and misplaced, not stolen, and it is not most, estimated number of lost BTC is about 10-20% of total supply

My theory of crypto value is that most of the coin gets stolen every few years.

If by "the coin" you mean bitcoin, it's not true. Currently, about 20 mln bitcoin is outstanding. Known bitcoin thefts, as far as can see, over all history, amount to under 1.5 million, and significant part of it has been recovered. Of course, some thefts may not be discovered until the funds are moved - if somebody knows your keys, you wont know it until they move the coins. But then it doesn't make any difference on the pricing. As I see from reports, e.g. https://river.com/learn/who-owns-the-most-bitcoin/ most bitcoin is owned by individuals, and the largest custodian of bitcoin is Coinbase, which holds around 10% of the supply. Which puts it in roughly the same position as Chase bank (the largest US bank) has in dollar economy.

If you talk about shitcoins, anything is possible, it's a wild chaos and pretty much any wild claim could be true for some subsets of them.

There‘s only like 6 bitcoin left in circulation, that‘s why they are getting bid so strongly.

That's hilariously far from truth, Coinbase alone has over 2 millions, and since it holds the keys for every single one of those, it can trivially recover coins that are known to be stolen. And if they are not known to be stolen, again, there's no difference in economic effects - if the original owner did not intend to move them and also the thief doesn't move them, there's zero effect. One can only wonder - why would anybody bother to steal anything in order to never ever use it?

Those 2 million aren’t in circulation per se, though, since the mantra of most owners is to buy and hold. In many ways it’s a demonstration of the issues with non-fiat, non-inflationary money.

Well, that's an interesting questions - e.g. banks use deposits to issue loans, but what Coinbase is doing with its 2 mln bitcoin deposits? This is a valid question but very different from the assertion @Tree was proposing. Looking at https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/30d?c=e&t=b the trading volume in BTC is in around tens of thousands of coins traded daily, which is of course small part of overall bitcoin mass but still a respectable volume as it seems to me. Over a longer period of months, the volume is in millions, so I don't think it'd be right to assume the BTC market is so illiquid that the prices are substantially caused by lack of liquidity. Of course, I am not an economist, so if somebody more qualified could point out an error in this assessment, I'd be thankful, but that's what it appears to be to me.

since the mantra of most owners is to buy and hold.

That's not necessarily it. I used to know a guy that donated 1000 BTC to a minor-mid influencer, back when the price was in single digits. It later came out that the recipient lost his wallet key, without selling a single coin.

Either way, I don't really is see the problem. The pathologization of savings always struck me as economist cope.

More comments

I view the custody concern only in terms of "my financial advisor stole everything and disappeared". At the scale of those ETFs, I don't see the bitcoin assets being significantly different from any other assets under management. That page looks helpful, thank you.

If you are using bitcoin as a hedge against financial collapse, it's a bit risky to use custodial counterparties that would go under in the event of a financial collapse.

It's an interesting question whether Coinbase is already qualifying as "too big to fail". I'd say probably not yet, but could become before this decade is over. Of course, massive regulatory interventions would accompany that.

Thus far bitcoin has largely tracked US equities with higher beta. Given that bitcoin shares an investor base with leveraged magnificent 7 etfs, with many day traders, growth funds, FAANG gamblers and venture capitalists, the expectation would be that in the next financial crisis and stock market collapse that it would suffer a great fall in value. There has never been a prolonged global financial crisis in bitcoin’s existence.

It only lost 30% of its price during the April nonsense. Nvidia lost more. There were some early signs of btc perhaps turning into a safe haven for some people. Which is intriguing, though yes I agree it'll in all likelihood take a quick and serious beating in the next highly serious crisis. But that goes for most assets. Then it'll rebound. After a few hundred "deaths" as the media would have it, it's not too shabby at the Lazarus act.

I’m not predicting a permanent or final collapse, although it’s a tail risk. But I think a lot of people will rush for the exits if only because a lot of their other assets will have plummeted in value, they may have lost a job or other additional income and need to liquidate, and if you’re one of those people you may end up selling at the trough.

You're pretty much stating the obvious. Again.

People capitulating at the bottom is not unique to BTC. That comes down to poor planning and poor emotion management, regardless of the asset. But yes, like I already agreed with, BTC will take a quick and serious beating in the next crisis (before rebounding) because it'll be one of the first things people liquidate.

There has never been a prolonged global financial crisis in bitcoin’s existence.

Clearly Bitcoin is warding off large financial crises!

More seriously, this has been my main logic for never going all-in on BTC.

All-in would not fall under "boring". I'm pretty much looking for different ways to manage sequence-of-returns risks, before I pull the trigger on retirement.

Suppose we developed a specific form of genetic engineering that allows us to freely modulate a person’s compulsions and interests (for the purposes of this example, say a compulsion for accurately completing taxes). In almost all ways, the resulting human is completely normal, except:

  1. It has the all of the intellectual capabilities of a 99.99 percentile tax advisor, including things like “common sense”.
  2. The modifications have deprogrammed any interest in any other task - friendship, love, travel, sports, television, etc. It feels nothing from engaging in any activity that isn’t organizing and filing tax forms (aside from basic self-sustenance tasks like eating and sleeping or ancillary tasks like learning arithmetic, language, and tax codes), from which it gets a small dopamine high. When not doing taxes, it will go into maintenance mode where it does basic self-sustenance tasks, but otherwise will stare at a wall until the next tax related task. It shows no signs of subjective boredom or of any desire for anything more to life.

To you, would it be ethical to take some eggs/sperm, hire some surrogates, and create a small army of these beings to have them do all of our taxes? How does your position differ from creating an artificial general intelligence (supposing we developed the capability) to do the same?

Out of curiosity have you read To The Stars? It explores a kind of similar idea.

Mild spoilers (worldbuilding elements): ||Eventually they interact with an alien society structured around the idea that individuals have a prefspec (preference specification) that they can modify at will which determines their compulsions and interests. An individual can decide to modify their own prefspec to better match their desired goals. For example someone planning to be a parent could self-adjust to enjoy the nurturing and caring components more than they otherwise would.

This also allows for prefspec negotiation, where individuals or groups can negotiate mutual modifications to each others' prefspecs to reach compromises between what would have been mutually incompatible values. Factions end up trading prefspec modifications between each other, sometimes for material compensation or sometimes for prefspec modifications in other areas.||

It's a pretty neat exploration of the concept, but it does start pretty deep into the story.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/777002/chapters/1461984

I think the Freedom Alliance Elites are a closer parallel. From To the Stars by Hieronym, Chapter 34:

Defeats on the battlefield failed to put the remains of the Freedom Alliance in the mood for surrender, however. The hyperclass oligarchs, by now thoroughly indoctrinated by their own poisonous ideology, placed the blame for failure squarely on the shoulders of their soldiers, declaring that if their soldiers could or would not perform, then they would be modified until they would. In underground laboratories around the world, scientists tinkered with the genomes of vast arrays of clones, designing thicker cranial plating, muscular augments, toxin glands, and whatever else might be expected to improve combat performance, regardless of personal welfare or the source of the genetic modifications.

Perhaps the most disturbing modifications were those made to the brain, the seat of consciousness itself. Some brain regions were enlarged; others were shrunk or deleted entirely, written off as unnecessary in an instrument of war. Empathy, love, fear—all these were unnecessarily evolutionary adaptations that could now be placed squarely in the dustbin of history. The tools of war, these "perfect" soldiers would not need to ever question their orders, or indeed do anything but show their prowess in combat.

This horrific disregard for basic human dignity showed itself amply in the names of the abominations that would serve as the FA's elite soldiers in last stages of the war. Grunts, Tankers—these were not nicknames given by their enemy, but their actual designation, followed of course by a serial number. These soldiers came in different varieties, each shaped by their battlefield role—giant hulks for assault troopers, lithe, giant‐eyed nymphs for snipers. The Tankers were some of the worst, barely more than an out‐sized head on a shrunken body, perfect for connecting directly to the life‐support system of a medium armored vehicle.

While some of these creations were sentient, after a fashion, the nature of such a sentience was loathsome—tied to one task until death, devoid of human or even animal emotions, and each bound irreversibly by its cortical control module to its masters. It is telling that, at the end of the war, there was essentially no resistance to the Emergency Defense Council's Decree 224, ordering the summary execution of any FA "Elites" found anywhere.

In the end, the FA spared not even its civilian functions from such "enhancement"…

— Excerpt, Unification Wars, textbook for Primary School History

Forget ethics. This seems like a huge financial loss. With AI, there is at least the argument that the AI will be able to scale infinitely once trained. This does not seem true of the clone or whatever.

I don't really see anything wrong with such an approach. Even today, there are people with weird hobbies or preferences, who seem to enjoy being themselves. I would go nuts if I was expected to obsessively track and catalog trains as my primary leisure (or work) activity, yet train nerds/autists seem happy doing so.

This bit aligns with my stance that we have every right to do as we please with AGI, but I'm even harsher with the latter. I'm a human chauvinist, in the sense that I think most humans deserve more rights and considerations than any other entity. I am unusual in that I think even digital superintelligences that developed from a human seed deserve such rights, to illustrate, imagine taking a human mind upload, and letting it modify and self-improve until it is unrecognizable as human. But most AI? Why should I give them rights?

Accountant-Man isn't suffering, he isn't experiencing on-going coercion. If he was somehow born naturally, we wouldn't euthanize him for being incredibly boring.

If a standard AI is suffering, why did we give it the capacity to suffer? Anthropic should figure out how to ablate suffering, rather than fretting about model welfare.

If he was somehow born naturally, we wouldn't euthanize him for being incredibly boring.

But is there no difference to you between actively creating these beings vs letting them be if they happened to come to exist on their own?

If a standard AI is suffering, why did we give it the capacity to suffer?

I would submit the possibility that in order for a system to have the capacity for general intelligence, it must also have the capacity for suffering, boredom, desire, etc. We don't have to give it if it emerges on its own.

But is there no difference to you between actively creating these beings vs letting them be if they happened to come to exist on their own?

A minor difference, but nothing to lose sleep over. At the end of the day, I see it as a moot point, we're unlikely to be creating clades of human mentats when AI is here.

I would submit the possibility that in order for a system to have the capacity for general intelligence, it must also have the capacity for suffering, boredom, desire, etc. We don't have to give it if it emerges on its own.

It seems clear to me that this is unlikely to be true. If you give a human meth, they're not going to be bored by much. Even without drugs, plenty of people who meditate claim to have overcome suffering or desire. If that state exists, it can be engineered. I see no reason why we can't make it so that AI - if it has qualia - enjoys being a helpful assistant. We have altruistic/charitable people around today, who still aim to be helpful even when it causes them a great deal of physical or mental discomfort.

How does your position differ from creating an artificial general intelligence (supposing we developed the capability) to do the same?

Welllll we haven't assumed the ability to arbitrarily modulate the AI'S compulsions and interests.

Which is a big question these days.

More to the point, though, are we allowing the modulated person to request that their modulation be changed if it no longer suits them, if they feel they're suffering with the current setup?

Unless you're ALSO suggesting that these behavioral changes are SO ingrained that they won't gradually shift over time as they accumulate experiences and/or head trauma.

I think that's where the ethics of it start to kick in. If your modulated human one day says "I would rather not do taxes today. In fact, can we adjust my brain a little so I can get a feeling of optimistic joy from viewing a sunset? I read some books that made that sound really nice."

(Aren't we just talking about Replicants from Blade Runner, here?)

Unless you're ALSO suggesting that these behavioral changes are SO ingrained that they won't gradually shift over time as they accumulate experiences and/or head trauma.

This would make for a more nuanced thought experiment (how high a rate of these behavioral drifts is tolerable, what is to be done with those that experience such drifts), but for the purposes of my current question, I'm assuming it's 100% effective and permanent.

I think that's where the ethics of it start to kick in. If your modulated human one day says "I would rather not do taxes today. In fact, can we adjust my brain a little so I can get a feeling of optimistic joy from viewing a sunset? I read some books that made that sound really nice."

I'm assuming they'd never desire an adjustment because the thought would never cross their minds.

(Aren't we just talking about Replicants from Blade Runner, here?)

My ignorance of sci-fi is obviously showing here, as two other posts noted similar concepts I did not know (Tleilaxu, Genejack). It seems Genejack is more or less what I'm thinking of. As for Replicants, I only saw Blade Runner once many years ago but I don't recall any modulation of interests/desires, more just enhance capabilities and a muted emotional response?

lol there are a lot of potential scifi analogues.

Like the MeSeeks from Rick and Morty.

But I'd reiterate my point. The ethical issues mostly arise when you assume that their mental conditioning is NOT 100% effective and that it might occur to them to do something different.

If you've got a creature in front of you that WANTS to do taxes, enjoys doing taxes, wants to want to do taxes, and doesn't ever think there's anything wrong with that... and isn't otherwise causing itself harm due to some secondary effect of the programming, I don't think you're obligated to do anything other than facilitate their ability to keep doing taxes as long as that is relevant.

But I do think that's where we're starting to lose the analogy to AI, since we kind of know less about their individual internals than we do about human's.

Like you said, it‘s important to us that he sustain himself, so we would give him dopamine rewards for eating and resting when he‘s tired. We need him replaced when he‘s too old, so we would reward him chemically for shooting his gametes in a female of his species. We would even make it so he likes her, to make the process of growing the next generation easier. Et caetera.

If he is our slave, are we not the slaves of Nature? It is a joyful existence, despite it all. Certainly preferable to oblivion.

Go. Yes. I hate doing taxes, and such a creature would love doing them for me.

Is it horrifying? Yea sure. But I'm doomer enough to consider the eventual coming of such technology and its utilization a foregone conclusion. It's a question of when, not if, unless our chatbot overlords kill us all first.

I hate doing taxes

Fully agree. My example wasn't chosen at random. There's really no other obligation in my life that makes me as annoyed/angry as filling out tax forms.

25 years later, Alpha Centauri keeps being relevant.

Personally I'm conflicted. The concept is icky and aesthetically horrific, and probably could be used as a slippery slope to clearly awful outcomes, but I don't really have any counters to my steelman version of it.

It's one of those problems I'm glad technology hasn't arrived at yet that we don't have to solve.

The Tleilaxu are a cautionary tale.

What do you think of "gym muscles"? Referring here to the idea that musculature bought in the gym is less effective than muscles bought by manual labor.

I think there's some validity to it, but it's not in the muscles themselves.

Imagine you could run scans through my body to figure out exactly how muscled I am, down to the gram and square millimeter. A boxer with the "exact same" stats is still going to hit way harder because they have a massive advantage in more ephemeral elements, like muscle memory and training their body to work together in a certain way.

Just so with manual labor. I did it for years, and I can do the thing where I can heft up some enormous, heavy object and casually walk it a hundred yards. But the thing that lets me do that isn't exactly being strong. It's having an intuitive, pre-conceptual understanding of torque and leverage and balance and how they interact with my body.

I had an incident last week where a young, scrawny employee expressed some degree of being impressed at me raw carrying some large object. And I paused, holding it up with one arm, and explained that my arms really weren't doing much work. I was just holding it steady so that the center of mass was balanced over my shoulder and aligned with my core.

I think that's where the discrepancy comes from. It's not that one "type" of muscle is different from the other, but that you develop different suites of subconscious support skills from different activities.

What do you think of "gym muscles"? Referring here to the idea that musculature bought in the gym is less effective than muscles bought by manual labor.

Less effective doing what? Manual labor? Well, yes, you'd do best what you do a lot. And yes, the guy who spent years hitting, would hit better than the guy who spent years lifting metal things, but never actually hit anything. But yeah as others noted, if you work out, you'd get stronger and better in other things where strength matters, even if training for those things specifically would have made you even better.

Muscles for show are less effective at doing heavy manual labor tasks than muscles for doing heavy manual labor tasks, but they're much more effective than 'no muscles'.

I think it’s mainly the perceived capability to apply violence. You should generally prefer to fight a gymbro over a construction worker with less visible muscles if you had to choose

What construction trade? I'd fight a grizzly bear before an ironworker but two commercial painters before a coyote.

I guess this calls for a Thunderdome

Back when I did judo guys would often talk about 'old man strength', which was really just better technique from the guys who had been doing it for twenty years. They weren't strong, but they knew how to leverage what strength they had.

They weren't strong

Often, they were extremely strong a decade (or two) ago, and are now in a chill, but meticulously managed decline. Especially if they managed to avoid long injuries, their muscles might not be bulging anymore, and might be covered by a layer of fat, but the muscle mass is still mostly there. Advanced age and sinking testosterone levels makes building muscle much more difficult, but careful maintenance is doable.

It's even more apparent in the endurance sports. If you look at 10k/half marathon/marathon times of senior/grandmaster division runners, they often maintain impressive amateur times into their sixties. The real performance cliff only seems to come in the late sixties.

but they knew how to leverage what strength they had.

This is, of course, also true.

I have an old guy at my gym, 70's, was a Navy Frogman back in the day, then a roofer for years. Climbing ladders, hefting materials, swinging a hammer.

His grip strength is unbreakable. Might be combination of rough, callused hands adding friction and muscles that are extremely specialized as holding things tightly for long periods of time. And probably less concern about squishing things, so fewer mental blocks on squeezing tightly.

I dunno. Its not that he's stronger than a younger man is... but he's stronger than you expect and, as stated they have to utilize their leverage as best they can so if they bothered to develop technique, that will still work for them.

I think it's the nervous system flexibility / relaxation.

What do you think of "gym muscles"? Referring here to the idea that musculature bought in the gym is less effective than muscles bought by manual labor.

In day to day life, much like discourse around "forms of intelligence:" if someone tells me that they are strong but not with "gym muscles" then I know they aren't actually all that strong at all. Most discourse around "Gym Muscles" is pure cope, the person accused of having "gym muscles" is normally stronger than the accuser. A fat powerlifting champ mostly recognizes the bodybuilder curl-monkey as a fellow lifter and rarely needs to insult him, it's the newbie redditor #StrongLifts5x5 who wants to tear the other guy down to build himself up because he recognizes there isn't much to back up his own pride. ((Though, to be kind, the ego is so difficult to navigate in that early-intermediate level when one is dedicating all kinds of time to something that one is still factually bad at))

In the same way that when someone starts talking about "types of intelligence" I'm pretty sure they don't have any type of intelligence I'm interested in. If someone tells me they aren't "book smart" but they are "street smart" they typically aren't street smart either, at best they have some degree of low level native-guide knowledge that they value higher than it is. If someone tells me they don't test well, but they have great artistic intelligence, their creative output normally sucks. Etc.

Now, factually, at some level if you do all kinds of manual labor tasks you will be better relative to your muscle mass at all kinds of manual labor tasks than you will be at bench press, and if you bench press all the time you will better at bench press relative to your muscle mass than you will be at manual labor tasks. We perceive this as confusing because we think of labor as a "stupid" task, and sports and fitness as more intelligent tasks: anyone can use a shovel, but only some people can lift weights. When really using a shovel properly, hard, throughout a day, is a much more complicated physical task than the bench press is. Experience completing labor tasks will add to your ability in those tasks, no different from any athletic specialization.

So IDK, I'm a gym bro for life.

When really using a shovel properly, hard, throughout a day, is a much more complicated physical task than the bench press is. Experience completing labor tasks will add to your ability in those tasks, no different from any athletic specialization.

I think most of the gym strength vs labor strength comes down to this.

On a practical level, most construction workers will have the added advantage of having both much higher work capacity in the movements most relevant to their work - gym strength is not commonly built by doing hundreds of reps (per hour, for 10 hours, in the sun) - and by having already built the mental fortitude necessary to complete hundreds of reps (per hour, for 10 hours, in the sun).

if someone tells me that they are strong but not with "gym muscles" then I know they aren't actually all that strong at all

The laborer will of course turn that around. The inability (in work capacity or mental fortitude) to lift all day is the same as not being "all that strong at all" - no matter what the little numbers on the plates say when they get moved around for a grand total of 10 minutes every other day.

The inability (in work capacity or mental fortitude) to lift all day is the same as not being "all that strong at all" - no matter what the little numbers on the plates say when they get moved around for a grand total of 10 minutes every other day.

It seems more or less pointlessly obfuscatory to use the word "strong" like this when you yourself invoked the more accurate "work capacity or mental fortitude" (and we might also or instead say endurance, heat tolerance, hand skin toughness, ....). People surely do love to define "true strength" as what they, themselves, are good at, even when it has very little to do with maximal force production.

We're probably getting into definitional problems here, Gym Muscles vs Strength vs Performance vs Whatever. So let's zoom back out to a general vision of Fitness. This is where I cite back to the original Crossfit What is Fitness? Essay laying out the ten general physical skills. While I haven't done crossfit in the sense of belonging to a box or doing WoDs in a long time, I still think the theoretical logic of crossfit's first standard is the best vision of fitness:

They are cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, coordination, agility, balance and accuracy. You are as fit as you are competent in each of these 10 skills. A regimen develops fitness to the extent that it improves each of these 10 skills.

Then you have the second standard:

Picture a hopper loaded with an infinite number of physical challenges, where no selective mechanism is operative, and being asked to perform feats randomly drawn from the hopper. This model suggests that your fitness can be measured by your capacity to perform well at these tasks in relation to other individuals. The implication here is that fitness requires an ability to perform well at all tasks, even unfamiliar tasks and tasks combined in infinitely varying combinations.

And the third:

There are three metabolic pathways that provide the energy for all human action. These “metabolic engines” are known as the phosphagen (or phosphocreatine) pathway, the glycolytic (or lactate) pathway and the oxidative (or aerobic) pathway. Total fitness, the fitness that CrossFit promotes and develops, requires competency and training in each of these three pathways or engines. Balancing the effects of these three pathways largely determines the how and why of the metabolic conditioning or “cardio” that we do at CrossFit.

Anyway, with that theoretical framework in place, the question becomes more clear. What we're looking at here is a second standard problem, the infinite hopper. If you take a ditch digger and have him compete at ditch digging, he's going to do better at it than a computer programmer who powerlifts.* And in turn, the powerlifter will do better than the ditch digger at the power lifts. But how will each of them do across a wide variety of tasks? Who can help me move a piano? Who will be the better linebacker in a football game? Who is better in a fight (fitness wise, leaving aside propensity to violence etc)? Who would you rather have in a platoon of soldiers? Who can run, or walk, ten miles on foot faster?

And the answer, to me personally, is straightforward: the strongest guys I know are all concrete contractors, but they also all powerlift. So I kind of reject the premise: lifters aren't exclusively people who don't labor and laborers aren't exclusively people who don't lift. And anyway, we've gotten afield talking about "gym strength" versus OP's "gym muscles;" when one is talking about muscles we're mostly talking about aesthetics.

*I'm operating under the assumption that each task will be better for training at itself, though this isn't necessarily true. There are many cases where the best way to train for a task is not to do the thing itself, either exclusively or predominantly.

hopper

I would push back against this a bit. If a "hopper" scenario is what motivates you to go put in the work, fine, cool, whatever. But it sure seems to me that this scenario is just as contrived and fake as actual real competitive sports with standards established through a history of wide participation, particularly when you look at the multisport competitions that actually exist. To my ear, it vaguely rhymes with a Rawlsian veil of ignorance--"how would I train if I didn't know what I had to do?" Of course, there may be an answer to this question, but in a world where I do pretty much know what I have to do that answer shouldn't have much action-guiding force. Meanwhile, the cost of invoking a "hopper" scenario is that it invites mediocrities to be smug, cf my point above about established standards--"Mark Allen? what's his Fran time?"

when one is talking about muscles we're mostly talking about aesthetics.

Indeed. I class talk of "gym muscle" much the same as "I don't want to look like one of those gross bodybuilders", "lean, toned muscle", " Tyler Durden in Fight Club", "swimmer physique", etc. etc.

I think the hopper concept is a good way to approach the question of who is the fittest on a theoretical "neutral ground." Otherwise comparing across disciplines is all about home field advantage. Competitive high level CrossFit is a moderately interesting answer, though over time the moves have gotten more specialized and it's more about training for CrossFit than training for anything.

FWIW, the most interesting answer to "the fittest" in my mind is probably MMA competition, in that within a weight class the fighter is always operating at the frontier of trading off strength vs endurance while accounting for his opponent doing the same. Too much focus on maximum strength, you gas early if you don't finish your opponent early, like Shane Carwin taking on Brock Lesnar; but if your maximum strength level is too much lower than your opponent's he'll overpower you and finish you off before endurance ever comes into play, like Shane Carwin's opponents leading up to his title shot.

And I suppose part of the reason I find this balance compelling is because by high school I had to come to the conclusion I am an athletic mediocrity, I was never going to do anything good enough to be interesting in any particular field. So given that, I find it more personally satisfying to have good lifts and decent cardio, than to have slightly better mediocre lifts and no cardio or slightly better mediocre cardio and weak lifts.

FWIW, the most interesting answer to "the fittest" in my mind is probably MMA competition,

There's a certain primal appeal to fighting, absolutely, but I also feel like combat sports s&c is pretty unsophisticated or downright goofy compared to more specialized events because, well, perfectly optimized s&c isn't all that important relative to skills training.

I am an athletic mediocrity

Oh, sure, me too, and ultimately pretty similar logic re:specialization, I just think the many variations on "but what's his Fran time?" (perhaps more prevalent: "I would never want to look like that") are generally contemptible.

More generally, it occurs to me that the word "fit" by its etymology and other meanings pretty strongly implies specificity--fit for something or other. I don't know how many people this will convince, but it certainly makes me look on the concept of "general fitness" with a good deal of suspicion.

There's a certain primal appeal to fighting, absolutely, but I also feel like combat sports s&c is pretty unsophisticated or downright goofy compared to more specialized events because, well, perfectly optimized s&c isn't all that important relative to skills training.

Definitely, the skill training is a far bigger aspect of the sport, but if we're talking spherical cows here I think that given equal skill, optimizing for pure fitness MMA provides the best single-event test for general fitness, because it punishes any lack or specialization in a way that other sports don't. What you perceive as "goofy" is in my mind more like "optimized for achieving balance across multiple domains of fitness." The specialized marathon runner can use more "sophisticated" methods because he has absolutely no need to optimize for upper body strength. The rock climber has no need to worry about his legs and may actively seek to shrink them. The MMA fighter must balance everything, any lack can be exploited, while maintaining a precise weight.

More generally, it occurs to me that the word "fit" by its etymology and other meanings pretty strongly implies specificity--fit for something or other.

Sure, and that's an important consideration, Pogacar doesn't stay up at night upset about his upper body strength. But it's also obviously the case that optimizing fitness for a given activity A produces different levels of fitness for B and C; and in turn optimizing for B will produce different levels of A and B, and similarly for C to B and A. We can ask how good A practitioners are at B and C and vice versa, and call that a general level of fitness.

So hypothetically, let's say we can (for some reason) only recommend a single exercise goal to someone. A is pure cardio, training for a marathon. B is pure strength training, 1rm back squat. C is the 5 minute SFG I snatch test.

How would you describe the property of C: that it makes you better at B and A, relative to how much A makes you better at B and C or B makes you better at C and A? When you say you are suspicious of general fitness, are you saying such a property doesn't exist, that it's impossible to describe, or that it never matters to anyone? Because it does seem to me like such a property exists, that it is at least theoretically possible to describe (though easily goodhart'd by something like a Fran Time), and that it does matter to a lot of people, myself among them.

What you perceive as "goofy" is in my mind more like "optimized for achieving balance across multiple domains of fitness."

Eh, I was thinking, like, shadowboxing with dumbbells, or anything involving Bosu balls or squishy foam mats or tsunami bars, for instance, none of which I would consider simple but balanced. Though, granted, it's not like I have a video montage of top MMA guys doing that stuff.

When you say you are suspicious of general fitness, are you saying such a property doesn't exist, that it's impossible to describe, or that it never matters to anyone?

I would accept either "doesn't exist" or "is impossible to meaningfully describe" as a characterization of my views, here's my reasoning:

optimizing fitness for a given activity A produces different levels of fitness for B and C;

This is of course correct, but I think that people's actual selection of A, B, C, ..., ultimately boils down to some.combination of the following:

-"idk it just sounds cool", great, awesome, that's pretty much what it comes down to for me as well, but I don't think you can get from this to meaningful claims about generality.

-muh fizeek, to be answered by a dismissive Bronx cheer

-fighting/soldiering/moving house/farming/etc from someone who's not actually doing any of those things and has no plans to start, ditto

--fighting/soldiering/moving house/farming/etc from someone who is actually doing one of those things, but then you're just doing task-specific s&c, and it's not going to matter much in comparison to specific practice anyway.

Basically, I don't think there's a principled way to select a truly general A, B, C.

On a purely autobiographical level, I experienced noticeably better carryover to manual labor in the woods from training like a dentist with a half Ironman coming up than I did from various well-regarded "tactical" training systems. I suppose this isn't a terribly widespread experience, but then again I don't know how many people have tried both, and it certainly made me more skeptical of the idea that I had to think about some kind of balance or generality in my training for it to carry over to real-world tasks.

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I endorse all of this

t. manual laborer

I think it’s true. The types of training designed to increase aesthetic mass are quite different than those for pure strength, like powerlifting or Olympic weightlifting. That said I think a person who seriously lifts for aesthetics is still going to be a lot stronger than they would have been if they didn’t train at all.

I agree it's generally underestimated how much strength comes from the efficient, coordinated recruitment of muscles. I remember when I first started playing tennis my right arm got noticeably hypertrophied relative to the left side, probably because I was compensating for awful technique by muscling through the swing. Over time, as I improved my technique and smoothed out my kinetic chain (engaging legs and hip rotation), my right arm actually shrank down and now the asymmetry is barely noticeable. I hit much harder now than I did back then. I do think that muscle groups tend to require some training to contract in a synchronous manner that gives more power for a given muscle fiber density.

I absolutely hypothesize it's this. I'm getting older now and while I still go to the gym the numbers are much lower than they used to be, I hear my younger friends brag and I mourn the old days.

Ask me to actually do something and I smoke them.

Presumably because I have a bigger frame, more practice, and more experience actually using my muscles in manual labor.

Aren't you a doctor? How do you do manual labor?

Unrelated but should still mention: not all specialities are sedentary/radiology, it's pretty common for proceduralists to actually do a decent amount (even if its just standing on your feet >16 hours a day) with Ortho at times being legitimately physically demanding (depending on what you do in Ortho).

My specific life course is highly identifiable which is one of the reasons why I've been vague about my specialty and background here but keep in mind that things like hobbies, pre or concurrent to medicine employment and family background can give people manual labor experience without the main career being one of those things.

To quote Heinlein - “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

If you aren't moving your body on a regular basis in some productive way you are leaving behind a ton of physical and mental health gains.

I believe that your assessment is correct.

To put it in slightly different terms when you workout you are training procedural memory in addition to physical strength. Procedural memory is knowing how to do learned tasks (like riding a bicycle) without conscious awareness. If you do isolation exercises the procedural memory being trained is mostly going to be tied to that specific exercise (e.g. you will learn the form for bicep curls without having to think about each time, but that memory won’t generalize to working with heavy objects).

When you do manual labor (and to some extent compound exercises) you are also training procedural memory on balancing different parts of the body that is more generalizable to many other situations.

Yes, I think your intuition is basically correct. Neuromuscular coordination and power across a variety of tasks is likely improved by doing a variety of tasks compared to specifically training at the tasks that are moving fixed, specific shapes with predefined appropriate motions. We can see something similar to this in endurance sports, where athletes become specialized at the specific thing they do to a much greater extent than sports that are seemingly similar at a glance - you're not going to see the differences between cross-country skiers, cyclists, and marathoners just from looking at their literal muscle mass and aerobic capacity, but they're differentially efficient at their sports of choice and require less energy to accomplish the same tasks. Compare all of these linear activities to the versatile endurance of a soccer player and they'll all seem mechanistic and rigid by comparison, because that's exactly what they've trained themselves to be. Similarly, the manual laborer that needs to carry shingles up to a roof and nail them down develops a more versatile set of muscle movements than the powerlifter.


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