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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2879 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 12, 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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What is the minimum annual income could you live off of while still being happy?

Like many corporate tech drones nearing middle age, I have gotten bored with the rat race and dream of a simpler, lower stress life. I don't really consoom much anymore -- I barely play games or watch TV, and I have a massive collection of books that I've yet to get around to reading. My only expensive habits are whiskey and the very occasional cigar, but I could probably reduce my intake or go without.

Having money is pretty great, though. You can solve a lot of problems by simply throwing money at them. And expensive whiskey is nice...

It goes hand in hand with discipline and frugality, but a level of income such that relatively-unexpected expenses are not a great source of stress will significantly improve your quality of life.

Do you have enough in an HSA to cover your health and dental insurance deductibles? Do you have enough in savings to replace your washer and dryer if they conk out? Specifics will vary for different people, but the general idea stands.

I feel like the premise is false. Consumption takes a very small amount of resources.

The question real question is: would you be fine living in a low COL area with all the social isolation (moving away from family and friends) and lack of services that entails? Otherwise the question should be what amount of money for consumption do you need per year in order to be satisfied, to which the answer for me is almost nothing.

I don't work in order to be able to consume more, I work to pay for my house and as a meaning generator.

My wife and kids are my meaning generator. The low COL area is where some of my extended family lives, and it is religiously, politically, and culturally compatible. Job market is meh, but I've been working remote for years now. I should probably just take a lower-gear tech job and just ride it for a while.

Do check out mrmoneymustache (if not already) - his Start here. There are others too. As such, if you have a corpus of 33x (33 times your annual expenses), then you can be retire early or coast easily. Whichever way, you may want to.

According to the Consumer Expenditure Survey of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (size of consumer unit by income before taxes: one person: income before taxes < 15 k$/a), living on 27 k$/a is perfectly feasible.

Of course, cost of living will vary depending on location, inside (scroll down to "local standards", which are tabulated by county) or outside the US.

I bought some ethereum and bitcoin on Coinbase back when I was a teen (before either they or I kept good records), and still have it on the exchange now. I believe there is absolutely no shot of nailing down an estimate to even the year's granularity of the purchase date, so I can't just retroactively fudge the basis, either.

Is just donating it as-is to charity the cleanest way to wash my hands of this ambiguously-basis'd balance, or is that likely to somehow be even worse than just biting the bullet of a "$0.00 basis" plea?

Considering the possibility that no custodial exchange will keep my crypto unbreached all the way up through my death, just leaving it in there and banking on the free death basis step-up is a bad option, I'd think.

Wait a second. Doesn't Bitcoin have a record of every transaction ever? Couldn't you just look at the blockchain to see when you got your coins?

No, because the exchange probably didn't produce any on-chain transaction to handle my purchase orders; and even if they had, my purchase was probably batched in with thousands of others and didn't have any on-chain data indicating how much of the raw acquisition was attributable to me.

The coins were bought off-chain, on an exchange.

In the bitcoin economy as it actually exists, most transactions between people happen off-chain (across the books of an exchange, or in the Lightning Network), and most on-chain transactions are people moving money from one hand to another (exchange deposits and withdrawals, opening and closing Lightning channels, transfers to and from cold wallets).

The easiest way to think about it is that Bitcoin replaces gold bullion, not money. Moving bullion out of the vault it is stored in is exceptional - most transactions happen by exchange of warehouse receipts.

Bitcoin went up 500x in the last ten years. Are you worried about getting taxed on 100% of its value instead of (the right and proper) 99.8%, or am I missing something about how it works?

I'd gladly accept a pile of crypto and give you whatever reimbursement doesn't cause you tax concerns.

I will jump in on the “I’ll take this problem off your hands” idea.

Is your concern here just taxes? If so just sell it and make a reasonable guess as to the basis, file the taxes, stick the money in an investment account, and give it a year or two to see if the agency wants their money. Or just do the zero basis thing and pay full taxes. Either option results in you coming out better than nothing.

I'll take them off your hands if you're just giving them away.

If it was long enough ago that you can't even estimate the year, a $0.00 basis is going to be pretty close to accurate anyway. Charity is a good approach if you don't want to deal with it and do want to make similarly-sized charitable contributions though.

If the U.S. puts a woman on some paper money, who should it be? I would vote for Laura Ingalls Wilder.

@hydroacetylene suggested Bessie Coleman, which prompted some "literally who" responses. I never heard of her myself. Looking her up, I'm assuming she's a Texas regional thing, like Juneteenth. Of course, like Juneteenth, the feds could be happy to use a Texas regional thing nationwide if it pleases the correct demographics.

@sarker suggested Louisa May Alcott.

@erwgv3g34 suggested Amelia Earhart.

Ayn Rand would be funny but not a realistic one.

I think there was a suggestion for Harriet Tubman years ago. I think a gun toting Republican woman of color would please and enrage enough people that it would be a nice compromise.

Amelia Earhart is a very good suggestion. I think my criteria would be pre-1950, not a DEI exaggeration of her accomplishments, non-political, not the wife of a more famous man as that’s a bit demeaning. Earhart has a nice feminist aspect, with bravery and technical competence. I would nominate these:

Laura Ingalls Wilder as kind of a stand-in for the bravery and hard work of women on the frontier, as well as their literary contributions.

Lilian Gish representing women in entertainment/Hollywood. Though maybe her involvement in Birth of a Nation disqualifies her. However, importantly Gish was gorgeous, and would make for beautiful money.

Emily Dickinson representing women’s contribution to literature, especially poetry.

Maybe Grandma Moses?

My issue is all of these feel sort of DEI. Why Earhart and not Lindbergh? Why Dickinson and not Whitman? Why Gish and not Chaplin? I guess Wilder would be my top choice followed by Gish, but more as emblematic of women on the frontier than her specifically.

Amelia Earhart is a very good suggestion. I think my criteria would be pre-1950, not a DEI exaggeration

Earhart's achievements were exaggerated by the 1st-wave feminists of the time for DEI reasons, and continue to be. Dalrock brought receipts

Your list makes me consider Hedy Lamarr. Her achievements as an engineer are somewhat exaggerated for DEI reasons (the US navy didn't take her work on frequency hopping forward at the time, and the people who developed CDMA probably weren't aware of it) but her achievements as an actress are not.

achievements as an actress

What's next, achievements as a prostitute?

Find some mother of ten kids, all or most of which turned out well, who worked herself to the bones all her life long in order to support the family. Make sure she was married to an industrious and law-abiding husband all the while.

Put that on money, and watch the feminists squirm while actual women living real lives get some representation.

Dr. Jill Biden, 46th POTUS.

Edith Wilson got there first.

The reverse side should have the picture of the autopen.

Emily Dickinson

If the U.S. puts a woman on some paper money, who should it be?

The statue of liberty

If there still hasn't been a female President 10 years after Nancy Pelosi dies, then this question will have an easy answer. She is by far the most significant female political leader in the US to date.

Right now, I don't see any advance on Susan B Anthony, who was on the 1979 dollar coin for a good reason. She was also a leading candidate when the Obama administration wanted to replace Hamilton and/or Jackson with women.

It's a good thing we put at very few politicians on British banknotes - the row when feminists decide we need a woman and the only serious candidate is Margaret Thatcher would destroy confidence in the currency.

It's a good thing we put at very few politicians on British banknotes - the row when feminists decide we need a woman and the only serious candidate is Margaret Thatcher would destroy confidence in the currency.

I'm not sure why they chose Jane Austen instead of Florence Nightingale. The woman who invented modern nursing vs a woman who wrote six books about thinly veiled author inserts finding rich husbands. My guess is that the civil servants who decide are more likely to be English Lit graduates than nurses.

They change the portraits roughly every 20 years - Florence Nightingale was on the £10 from 1975-1994, making her the first woman to appear on British money who was neither the Queen nor Britannia.

I stand corrected. I wonder who's next. Hopefully not Mary Seacole.

I would favour Rosalind Franklin. Agatha Christie is the other obvious candidate.

I don't think anyone knows what Ada Lovelace looked like, and her achievements are overrated anyway. J K Rowling is still alive, which rules her out. Enid Blyton is too politically incorrect to be a serious candidate. Emmeline Pankhurst hasn't been on a banknote, and if she counts as a politician she probably won't be - Churchill is the only politician featured to date.

She is by far the most significant female political leader in the US to date.

I'd say Eleanor Roosevelt, depending on the definition of "political leader", for her work on UDHR, which has had humongous effect on global politics and ideology ever since its declaration.

Harriet Beecher Stowe. Or Sacagawea.

Maybe add Sally Hemings to the $2 alongside Thomas Jefferson?

LOL Ayn Rand would be hilarious. Would love to see that.

Laura Ingalls Wilder would be amazing. I basically grew up with her Little House book series (the first proper novel sized book I ever read was her Little House in the Big Woods). A few years ago I read the recently published Pioneer Girl which I'd strongly recommend to anyone who wants to get a good idea of what it was like living in the then desolate American Midwest in the 1870s.

I even spent a fair amount of time cataloging her family tree and learning about them from other sources on the internet. For instance Charles Ingalls was a Freemason, which was of course good to see. I'd have liked to have had the chance to meet some of her descendants today but unfortunately the whole line has died out, even including her sisters' descendants.

Abiah Folger, Benjamin Franklin’s mother. She had ten children.

To be clear, if I was dictator of the US, and I decided not to do a maximum troll answer(let’s have $5 bills assigned to have Margaret Sanger or Phyllis Schafly at random…), I’d probably do Elizabeth Ann Seton and send the first run as bonuses to schoolteachers.

Bessie Coleman simply seems like an answer that makes everyone happy.

I'm starting to think you're Coleman's descendant.

I’m not black, but it’s difficult to use her for political shitflinging and pilots licenses seem worth celebrating so no one will mind overcelebrating the black woman- and her being a black woman makes the ‘we need a literally who’ crowd happy.

Molly Pitcher

I would vote for Laura Ingalls Wilder.

She was canceled a while ago.

NPR:

A division of the American Library Association voted unanimously Saturday to strip Laura Ingalls Wilder's name from a major children's literature award over concerns about how the author referred to Native Americans and blacks.

In 1935's Little House on the Prairie, for example, Wilder described one setting as a place where "there were no people. Only Indians lived there." That description was changed in later editions of the book. And multiple characters in the Little House series intone that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian."

National Review:

Most news stories covering the travesty of renaming the Wilder medal have cited the earliest known objection to Wilder’s representation of the Kansas landscape in Little House on the Prairie (1935) as empty of people. “There the wild animals wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much farther than a man could see, and there were no settlers. Only Indians lived there.” Until 1953, the text read, “there were no people. Only Indians lived there.” A reader complained in 1952 to Nordstrom. Her response to the reader clearly reflected her horrified shock at the realization of how the passage read. “I must admit to you that no one here realized that these words read as they did. Reading them now it seems unbelievable to me that you are the only person who has picked them up and written us about them in the twenty years since the book was published.” The letter emphasized the response of everyone at Harpers & Row: “We were disturbed by your letter. We knew that Mrs. Wilder had not meant to imply that Indians were not people.” Indeed, Wilder responded just as Nordstrom predicted. “Your letter came this morning,” Wilder wrote on October 4, 1952. “You are perfectly right about the fault in Little House on the Prairie and have my permission to make the correction as you suggest. It was a stupid blunder of mine. Of course Indians are people and I did not intend to imply they were not.”

Can someone please steel-man the American system of making individual citizens responsible for filing their taxes in a hopelessly complex tax code, then punishing them for making mistakes? From where I stand, it all just feels like racketeering by H&R Block et al. to extort fees year after year.

From where I stand, it all just feels like racketeering by H&R Block et al. to extort fees year after year.

Now that's mostly the case, but the roots of this system were actually in minimizing governmental intrusion into private life. In order to calculate your taxes for you, the government has to be aware of a lot of things you are doing. Now, you would say this is true anyway, and you'd be right. But the way the system was designed initially, that wasn't the case - the government was supposed to know what you report to them, and no more. That, of course, went out of the window long ago, but the system remained. Thus the idiotic situation where the government has all the data about you and your business (unless you take special steps to hide it, which are mostly illegal by now) but they are now allowed to use this data to calculate your taxes, so you have to do it by yourself. Then they will be allowed to use the same data to catch you if you're cheating. For me, as a software developer often dealing with, by now, decades-old code, this is a common situation - the system started with one set of assumptions in mind, they changed, but rebuilding the whole system from scratch is too inconvenient, so now everything works in weirdest ways that make no sense anymore.

The government shouldn't have any idea how you spend your money, but wants to incentivize certain spending. The only way that can be reported is with a citizen provided form. That's the original reason.

Do the filing prep firms lobby to keep it that way, long after the government collects a lot of this information elsewhere. Absolutely.

From a revenue maximizing perspective: It's essentially the same as using coupons and discounts for price discrimination at a grocery store. You capture additional transactions from customers willing to put in the work/inconvenience of shopping from the discount rack or using coupons, and broadly speaking these are mostly transactions that otherwise wouldn't have occurred because those customers would not have been getting enough consumer surplus from the transaction at the original price. You offer different prices to people with different willingness to pay by placing slight inconveniences in the way, people who really want to pay less will go through the inconveniences while people who don't care about paying more won't. With taxes, people who really don't want to pay those taxes (or people sufficiently sophisticated that their objections to having to pay those taxes would actually matter to the system) avoid paying those taxes in various ways, through complex deductions and schemes to funnel money one way or the other. People who don't really care about their tax bill (or people who are low-class enough that their complaints won't matter to anyone but their bartender) just pay the taxes because they don't care enough to figure out all the ways to avoid them.

From a freedom maximizing perspective: At the time it was put in place, this method minimized the degree to which the IRS surveilled individual Americans. This is mostly negligible today, when privacy has been so thoroughly compromised under law and custom that it feels irrelevant. But at the time this was an important consideration.

Intertia: But mostly, I think the best steelman is that changing the system would have unpredictable effects on the economy. Between two thirds and three quarters of Americans get a tax refund. The average refund (I couldn't find the median where I looked) is around $3,000. This is essentially a forced savings program by the IRS, in which Americans are forced to save a small amount from each paycheck and then given the money back in a lump sum later. This might have systemically important functions at this point which lead to significant switching costs nationally. For example, it's pretty well known that the best time to sell a cheap used car is around tax refund season, as lots of poor people who otherwise spend as fast as they get it suddenly have a pile of cash and need a car. People also often spend that money on home repairs or security deposits to move houses. Though they also often, of course, blow it on vacations or poor decisions. While the system that leads to a tax refund might be inefficient in and of itself, at this point if we got rid of this system we don't know what impact it might have. Poor people might stop being able to buy used cars, as they go back to saving nothing. Cheap flights to Florida from northern cities might dry up as middle class folks stop getting a tax return in the colder months and eyeing up tickets. Plus, regardless of the total taxes paid, once you get rid of the refund, people won't notice the extra few bucks every week, but they will notice the lack of a big lump sum every year, and will feel worse about it. The tax filing system is a way to trick children into feeling like they're paying less.

Intertia: But mostly, I think the best steelman is that changing the system would have unpredictable effects on the economy. Between two thirds and three quarters of Americans get a tax refund. The average refund (I couldn't find the median where I looked) is around $3,000. This is essentially a forced savings program by the IRS, in which Americans are forced to save a small amount from each paycheck and then given the money back in a lump sum later. This might have systemically important functions at this point which lead to significant switching costs nationally

I am going to reply to this post but I wonder if you people have some misapprehension what it is like in countries with pre-filled forms.

In countries where the tax authority pre-fills your forms, they still have tax refunds if employer withheld too much (and back taxes, if your income changed in other direction). You still get a document that shows how much money the state collected from you and what is your confirmed final tax. You usually get clear instructions when and how you can get credits/deductibles and what to change in your form to claim then.

Only difference that there is no need to pay for a 3rd party software do the latter part.

How do those countries handle cases of "odd jobs" and stuff like that? If you're a farmer that makes money by, I dunno, selling grain, how does the government know how much was sold? Or if you sell goods/services direct to consumers? I suppose the tip income is somewhat US-specific and doesn't matter quite as much any more, but there are a bunch of less-easily-trackable income sources that would seem to make this a bit hard in the general case.

How do those countries handle cases of "odd jobs" and stuff like that? If you're a farmer that makes money by, I dunno, selling grain, how does the government know how much was sold? Or if you sell goods/services direct to consumers?

A farmer already has a business, so those would be handled the same way as any other business transactions. Selling small scale goods / services requires reporting the income if it exceeds a small threshold, but that's still fairly easy and can be done online. If it's more substantial, you may want to start a business. There are also services for people who do occasionally freelancing gigs that charge a small percentage fee to act as their official employers, so the client doesn't have to deal with paperwork and the person doesn't have to deal with the extra complexity of starting up a business.

I have zero real interface to farming and consumer-facing business, but I think if your income comes from selling stuff to people and not payroll, you are then taxed like a small business, and most entrepreneurs pay for accountant services handle that shit. I know that "farmers markets" type of businesses have lessened reporting requirements as long as their business is small-scale.

tip income: no idea how it would be handled when it does not go through cash register.

Any other variable income (say, bonuses of salaried employee) is easier but inexact. Every year the tax authority sets a preliminary withholding rate based on your previous reported income and rate (which they obviously know of), and you have a chance to correct their estimate. If you have same employer, employer is informed directly and you have to do nothing if you agree with the estimate. Your employer withholds accordingly, reports the amount withheld to government and you, at end of tax year authority calculates true total reported income and sends you the pre-filled form. Standard deductions are automatically applied, you tick a box and report a number if you think they missed something. If your income income is super variable, withholding rate was probably not correct, and you usually get a refund or back taxes. (People usually set their rate same so that they get refunds.) If you are doing odd jobs as hourly paid wage labor or you as a salaried employee switch jobs, you provide your taxation information to every new employer.

In case of Russia, they don't. That's why they introduced a new "self-employed" status a few years ago with much lower taxes on income to incentivize people to report their cake baking and pipe fixing and dunce tutoring. (It's different with the farmers since they don't really sell grain to individuals and mill that buy it from them provide the record of buying it.) But the self-employed are small fish and it's not worth it to personally hunt down every single one of them.

The next set of carrot and stick that will be used to ensure compliance is probably government-run crypto. It's easy to inject it into the economy: social security of every kind. All transactions using them will be 100% transparent to the government.

dunce tutoring

I assume this is a typo for "dance", but I find it rather amusing.

ETA: This dumb brought to you by not being fully awake.

No, it seems pretty clear ESOL for teaching kids that don’t live up to their potential- despite how low that potential is.

A 'dunce' is an idiot or a slow learner. See also the 'dunce's cap' which was used to shame and humiliate children who were disruptive or did not learn.

It's not a typo.

You know, you're right I didn't know that.

But there is a significant difference. On a quick look, only between 15% and 35% of taxpayers in UK, France, Germany get a tax refund at the end of the year. So it's a pretty large difference in scale.

Some Benefits:

  1. People can be guilty of two crimes when they don't pay taxes: not paying the taxes, and lying about the amount of taxes owed. Which also makes it easier to catch criminals who are making lots of money illegally. (Al Capone Argument)
  2. Its only hard to pay taxes if you are trying to maximize the amount you are not paying. You can very easily give the maximum amount you suspect you owe, and if you are wrong the government will send you a reimbursement for taxes you overpaid. (Kennedy, do your part argument)
  3. Special interests can be given special and hard to follow exemptions that are only meant for them, and require a bunch of hoops to claim. You can then write off those estimated tax costs as something you did for the consumer while not having those full costs get reflected in the actual budget. (Cynical jack ass argument)

There are more special interests that benefit from complex tax systems than just H&R block.

I think he was referring to a system they have in places like Sweden, where if you're a normal W-2 employee the government would look at your W-2 income and take the standard deductions and do all the stuff that they will correct anyway if you did it differently and didn't get the maximum refund. The first time you claim a child they could keep track of the age and take the deduction every year until 18. If you wanted to take more deductions than they were offering, then you'd file your own return. But most people wouldn't have the need to do that. The predatory thing comes with H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt opening up places in the 'hood where they'll offer to do poor people's taxes so they can charge a percentage of the EITC they recover.

I don't know how it is in Sweden, but in the US I am not a big entrepreneur but I have to take into account, beyond my salary:

  • Freelancing income - plus expenses, plus SEP IRA linked to that income
  • Income from bank deposits
  • Income from stock (is taxed differently from above and has a myriad rules like short/long term, wash sales, etc.)
  • HSA
  • IRA
  • Local tax deductions
  • Mortgage deductions
  • Charity deductions

It became a bit simpler recently when standard deduction had been raised so most of these deductions aren't worth itemizing anymore, but before that I had to deal with it all. Obviously my workplace has no idea about any of it and can't deal with it. Some of them (like taxing income from bank deposits) can be done by the banks, but other stuff can only be properly calculated by somebody having the full picture, i.e. the IRS. Oh yes, and for many of those the actual tax level depends on my income. And not just plain income, but modified adjusted income (real term) - to calculate which you need to check a couple of dozens of rules on which parts are "modified" and which are "adjusted", and all of it depends on all of everything else, pretty much.

And it's not pocket change either - if it's not done right, the difference can easily be hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars even for mid-tier income like mine. IRS could calculate it all (well, except state taxes which is different rules in every single one of them) - but nobody else, realistically, could do it without me giving them all the data and them recreating what IRS has from scratch. Which is what H&R, Intuit and such are charging the money for.

And to be clear here - my taxes are very simple, comparatively. People have massively more complicated tax situations that I do. I'm still in the DIY zone, people with more complex taxes just hire somebody to do it for them, because there's no way a layman can figure it out.

Bank reports mortgage, interest paid on deposits, mutual fund trades and such directly. Reporting stocks can require more manual work depending on broker / exchange. Arrangements exactly like HSA and IRA don't exist here, but if they did, I presume the service provider would report the details to tax authority.

National tax authority keeps track of applicable local tax code arrangements, but I suppose it must more complicated in a true federal state like the US.

I presume freelancing income, other expenses and stuff like charitable donations you have to declare yourself everywhere.

nobody else, realistically, could do it without me giving them all the data and them recreating what IRS has from scratch. Which is what H&R, Intuit and such are charging the money for.

So why citizen needs to recreate the IRS calculation to submit the paperwork?

I addressed this in another comment - because when the system had been initially created, IRS wasn't supposed to have most of the information - at least not routinely, they could get a court order or such if they have reasonable suspicion you're cheating, but otherwise they wouldn't have the full picture. Since then, a lot changed, and now pretty much everything is reported to the IRS. But the system is still arranged as if IRS doesn't have the full picture, even though it does, and since now there are massive companies built essentially on tracking what IRS has and re-implementing it in a user-friendly way - and the IRS itself does not implement any user-facing interface to it - we have barriers to change. IRS would have to budget some investment (not large on the scale of federal government, but not insignificant in absolute numbers, probably tens of millions of dollars at least, maybe more) to implement a user-facing system that could be efficiently used by taxpayers, and the incumbents would lobby very hard against it, claiming this already exists as a private solution (which is true) and the feds squeezing out private business is unacceptable (which is usually true in general, but in this particular case is not, but they can make it look true).

Can someone please steel-man the American system of making individual citizens responsible for filing their taxes

MODE OF STEEL ON

In a free democratic republic, citizens should be aware about the true cost of state, and if they think it is too high, they should organize and vote for smaller and leaner government.

MODE OF STEEL OFF

Yea, it looks, walks and talks like mob extortion, but, unlike most parts of the system, can be steel manned. Not that it was ever deliberately designed for this reason.

So, what are you reading?

I'm still on The Eternal Dissident.

Finished Merchanter’s Luck. Excellent, vintage sci-fi. I’d rate it quite highly for elegantly sketched characters, understated but effective worldbuilding, and economy of prose. These are enough to turn a borderline cliche premise into an immersive one. Unabashedly genre fiction without straying into pulp.

Next up is Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, a period Victorian gay heist novel and/or comedy of manners. While I don’t normally enjoy such a hateful protagonist, I’m quite liking the book so far. Unfortunately, the previous owner of my copy underlined random bits and occasionally added margin notes.

The Oxford Handbook of Psychiatry, 4th edition:

The authors have made the bold artistic choice to employ what I call "narrative whiplash" as their primary technique. Patient vignettes follow a strict three-act structure: Act One (character introduction), Act Two (literally any psychiatric condition), Act Three (death/insanity/miraculous recovery). This eliminates any tedious middle section where character development might occur. It's rather like if War and Peace were rewritten as a series of Twitter threads, except instead of 280 characters you get exactly three sentences before Pierre either achieves enlightenment or develops catatonia.

Then again, the pacing might well be a stroke of genius when you consider the target audience: exhausted junior doctors who need to absorb maximum psychiatric knowledge while standing in a hospital corridor at 3 AM. Who has time for denouement? The patients certainly don't seem to.

The real mystery is why Oxford's handbook writers haven't applied this technique to other fields. Imagine: "A 67-year-old man presents with chest pain. He has a heart. He does not have a heart. The end."

(I don't actually think there any patient vignettes in it, it's too no-nonsense for that stuff)

I have previously complained that Fish's Clinical Psychopathology has very little to do with fish, nor was it written by one. A missed opportunity, I'd like to know what the SSRIs and cocaine in the water do for salmon facing the awareness of their inevitable mortality.

Verdict: False advertising, so I won't even read it.

Then there's Making Sense of the ICD-11. It always sets certain bells ringing when a book requires another to make sense of it. I hope the authors of 11 know that it should have just been a trilogy. The DSM guys are at least more restrained about milking the franchise (galactorrhea due to hyperprolactinemia).

The main takeaway, at least for me, is that the real mental illness was the classification systems we made along the way.

Ya'll don't have review books over there?

Dang.

Also medical classification systems are great. Fight me bro.

Something like:

V9135XA: Hit or struck by a falling object due to an accident in a canoe or kayak

I'm sure is a lot of fun to marvel at, but working with this system practically might be challenging... "So you say you were struck in the head by a falling object, my first medical question would be - were you per chance in a kayak at the time? How about a canoe?"

Comedy value on point though.

Review books? Do you mean like targeted USMLE prep books and their equivalent?

Never heard of any for the MRCPsych, and I just looked on Google with no luck. There are some for other specialties, I can see results for the MRCP (no pancreas involved, usually), but apparently psychiatry residents get the shaft.

What most people do is sign up to a repository of notes and MCQs. I opted for one known as SPMM. In a way, the notes are a book, one that condenses a ton of scattered bullshit into something the mere human mind can grasp. Unfortunately, the overall quality leaves something to be desired, the study material I had for prior exams was better (clarity, content, presentation), but the more niche the exam the fewer people willing to spend money I guess.

Honesty, I'm done with like 75% of the coaching material, with just about a month to go. The problem is that psychiatry, when flattened into a series of bullet points for an exam, becomes uniquely soul-crushing.

In contrast, the other exams I've discussed actually require a bit of critical thinking. I didn't appreciate it at the time, but I do now.

I just find it hard to make all that information stick when it's so boring, and I do not relish the necessary revision ahead. Spaced repetition sounds great until you're actually doing it.

I attempted to channel my procrastination into going through some of the Royal College's suggested reading, and as you can see, I'm regretting it. The notes make them mostly redundant anyway. ChatGPT in combination makes them entirely so.

Also medical classification systems are great. Fight me bro.

I cast F60.2

Wait, that's deprecated. Uh.. 6D10.1? Plus 6D11.3? For fuck's sake, in the most recent exams, they expect us to memorize ICD-11 and DSM-5 criteria, and the changes from ICD-10. When we still use 10 for all of our actual work and coding, with no plan to change before the current crop of consultants die of old age. And we don't even use the DSM, at least where I can see it. Is it there in our syllabus solely so we don't feel too embarrassed to attend American conferences? God knows.

You can see why this gives me a headache, though I will admit that classification systems are useful.

What about Anki decks for your boards?

Yeah F codes are a little silly at times cough cough struck by orca but automated tools help make them less of a pain in the ass.

The DSM is great though for kludging a million random phenomena into something that can be actually communicated between humans.

I haven't run into an any Anki decks specifically designed for this till date. I've made a few of my own, and I intend to go through them eventually.

The Oxford Handbook of Psychiatry, 4th edition

An interesting read, as long as it's not compulsory. I find it interesting that it has a new section 'to reflect changing cultural attitudes around gender dysphoria' but once you get into the more usual boring disorders it will tell you the gender incidence and relative ratio with bracing honesty.

Pathological fire-setting/pyromania: Multiple episodes of deliberate, purposeful fire-setting, leading to property damage, legal consequences, and injury or loss of life. Rare in children; more common in male adolescents, particularly those with poor social skills and learning difficulties

Kleptomania: Failure to resist impulses to steal items that are not needed for their personal use or monetary value. Usually women, mean age 36yrs, mean duration of illness 16yrs (often childhood onset). ~5% of stealing in the United States (USA).

I finished my reread of Vineland. It is roughly as I remembered it: something of a mess with not-fully-fleshed-out ideas and plotlines going all over the place, but perhaps the strongest attempt by Pynchon to write some real characters instead of his usual 1D cartoon characters. It feels like a braindump to get rid of a bunch of quarter-baked ideas that were clogging up his head so he could get down to writing Mason & Dixon and Against the Day.

Interesting. After discovering that One Battle After Another was based on Vineland, I've wanted to read it to get a feel for the source material, all the more so since I made my way through Gravity's Rainbow and well remember the sense of,"what in the actual fuck did I just read," stupefied awe that I felt afterwards. I kinda want to read it both less and more at the same time after that description!

I made my way through Gravity's Rainbow

You're a stronger man than me. I thought "what in the actual fuck did I just read" and closed the book about five pages in.

Die Staufer: Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Kaisergeschlechts, by Johannes Lehmann.

It's a historical work about the medieval house of Hohenstaufen, and especially about the emperors, with Friedrich I., known as Barbarossa, serving as the headliner. It's pop-sci, but very dry, just the way I like it. Tries to draw from as many different sources as possible, compares them dispassionately, usually shrugs and admits that there's no way to know for sure, and then goes on to recount the history of those rulers in a workmanlike fashion. It's unexciting, calm and goes for accuracy instead of shock value. Thus my teutonic heart gets all warm and fuzzy. What a comfy read.

Also, my wife pulled it out of a book stop, so it didn't cost me anything.

So many German books on the Hohenstaufen I will never be able to read... Oh well, I don't really need to, considering that Kantorowicz's Frederick II is an entirely true and accurate portrayal of just how great he was.

The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton. It's the book which is widely credited with inventing YA fiction, for better and for worse. An easy read which I know I'll never read again, and probably the best book written by a 17-year-old girl I've ever read. The name on the protagonist's birth cert is "Ponyboy"; now there's another reference I understand, RIP.

One of those movies where the casting director should have been given a raise or something.

"Poetic Woods" by Anne Blockley (2023), hardcover version. I like it! Well bound, lots of paintings of slightly abstract forests.

I'm really locking into Infinite Jest, a work of unrealistic genius and prescience, so good that I don't even know what to say about it.

On audiobook I finished Two Weeks, Eight Seconds which was exactly what I wanted at the time that I wanted it. A perfect sports book.

In between I've been reading the Fort Bragg Cartel about drug running in the specops world in the South. It's good, but the author is just such a weenie. I'm antiwar as they come, but the book is so preachy about it when it is irrelevant to the action in the book.

Infinite Jest is nearing the top of my to-reread list. I first read it in 2012 or so. I thought it was great and want to see if holds up.

I remember the worst parts being the terminally unfunny bits that drag on and on and on. There are some "jokes" that weren't funny to start with and certainly didn't get better with repetition.

When you're done, you need to immediately re-read pages 1-17. Then there is an interpretation of "what really happened" written by Aaron Swartz that is worth reading, although it has drawn some criticism.

the Fort Bragg Cartel

My buddy (who has periodically contemplated trying out for the 19th SFG and could probably hack it) put me on to this. It's entertaining, but if I had to take a drink every time the author delivers what is supposed to be harsh criticism of Delta or ST6 that actually makes them sound absolutely fucking rad, I would have passed out in a state of advanced intoxication a quarter of the way through.

I wonder if that would improve or ruin my use of the book as my "read a bit before bed" book, the whiskey might cause me to pass out faster by that ruleset, but the hangover would be killer.

I think any profiler should start from a place of sympathy with their subject, even if it is ultimately a hit piece, the story will hit harder if you start by looking at them as a hero. Even a biography of Stalin or Mao is better if you start by looking at them as on Campbell's Hero's Journey and then show them going off the rails, show them becoming a villain. If you start out hating them, it kind of undermines the story. The closest he gets is the kind of standard shitlib "oh he was kind of sad and pathetic and poor before he joined the army" thing.

Particularly I guffawed when he described Delta Force selection ending with a "40 miles ruck that would turn a normal man's ligaments into gelatin." Which, I'm sure I wouldn't pass half the stuff they have to do there, and I'm sure it would suck, but 40 miles isn't gonna kill you. But the guy just clearly doesn't do anything.

Lol, I read it more as addressed to an audience that's never done anything than as by an author that's never done anything, but you may well be right. Separately, the accounts I've read of Delta selection (e.g. Haney's Inside Delta Force) make it pretty clear that the challenge comes more from navigation, elevation gain, bushwhacking (using the road is an auto fail), and beating the time cutoffs than from merely covering ground as such.

I've heard Infinite Jest is quite the doorstopper. Are you finding it difficult to read?

I did not enjoy Infinite Jest. The author is a gifted wordcel: he has nothing worthwhile to say, but he is very good at saying it. It's just Reddit philosophy, dressed well.

When I read it around age 17 (circa 2002), I found it really invigorating. I got a kick out of the detailed detours (especially the footnotes) and it struck me as novel and true. I reread it 2-3 years ago and it was a bit of a slog (though I still finished it--I just wasn't excited each time I picked it up). Sometimes you have to be in the right place in life for a book to speak to you, and sometimes you've already seen the tricks that make a book notable that the charm wears off.

I no longer feel compelled to continue reading books that don't hold my interest though. Give it 100 pages. It should be clear at that point if it currently resonates with you.

The worst parts of Infinite Jest are:

  • The use of footnotes endnotes
  • The fact that it's considered so pretentious to have read it that it's now just a punch line that nobody takes seriously

Still haven't met a single person IRL who's finished it. Bummer.

Footnotes would be fine. What makes IJ obnoxious is that it has extensive endnotes such that you are constantly flipping to the back of the book. Or have they fixed this in newer editions now that Wallace isnt alive to stand in their way?

Anyway, if you guys enjoy IJ, I would consider Solenoid to be an absolute must-read.

Sorry, you're correct, it's endnotes. It makes the Kindle edition of the book really the only readable one. I'm curious if DFW was sending a message of contempt to his readers with the approach. A lot of artists hate the people who consume what they create. I've specifically isolated myself from reading his interviews etc. because I suspect it may have been the case here.

@FtttG

This is my third or fourth attempt to read this book. In the past, I've gotten a few hundred pages deep only to fizzle out as it didn't go anywhere in particular. It's incredibly difficult to read, not so much because of the footnotes or the pure length as because of the structure of the story.

I'd previously enjoyed DFW's shorter work, and to some extent I think Infinite Jest is just a really large short story collection that links together in intricate ways to produce a bigger work. A lot of the chapters, or sub-chapter units of the book, really constitute stories or vignettes or essays of their own, and their significance to any broader plot (indeed the existence of any broader plot) only becomes significant later. DFW's brilliance in writing essays and short stories gives you these really gripping moments throughout that seem to have nothing to do with the entire rest of the story. DFW also uses very non-linear storytelling, with a confusing in world neologism for years, to obfuscate what you are seeing and when.

Then you have the overall setting, which is sort of semi-sci-fi magical realist near future-past in a way that's incredibly difficult to find your bearings in. When I read Tolstoy, I know what the rules of the universe are because they are the rules of my universe. When I read Asimov or Tolkien, I can quickly grok the rules of the universe because they're very different from the rules of our universe in specific fairly well explained ways. Infinite Jest's universe is different in confusing and non-specific ways, and it's not clear when narrators are unreliable or taking the piss, or when we're supposed to take things seriously. At times DFW chooses to be brutally realistic, at times absurdly fantastical, nearly always pessimistic in outlook.

It's also disgusting, viscerally disgusting in a way that only a writer as talented mechanically as DFW can be. Everyone is asymmetrical, everyone is disgusting, bodily acts are described in extensive detail, rape abuse illness and addiction are commonplace, deformity is everywhere. It's just how the book is, but there are significant sections that are just viscerally unpleasant.

Finally, I think the book has gotten a lot harder since its publication, in that it represented a fork from the past around the publication date. For my partner in my book club, who was a teenager when it was published and read it for the first time when she was in art school in the early 2000s, there are a lot of references or just moods that make more sense to her than they do to me, ten years her junior. It's very like Stranger in a Strange Land in that way, a retro-futuristic work that projects the current mores and world forward. In your mind you have to back up to 1995, then fast forward to a world where some technologies never develop and others hyper-develop.

That said, my foolproof method for reading difficult books is to just keep swimming. This developed when reading the great Russians, in that way that Americans typically get confused by the use of first name or surname or patronymic or title or affectionate diminutive to refer to the same character, I used to get stuck trying to figure out who exactly was who in Anna Karennina then I decided one day that I should just keep reading and I'd figure that out later, and that worked. I approach everything confusing in DFW the same way, I just keep reading and I figure it out later. I think this is what @Rov_Scam is getting at, knowing that it's an important book he keeps trying to read it while understanding everything said but it's impossible to understand everything so he can't read it; his brother just read it without worrying about understanding everything and was fine.

The other aid getting me through this reading is my book club, in which I meet up with a pretty lady every few hundred pages and we discuss the book and its themes and broader philosophical topics over drinks. And this creates accountability in that as a man I can't let a pretty woman mog me at something, and also makes the book easier in that discussion helps explain things. Marx's famously dense Kapital was originally published in France serially in socialist newspapers for workers to read in clubs, they wouldn't (probably couldn't) understand such a book on their own, but in a group it becomes comprehensible. The lack of reading groups is one of the unfortunate consequences of our world today.

It's truly a work of rarely-reached genius, a fitting heir to the western literary canon (though in my mind the canon truly ends with Joyce). It's highly prescient philosophically, it has a lot to say about modern concerns on AI. Though I also kind of think the whole book is just about internet porn. Everyone on this forum should put in the work to read it, it's worth it, but I can also see how its cultural impact is mostly negative rather than directly influential.

I do wonder if Parker and Stone were influenced by Infinite Jest when they wrote South Park, though.

I completely understand your experience regarding the Russians. In any given domestic situation, the same character is given four different names, and none of these are what his coworkers call him.

What really used to get me were the diminutives, which are not intuitive to an English speaker. Ilya doesn't naturally turn Ilushka in my mind.

Yes, Mr. Ivanov, Alexander Ivanovich, Alexander, Alex, Sasha, Sanya, Shura, Shurik, Ivanych, etc. are all the same person, depending on context. And using the wrong one in a wrong context may be a major social faux pas too. Unless you grew up with it, it can be a bit tricky to guess, especially that some diminutives have very little obvious connection to the full name, and some of them are also non-unique. You just have to know it.

It's my favorite book but it can be Work.

I am shocked at how it only seems to become more prescient as I age.*

*and disturbed.

Recommend me any outside the box interpretations I can bring to book club to look smart l.

Now the secret is that I haven't actually reread it in nearly 20 years. But it was "sticky" (and formative given my age when I read it).

It's okay to love something and not be obsessed with it. It's also okay to keep bouncing off of it even if you love it - stop when you feel you've got enough.

That's maybe one of the lessons of the book haha.

My experience of the discourse of the book is course then out of date.

I can't say anything about Parker and Stone, but the creators of The Office (US) were big DFW fans and wrote in a lot of references to his work.

MY brother is unpretentious and got into Wallace after I showed him the essay about the cruise ship that we both quote relentlessly. On year at the beach he read Infinite Jest because he wanted to read Wallace. He not only finished it, he's reread it several times. I think part of it is that none of his friends even know who Wallace is so he came into it as a book written by a writer he found funny (we both have an excessively dry sense of humor) and not as something he felt obligated to read. I started it years ago but with my own knowledge of the book's import I found it impossible to continue, even though my brother insists that it's right up my alley.

Another interesting part is that it rewards reading it twice. I didn't have the time to commit to it but yeah.

I don't think you have to read it but I did hit a bump in it part way through, fought through it, and then was glad I did.

Loved the cruise ship essay too. One of many reasons I haven't done one

Just cracked open Verner Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. The hook was he has fun insights on how a civilization deals with software that's thousands of years old.

How does a civilization deal with software that's thousands of years old?

I don't know! I just started it!

Clever strategy, but it'll only work for the first sprint or two

Working Class (SC Marva Collins Book 2) by Nathan Lowell.

what is the philosophical origin of "no consensus-building"? This rule describes exactly what I want out of an intellectual community but this community is the first place I've seen it put this way in a really clear and succinct way. I'm curious where it comes from. I know very little of the rationalist etc. lore, but I'm also curious about what philosophy writing it could come from, which I could imagine being Isaiah Berlin pluralism etc. but possibly others?

It is poorly worded rule. You are totally allowed to build consensus by convincing and persuading people. You are not allowed to assume already existing consensus on a topic. I am not sure that it is philosophical, but mostly practical. Posts that starts with - "We all agree that" usually are not very productive, not consistent and show that the poster has rarely faced any intellectual adversity and mostly has been in circlejerk places.

Well, your interpretation is the one I personally hold, so maybe you're onto something there.

People can point to a consensus that already exists, and no one is going to object, but building a consensus is smuggling your controversial opinions in the shared, uncontroversial context of a post hoping they will evade scrutiny. Well executed it's a great propaganda tool, but in a forum where people are expected to lay out their opinions clearly for debate, it's dishonest and counterproductive, as if someone spots the smuggled opinion and cares to debate it honestly, they will need to have you unwind that argument back to that assumption, which wastes everyone's time. It also, as Primaprimaprima mentions, feels very hostile and unwelcoming when you have it done to you.

Yeah what you and prima said aligns with my thoughts, but it seems like you'd expect this wisdom to be in a philosophy text or blogpost somewhere and expanded upon

TheMotte was intended to be a neutral meeting ground where different factions of the culture war could come together and have cordial discussions.

If the forum puts forward the appearance of a consensus on sensitive issues (e.g. “we all know the 2020 election was stolen”) then that would be antithetical to our goals because it would make the atmosphere more hostile to factions with different opinions.

I went blind again. Before anyone panics, it was for less than an hour, and I'm fine now.

I was previously diagnosed with a condition known as central serous chorio-retinopathy, where fluid leaks out of the vessels below the retina and makes it bulge out. It is usually due to corticosteroid consumption, which I've never done, but also due to prolonged and severe stress. Guess what I'm experiencing?

This isn't the first time. In keeping with a now-obvious pattern, it happened to me before a high-stakes exam. Once before the PLAB 1, again before the MSRA. And now, the MRCPsych Paper A looms ahead of me.

My stimulants might contribute (they're stimulating the sympathetic nervous system too), even if I take very reasonable doses. Unfortunately, my ADHD is not an affectation, I can't study without my meds, let alone pass exams. Especially exams that require months on end of grinding and memorization, when is rather be doing anything else.

So yeah, same choice as usual: lie flat, or keep fighting. I'm inclined to do the latter unless the attacks become so severe that I'm at great risk of permanent visual damage. I did see a doctor once, and it was decided that a waitful watching system was appropriate, instead of jumping to options like intravitreal injections or lasers. It's been a year and a half since then, and this attack was mild, so I suppose it wasn't the worst advice.

Anyone else have a few dangling Damocletian swords above them? Aimed at their eyeballs? Alternatively, what's the best way for me to manage my stress, when giving up or foregoing my meds isn't an option I'm willing to consider?

(I'm going to order myself some green tea. It helped in the past.)

See if you can find the right kind of downer? Sure, it might sound like a bad idea, but so does being on stimulants your whole life. I think the ship has sailed on that particular kind if worry.

When I was a first year in med school, staring at the sheer amount of knowledge I was supposed to cram into my brain, I would get too anxious and stressed out to even concentrate enough to study. So my girlfriend suggested I take some of her Xanax, which calmed me down enough that I could hit the books. The next day though I would have forgotten everything because as you know (and I had not yet learned at the time) benzos fuck with your hippocampus and it's harder to form memories. I did this three times before I recognized the pattern enough to bother googling it. So uh, don't do that.

What ended up working out for me was getting plenty of daily exercise. I was basically trying to study for 14 hours a day, then I'd watch a movie to unwind, then go to bed. Cutting that back to 13 hours of trying to study and one hour of exercise in the morning made me a lot less stressed out. And of course commiserating with people in the same boat as me. The worst thing you can do is not talk to your friends and colleagues about this.

Now, the thing that tends to stress me out the most is parenting. I am fully confident at times that I am fucking up my kids and they're going to need a lot of therapy in their mid-20s when they realize how much damaged my wife and I caused. But, and maybe this makes me look silly, I find the sycophantic nature of ChatGPT as well as its always available-ness is perfect for stopping me from spiraling.

Anyway: physician, heal thyself and so forth.

Another doctor here? Good, please unlurk yourself! That's a genuine request. We're up to 5 and change, depending on how you count med students who may or may not be hiking naked in Alaska.

When I was a first year in med school, staring at the sheer amount of knowledge I was supposed to cram into my brain, I would get too anxious and stressed out to even concentrate enough to study. So my girlfriend suggested I take some of her Xanax, which calmed me down enough that I could hit the books. The next day though I would have forgotten everything because as you know (and I had not yet learned at the time) benzos fuck with your hippocampus and it's harder to form memories. I did this three times before I recognized the pattern enough to bother googling it. So uh, don't do that.

Evidence that pharmacology should be shoved into the first year syllabus haha. You'd have been better off drinking alcohol to steady your nerves, since (paradoxically) alcohol increases reteograde memory retention, while hampering it anterograde (at reasonable doses).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-06305-w

For anyone else reading: don't do this.

What ended up working out for me was getting plenty of daily exercise. I was basically trying to study for 14 hours a day, then I'd watch a movie to unwind, then go to bed. Cutting that back to 13 hours of trying to study and one hour of exercise in the morning made me a lot less stressed out.

I'm in awe. I couldn't study for 12 hours a day if my life depended on it, even on medication. I feel utterly burnt out after 4-6 hours of actual study (not just sitting there with the book open, or procrastinating, as I'm doing now). This was true even before I had a job. Well, apparently that has been enough so far, and I try to keep up the habit.

The worst thing you can do is not talk to your friends and colleagues about this.

I did. I still feel bad about it, my dad is always stressed when he hears of such episodes, and he's the old-fashioned type of doctor who believes I don't need stimulants because ADHD isn't a real condition. He loves me, so I look past that. They know, they care, but they're a continent away.

Friends? They get it, sometimes. I had a good buddy who was a bit older and burdened with kids, he passed the exam during the previous window, so I suppose I have no excuse.

Now, the thing that tends to stress me out the most is parenting. I am fully confident at times that I am fucking up my kids and they're going to need a lot of therapy in their mid-20s when they realize how much damaged my wife and I caused. But, and maybe this makes me look silly, I find the sycophantic nature of ChatGPT as well as its always available-ness is perfect for stopping me from spiraling.

I suppose it's my turn to reassure you, though I have no kids of my own. Donald Winnicot was on to something when he came up with the concept of the "good enough mother" (and father).

Once you're past levels of effort above outright neglect, the returns to additional parental effort decline steeply or become outright flat. Parenting is not a video game where grinding extra hours levels your kid up faster. When it comes to variance in life outcomes, heredity is king, non-parental environment is queen, and “parenting” (once you’ve cleared the bar of “not abuse or neglect”) is a minor courtier at best.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3285

I have seen a full writeup somewhere, but I've lost it. I can look harder later.

In other words, you don't have to worry too hard. You've done the important things, like giving them your genes, amassing wealth, not abusing them (I hope, but feel free to disabuse me if you disagree) etc.

They're good genes! You're a doctor, hardworking, and probably more conscientious than is good for you. In all fairness, so were my parents, but you can't help some things. I turned out okay. I love my parents despite their minor failings, and I'm sure your kids will love you too. If you’re worried you’re messing up, that’s actually evidence you’re not the type who would really mess up.

Anyway: physician, heal thyself and so forth.

Thank you, I mean it. I've been through worse, both in terms of academic load and blindness. I'll live, and if I ever become a consultant, I will dedicate my life to involuntarily commiting some of the exam-designers. Oh, and if your kids end up needing therapy, I'll offer a steep discount as a professional courtesy.

I mostly lurk because I don't feel like I have much to contribute and everyone around here seems to know what they're talking about, or at least is good enough at rhetoric to fool me. And then I have this really bad habit of needing social approval in a way that downvotes cause me mental distress, even if I am positive I'm right. I'm kind of a coward online like that in a way that I am not irl.

And my study habits were probably unhealthy. I had a few friends in med school and was generally very well liked by people who knew me, but I had more than a few people say to me at some point in our 4th year "damn wsgy why weren't we better friends? You're a great hang!". I had kind of partied way too much in university and overcorrected. My (now) wife even mentioned what it was like to date me those first two years at our wedding. The rule was she could have me for an evening and overnight either Friday or Saturday and had a blanket invitation to stay over at my place on other days but I wasn't going to talk to her until 8pm and we had to be in bed by 10:30. Like she'd be hanging out on my couch watching TV while I ignored her with earplugs in my head. It got a laugh, appropriately.

I'm not actually too worried about the kids in the grand scheme of things. But it's like having one of your vital organs removed from your body and giving it a mind of its own. You can't help but get at least a bit neurotic about it getting damaged.

Maybe post more so that eventually your thin skin gets bruised into thick calluses.

Same boat here - fellow medico, don't post much here since i also feel not much to contribute.

Honestly I've used the downvotes from my sometimes half-cocked healthcare economics rants as part of exposure therapy for fear of online censure.

Our people pleasing and neuroticism needs treatment!

I mostly lurk because I don't feel like I have much to contribute and everyone around here seems to know what they're talking about, or at least is good enough at rhetoric to fool me.

Hey, having nothing useful to contribute doesn't stop some people! Don't let it dissuade you, you're probably wrong on that front.

But yes, having thick skin is a major benefit when it comes to regular participation on the Motte. I would encourage you to dip your toes in the water in the less contentious threads, like you're doing right now.

And my study habits were probably unhealthy. I had a few friends in med school and was generally very well liked by people who knew me, but I had more than a few people say to me at some point in our 4th year "damn wsgy why weren't we better friends? You're a great hang!". I had kind of partied way too much in university and overcorrected.

Such a shame. My parents would have loved to have you instead of me. Well, not because I partied too much (I didn't, at least in med school), but because they wished I'd studied.

I'm not actually too worried about the kids in the grand scheme of things. But it's like having one of your vital organs removed from your body and giving it a mind of its own. You can't help but get at least a bit neurotic about it getting damaged.

A fair point. It's easy for me to talk about adopting a laissez-faire attitude towards children I don't have. The changes parenthood provoke are scary, but also strangely comforting. One's own struggle and strife seem so inconsequential when there are little people who need you. Yours will turn out great!

I've found that prioritizing sleep above all other things helps to keep my stress in check. In school, I would sleep immediately after class to ensure I got enough and I'd fit homework and studying in the hours that remained between waking and having to be in class.

I wish I could do that dude. The stimulants already muck up sleep cycle, and I've never been the kind to be able to cat nap.

First of all, sorry to hear that and all the best with the tests.

Secondly, about:

Especially exams that require months on end of grinding and memorization, when is rather be doing anything else.

I’m curious about these medical exams and studying. Are there some candidates you’ve met that can just ace them without studying, based solely on general medical knowledge and above average recollection from both medical school and hands-on training in the years before their specialist qualification? Or is it like some legal qualifications, where even a towering intellect needs to rote memorize that the answer is a section 37 part 3 form and not a part 4 and that a certain period is 13 working days and not 12?

My recollection of medical school was that almost all of the stellar students and smartest students were the same people. You did have a pot of smart bad students but usually they had something like ADHD and couldn't keep up with the study demand. Although I find that the smart people who didn't do well were better at retaining information years later than the not as smart but better students (this retention being in reference to things like other people's specialties).

However, "bad student" for medical school in the U.S. is a god outside of it - things like pre-exam crams and all nighters are flat out impossible. It isn't uncommon at the start of first year to be basically learning multiple undergrad classes worth of material in a week, every week. Almost all exams are incredibly high stakes and some are full days in length or more etc.

The material usually doesn't require much beyond an above average IQ to learn but the amount of it is vicious - the classic statement is "like drinking from a firehose" and then you do that for years.

No amount of pure horsepower can do it - you also need the effort.

That said an interesting part of how this has gone in the US is that the rote memorization component of medical education has become more or less solved, and since they need to do some candidate discrimination..... they've worked very hard to dial in on the "thinking" parts instead of pure memorization.

A question might be - patient with x disease has y side effect, which of the following medications most likely caused the side effect? And then all 6 meds cause that side effect - they want you to know that one of the medications is overwhelmingly likely to be prescribed because of a practice guideline, causes the side effect at a much higher rate, or something else like that.

15-20 years ago the standardized tests were hard because the way medical knowledge has exploded in recent years. Now they are actually fucking hard and require much more in depth understanding.

This may be a bit US specific though, as the population of students here is generally neurotic passionate about care people or money seekers looking for the best gig (which also requires high performance).

EDIT: An added layer of problem is that the exams have no constrained syllabus, the best you have is weights. The contents is usually "everything." Nephrology in Ortho boards? Sure. A modality that hasn't been used outside of Eastern Europe for 30 years? Sure. A drug that just cleared clinical trials five minutes ago? Yeah.

The secret is that all of the questions are fair or at least important (ex: new drug is actually the first in a new class of medications that they've been trying to get off the ground for decades), but as a student you don't know that until years later, so if you want to do well (and people do) you have to know absolutely EVERYTHING.

Thank you.

I’m curious about these medical exams and studying. Are there some candidates you’ve met that can just ace them without studying, based solely on general medical knowledge and above average recollection from both medical school and hands-on training in the years before their specialist qualification? Or is it like some legal qualifications, where even a towering intellect needs to rote memorize that the answer is a section 37 part 3 form and not a part 4 and that a certain period is 13 working days and not 12?

I don't think that it is possible to pass just about any medical exam with zero studying, in the literal sense. But I definitely know or have heard of people who can get by with much less of it in the way of "total hours of effort". The very best young doctors I know (in terms of academic performance and successful entry into difficult specialties) were both very smart and very hardworking.

There are people who have retained far more than I did from med school, which definitely came in handy for them. I wasn't the most motivated of candidates back then (because my performance didn't matter as long as I passed, and I only ever failed one minor exam in the last decade), but I put far more effort into career-defining or gatekeeping exams later.

For example, the very first exam a foreign doctor needs to clear to get a license to practice in the UK is the first PLAB exam. It was always oriented around a UK curriculum, but now is/will be entirely subsumed into the same British end-of-medschool exam that is the UKMLA. A British med student would have a very significant innate advantage simply because that's their default curriculum, whereas a foreign grad would need to learn additional information about UK guidelines (holding all else equal, which I will happily grant isn't true, British med students are very good on average).

Once the PLABs were done, I had to give another exam called the MSRA, where the advantages for the locals diminish. The exam has roughly the same core topics as the PLAB/UKMLA, but will drill much harder into the nitty-gritty details. These details aren't comprehensively covered in med school, so that's when your own effort begins to come through.

The next step is usually the membership exams of one of the Royal Colleges. In my case, the MRCPsychs. At that point you are well beyond "innate" or general knowledge. Almost everything is new.

Not all RC exams are made alike:

Something like the MRCPsych Paper A heavily rewards rote memorization. There's no exam where it isn't important, but some others will test your practical and critical thinking skills harder than others.

Or is it like some legal qualifications, where even a towering intellect needs to rote memorize that the answer is a section 37 part 3 form and not a part 4 and that a certain period is 13 working days and not 12?

You would have to be God to derive medicine from first principles. For mere humans, no matter how smart, there's no choice but to resort to empiricism and knowing what works. Medicine, for all its scientific underpinnings, remains a deeply empirical and at times atheoretical field.

For example, why do antipsychotics increase the risk of pneumonia? Nobody knows. Why do clozapine and olanzapine cause the most weight gain (within antipsychotics)? Fuck knows. There is no logical chain that leads from the pharmacology of clozapine to it causing more weight gain than ziprasidone. We only know these things through observation.

The exam questions reflect this reality. They do not ask you to model the interaction of dopamine antagonists with hypothalamic appetite centers. They ask: "Which of the following drugs is most associated with weight gain?" This is not a test of your reasoning. It is a test of your internal lookup table. You either pass the herblore skill check or you don't.

And that is a good question. It's information that is in some way relevant to clinical practice.

Freud's nonsense isn't. Neither is Monkey Business. I don't know why I need to learn the name of the dude who invented modern antipsychotics, or why I'm being asked that. Yet those make up an unfortunate amount of the syllabus.

For example, why do antipsychotics increase the risk of pneumonia? Nobody knows. Why do clozapine and olanzapine cause the most weight gain (within antipsychotics)? Fuck knows. There is no logical chain that leads from the pharmacology of clozapine to it causing more weight gain than ziprasidone. We only know these things through observation. The exam questions reflect this reality. They do not ask you to model the interaction of dopamine antagonists with hypothalamic appetite centers. They ask: "Which of the following drugs is most associated with weight gain?" This is not a test of your reasoning. It is a test of your internal lookup table. You either pass the herblore skill check or you don't.

Sure, but I would classify this closer to the ‘classical’ examination than the rote legal memory check where, you FOOL, you forgot that it was actually a class 5(a)i notice and not a class 5(b)i one even though you actually! In the sense that I would imagine that smart and well-read psychiatry students would probably know that antipsychotics increase the risk of pneumonia and so on. Even moreso for Freud’s ‘nonsense’.

I would imagine that smart and well-read psychiatry students would probably know that antipsychotics increase the risk of pneumonia

I... uh... didn't know that until I opened my revision notes to look for examples. You are welcome to update on how smart or well-read a psychiatry student I am. In all fairness, that knowledge is irrelevant in clinical use, I've never seen or heard of a psychiatrist not prescribing because of pneumonia risk from an antipsychotic.

But, in general, my main source of frustration is irrelevant information gumming up the syllabus rather than the fact that a lot of memorization is involved. If what I have to memorize a lot of facts to be a good psychiatrist, then that's just what I need to do. But I don't enjoy, and in fact, hate quite a bit of what I'm forced to learn. Physics majors aren't grilled on their knowledge of Aristotlian mechanics, nor are chemists asked to produce the schematics of the alembic necessary for transmuting lead to gold. It's all so tiresome.

Fuck, I’m sorry.

I have stress-provoked tachycardia which is less crippling but certainly unfun and produces perhaps a similar ‘I need to do important things to have a good life but not too many things or else my body will go wonky’ dilemma.

I’m sort of failing to manage it at the moment but generally I would advise trying to separate out one’s stressors a bit. Don’t go drinking the night before the marathon. Try to have specific study times that don’t coincide with your worst work shifts. If possible, try to have the confidence that you can take a break every so often without fucking up your life.

Thanks my dude. Misery loves company!

(Also, I will probably be in London sometime between Monday to Wednesday next week, let me know if you're free. We can be miserable together in person.)

I have stress-provoked tachycardia which is less crippling but certainly unfun and produces perhaps a similar ‘I need to do important things to have a good life but not too many things or else my body will go wonky’ dilemma.

I presume you've gotten that looked at? My impression is probably anxiety, and CBT or the drugs would help if that's the case. Maybe even just a beta-blocker for symptomatic relief if it gets bad.

I’m sort of failing to manage it at the moment but generally I would advise trying to separate out one’s stressors a bit. Don’t go drinking the night before the marathon. Try to have specific study times that don’t coincide with your worst work shifts.

I won't be drinking before the exams, and I've already cut it down to a single night of dissolute enjoyment at the pub. They miss me, but I actually need to lock-in.

I try to study at sensible hours, but easier said than done.

If possible, try to have the confidence that you can take a break every so often without fucking up your life.

That's true. This exam isn't the end of the world if I fail, just £500 I won't be getting back. But I do very much want to pass it in one go - deferring it is an option, but I'll only be getting busier in the future and I'm already a bit overdue for an attempt.

To moan in general, the exam is designed by sadists, with much of it of limited/negative utility in actual psychiatric practice. But I am not credentialed enough to be consulted on such topics, so I'm dealing with it. It's also pointlessly hard, but eh, I can manage that too.

Thank you for listening, it means something to me.

I will probably be in London sometime between Monday to Wednesday next week

Cool! That's today to Weds, or next week?

I presume you've gotten that looked at? My impression is probably anxiety, and CBT or the drugs would help if that's the case. Maybe even just a beta-blocker for symptomatic relief if it gets bad.

Had keyhole surgery (catheter ablation) a couple of years back when it flared up to multiple several-minute bouts of 180bpm a day. Much better now, only once every few months, but I live in fear of it getting worse and needing surgery again. Realistically could be a lot worse but it's made me risk-averse in a way I dislike.

That's true. This exam isn't the end of the world if I fail, just £500 I won't be getting back. But I do very much want to pass it in one go - deferring it is an option, but I'll only be getting busier in the future and I'm already a bit overdue for an attempt.

To moan in general, the exam is designed by sadists, with much of it of limited/negative utility in actual psychiatric practice. But I am not credentialed enough to be consulted on such topics, so I'm dealing with it. It's also pointlessly hard, but eh, I can manage that too.

Good to hear that it's not do-or-die, at least. Worst comes to the worst, spreading the study out over a longer period will make you much more likely to retain the knowledge.

Best of luck!

Had keyhole surgery (catheter ablation) a couple of years back when it flared up to multiple several-minute bouts of 180bpm a day. Much better now, only once every few months, but I live in fear of it getting worse and needing surgery again. Realistically could be a lot worse but it's made me risk-averse in a way I dislike.

Now that is far more serious than I'd like. Did they not give you beta blockers for as-required symptomatic relief? Did the surgeons or cardiologists not give advice regarding lifestyle modifications or exercise tolerance? This is far out of my wheelhouse, but I don't want you to be unduly anxious, even if you are right to worry.

Cool! That's today to Weds, or next week?

Next week! I'll DM you closer, once I know the exact dates.

Best of luck!

Thank you again!

I've got a tab of verapamil, which is similar to a beta blocker. In practice they've usually died down quickly enough that I don't have time to fetch and take it, which is good.

Did the surgeons or cardiologists not give advice regarding lifestyle modifications or exercise tolerance?

They did, in Japanese lol. Broadly they said, "Look, just don't worry about it. Do whatever exercise you like - it won't help but it won't make things worse. In practice go on living your life the same as ever." Which is... nice and all, and better than the alternative, but somehow less reassuring than 'eat salad, never let your heart get above 160, and we want you to wear a 24h ECG once a year' or whatever. I try not to think about it too much, or else I will turn into a hypochondriac.

It seems to be genetic (at least one of my elderly relatives used to have it I think) and to die down as you get older.

Verapamil is a calcium channel blocker, and a good option. I don't recall off the top of my head whether it's superior to something like metoprolol, but it is very reasonable to prescribe.

They did, in Japanese lol. Broadly they said, "Look, just don't worry about it. Do whatever exercise you like - it won't help but it won't make things worse. In practice go on living your life the same as ever." Which is... nice and all, and better than the alternative, but somehow less reassuring than 'eat salad, never let your heart get above 160, and we want you to wear a 24h ECG once a year' or whatever. I try not to think about it too much, or else I will turn into a hypochondriac

I'm sorry, I had to laugh. This is a good reminder that patients are not made alike, some of us need gentle reassurance, others desire bright lines in the sand. In all honesty, I think telling someone not to let their HR cross 160 either won't work or will be counterproductive. The anxiety of watching it maybe go to 140 might easily cause it to spike.

Something like an Apple Watch with ECG tracking might be good just for the peace of mind. I told my dad to get one, and even offered to pay. Unfortunately, despite getting a heart disease so rare it was until recently thought to only happen to the Japanese (coincidence?), he's proof that doctors make bad patients.

If you want to DM me the exact diagnosis, I can probably give you better advice, but I am still a psychiatry resident and I am blissfully forgetting everything about cardiology other than measuring QTc elongation on a trace.

It seems to be genetic (at least one of my elderly relatives used to have it I think) and to die down as you get older.

If they lived to be elderly, don't you think that's a good sign?

Much appreciated! I'll take you up on that and DM you if I ever need a serious talk, but I'm quite all right for the time being. I'm not worried about dying per se, but the original surgery was very much Not Fun for various reasons (I woke up during the operation) and I'd like to avoid being in that position again if I can.

Something like an Apple Watch with ECG tracking might be good just for the peace of mind. I told my dad to get one

Very useful in some ways, surprisingly un-useful in others. It lets you have a look and get an idea of what is 'normal' and what is 'not normal' on a moment to moment basis. It's less useful in that many conditions produce the same biomarkers. For example, low heart rate variability can either be a sign of relaxation and recovery (good, go and get some exercise) or your body desperately trying to relax and activating the parasympathetic nervous system after serious exertion (maybe not good, you need to relax and not do anything strenuous). Low stress just before you wake can be a sign that you're well-rested (good) or that you're very tired and your alarm woke you in the middle of a sleep cycle (less good). And so on.

Ideally sensors are a good way to sort through the psychological chaff such as excess stoicism or excess hypochondria/anxiety and get a good idea about what's actually going on with people, but it doesn't seem to work that way. There also seems to be a dearth of individual high-detail studies, just very specific medical studies on unusual cohorts or vast field surveys.

I'm sorry, I had to laugh. This is a good reminder that patients are not made alike

I imagine this comes up a lot :) But for certain types of people saying 'I would love to do X with you but the doctor says I can't because of Y, what a joyless bastard he/she is amirite?' can be much easier than saying 'I'd like to do X but it makes me nervous'. I don't know how you'd go about finding which patient responds to which approach except through experience and stereotyping, but I bet it has a big payoff especially if you ever go private.

Is there a tactful way to ask your boss to lay off something? My boss, a smart guy whom I respect, has become obsessed with LLMs. Literally every conversation with him about work topics has become one where he says "I asked (insert model) and it said..." which adds no value to the conversation. Worse, he responds to questions with "have you tried asking AI?". For example the other day I asked him if he knows why multiple TCP streams are faster than one (when you would naively think they would be slower due to TCP overhead), and he asked if I asked AI. Which of course I didn't, because I actually wanted to know the answer, not get something plausible which may or may not be correct. And he's like that with every question posed lately, even when we had legal documents we had questions on he was like "did you try feeding it to Gemini and asking?"

It's frankly gotten incredibly annoying and I wish he would stop. Like I said, I actually have a lot of respect for the man but it's like he's chosen to outsource his brain to Grok et al lately. I suspect that my options are to live with it or get a new job, but figured I'd ask if people think there's a way I can tactfully address the situation.

Bluntly, I think your boss is right in this case. The correct answer to "why are multiple TCP streams faster than one" is "it depends, what concrete thing are you observing?" There are a bunch of reasons a developer could be reporting "multiple TCP streams are faster than one", and where you should look depends on which parts of the network you can observe and control, how lossy the links are, which congestion control algo is in use in this particular case, etc.

If you say to an LLM "here is the thing I am observing, here is the thing I expected to observe, what are the most important additional pieces of information I can use to narrow down the root cause and what are the specific commands I can use to gather that information", the LLM will be able to answer that question. If you say "I have output from this common cli tool and I am too lazy to read the man page, explain it to me", the LLM can do that too.

Senior developer time is expensive. LLM tokens are cheap. Don't ask senior developers to spend their time answering questions you have if you haven't tried an LLM first.

With all due respect, I wasn't asking for an opinion on whether he's correct. I was asking if there is a way to tactfully ask him to lay off.

my options are to live with it or get a new job

Unless the two of you have an excellent relationship built on truth telling and open feedback, yes

For example the other day I asked him if he knows why multiple TCP streams are faster than one (when you would naively think they would be slower due to TCP overhead),

I would think there'd be no difference, ideally.

If there is a difference I would expect it's because the flow control heuristic on a single stream is a bit wrong and not properly saturating your link. That, or by opening multiple streams you are recruiting more resources on the remote end to satisfying you (e.g. it's a distributed system and each stream hits a different data center)

Mostly I would Google it ask ChatGPT to Google it.

it also might depend on what you mean by 'faster' or what you are doing. but if you are multiplexing streams inside of TCP like HTTP2 then this can be slower than separate HTTP/1.1 streams because a single missing packet on the HTTP2 TCP stream will block all the substreams whereas a single missing packet on a HTTP/1.1 TCP stream will only effect that one HTTP/1.1 TCP stream. by 'block' i mean the data can't be delivered to the application until the missing packet arrives. the data can still be buffered in the OS so you can imagine if you were just looking at a very large transfer with a very small amount of missing packets and you were only worried about the overall transfer time then this is not really 'slower'. but if you are very worried about the time it takes for small amounts of data to reach the other side then this can be 'slower'. a good example of this would be some kind of request-response protocol.

cc @dr_analog

The thing which motivated the question was that we were doing iperf tests from one location on our network to others, and observed that there was a significant difference in speed between one stream and 10. With one stream we might see a 200 Mbps speed, but with 10 we might see 400 Mbps. That seemed odd because like I said, you would think a single stream would be faster due to less overhead.

If you're doing TCP, even small amounts of latency can have bizarre impact when you're dealing with relatively large bandwidth compared to the underlying MTU size, window size and buffer size (and if going past the local broadcast domain, packet size, though getting any nontrivial IPv6 layout to support >65k packets is basically impossible for anyone not FAANG-sized). I can't say with much confidence without knowing a lot about the specific systems, and might not be able to say even with, but I've absolutely seen this sort of behavior caused by the receiving device taking 'too long' (eg, 10ms) to tell the sender that it was ready for more data, and increasing MTU size and sliding window size drastically reduced the gap.

it could also be you have a bunch of bad options for the TCP connection. tho, i suspect iperf would should have good defaults. a common problem with TCP application is not setting TCP_NODELAY and be a cause of extra latency. the golang language automatically sets this option but i'm sure a lot of languages/libraries do not set it. you can also have problems between userspace and kernelspace (but maybe not at this speed?). like if you can only shift 200 Mbps between the kernel and userspace because of syscall overhead on a single thread and in the multiple stream case you are using multiple threads then maybe that is why the performance improves. also, if you are using multiple streams you are going to have a much larger max receive window. there is some kind of receive buffer configuration (tcp_rmem?) that controls how large the receive buffer is and the thus the receive window. its possible this is not large enough and so using 10x connections means you effectively now have 10x the max receive window. also, there is tcp_wmem configuration that controls the write buffer in a similar way. cloudflare has an article on optimizing tcp_rmem https://blog.cloudflare.com/optimizing-tcp-for-high-throughput-and-low-latency/ which shows their production configuration.

I have observed this exact behavior before. Fun story time:

In 2015 I was living in North Korea and teaching computer science over there. Part of my job was to download youtube videos, linux distros, and other big files to give to the students over there. (I basically had full discretion about what to give and never experienced censorship... but that would surely have changed if I had been downloading transgressive material.) I discovered that a single tcp connection could get only about 100 kbps, but if I multiplexed the connection to do the download I could get >1gbps. The school was internally on a 10gps network, and I was effectively maxing out the local network infrastructure. I eventually diagnosed the problem as there was an upstream firewall that was rate limiting my connections. Despite what you might think, the firewall wasn't doing any meaningful filtering of the content (these were https connections, so there wasn't a way to do that beyond just blocking an IP, and basically no IPs were blocked; all content filtering at the time was done via "social" mechanisms). But the firewall did rate limit the connections. The firewall was configured to rate limit on a per connection basis and not on a per user basis, and so by multiplexing my downloads over many connections, I was able to max out the local network hardware. At the time, there was only a single wire that connected all of North Korea to the Chinese internet, and the purpose of the firewall rule was to prevent one user from bringing down the North Korean internet... which I may or may not have done... eventually I started doing my downloads on a wifi connection which provided a natural rate limiting that didn't overwhelm the wired connections.

I suspect that you are observing a similar situation where something in between your source and destination is throttling the network speed on a per connection basis instead of per user basis. My best guess about how this happens is that a device somewhere is allocating a certain amount of resources to individual connections, and by using multiple connections, you are accidentally getting more of the device's resources.

Aside: I am an avid user of LLMs (and do research on them professionally). Non-trivial networking is an area where I would be shocked to find LLMs providing good answers. Stackoverflow is full of basic networking setups, but it doesn't have a lot of really good debugging of non-trivial problems, and so these types of problems just aren't in the training data. The solutions usually require relatively simple debugging steps that build off of basic foundational knowledge, but the LLMs don't have the ability to reason through this foundational knowledge well, and I don't expect the transformer architecture to ever get that reasoning ability.

The solutions usually require relatively simple debugging steps that build off of basic foundational knowledge, but the LLMs don't have the ability to reason through this foundational knowledge well, and I don't expect the transformer architecture to ever get that reasoning ability.

That is one of my big skeptic points with LLMs. They don't (and can't) reason, they are producing what is likely to be correct based on their training data. When having this discussion with my boss he argued "they know everything about networking", and I don't see how they can be accurately said to know anything at all. They can't even be counted on to reliably reproduce the training data (source: have witnessed many such failures), let alone stuff that follows from the training data but isn't in it. Maybe we will get there (after all, cutting edge research is improving almost by definition), but we aren't there yet.

Thanks for the story, as well. I hadn't considered an explanation like that so I'll have to take a look at that if we ever want to dig deep and find the root cause.

So I've probably been "your boss" to someone a couple of times. There are essentially three stages:

  1. LLMs don't really work
  2. LLMs work amazingly; you should use them for everything
  3. I've outsourced too much of my creative thought and problem-solving to LLMs, and need to come up with my own answer first before asking it anything.

In October 2025, most people should be on step 2 or 3. If you have a ton of coworkers on Step 1, your boss has a responsibility to model being on step 2.

You can perhaps get him to lay off of you, individually, by explaining you're on step 3. The people who remain on step 1 are being stupid and inefficient. I lost patience with the people who come to me with questions I can obtain in seconds a long time ago. The ones on step 2 are being one-shotted and need to get a grip.

Another tactic is that when you're sending people AI-generated content and only asking if they've asked AI instead of answering it, you're implicitly not respecting their time. If someone is communicating to you from human-to-human and you're dismissing their question or putting an LLM between you, it's a sign of disdain.

Ironically, I'm dealing with LLMs being integrated into our career management platform and having the same problem in reverse. My subordinates are writing their reviews for themselves and each other with AI. I'm spending hours per month having to comb through this verbose slop, synthesize it with reality, and create thoughtful, specific feedback for everyone. It's pretty fucking lame.

The ones on step 2 are being one-shotted and need to get a grip.

I manage an architect who loves to paste obviously LLM-generated solutions to various problems and he's driving me angry. If LLMs are so fucking good that I can use their recommendations verbatim, I should cut out the middleman. The whole point of having a professional on payroll is that he can function both as a holder of domain-specific knowledge and as a critical evaluator of whatever LLMs produce.

The whole point of having a professional on payroll is that he can function both as a holder of domain-specific knowledge and as a critical evaluator of whatever LLMs produce.

A fuckin men

I have also seen a lot of the managers at my corporate job become AI-obsessed. If you figure out how to make it stop, let me know. It's incredibly frustrating, especially when they double and triple your output goals by claiming AI makes everyone 2 or 3x as efficient...

The real disaster is that the ones who are self aware enough to know they are bad writers went from 2 line emails to paragraphs of AI slop, no doubt promoted by the same 2 lines they would have previously just sent.

Idk, being asked to triple my work output was kind of disastrous for me...

I don't know if this counts as "tactful", but I got my boss to stop doing that by repeatedly pointing out errors in the LLM's output. After a few months, he got tired of being told that whatever source file it was talking about didn't exist, and now he only posts LLM output after verifying it, which is much less annoying.

That has happened a few times, but has not yet deterred him. He does generally accompany his "I asked $model and it says" statements with an acknowledgement that one needs to check because it might be hallucinating, but so far it hasn't really changed his habit to always ask AI first on every single topic.

Your boss has a point, at least in my opinion. If you're using a good LLM, like GPT-5T, hallucination rates are close to negligible (not zero, so for anything serious do due diligence). You can always ask followup questions, demand citations, or chase those up yourself. If you still can't understand, then by all means ask a knowledgeable human.

It is a mistake to take what LLMs say as gospel truth. It is also a mistake to reflexively ignore their output because you "wanted to know the answer, not get something plausible which may or may not be correct". Like, c'mon. I hang around enough in HN that I can see that even the most gray bearded of programmers often argue over facts, or are plain old wrong. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.

Human output, unfortunately, "may or may not be correct". Or that is true if the humans you know are anything like the ones I know.

I even asked GPT-5T the same question about TCP parallelism gains, and it gave a very good answer, to the limit of my ability to quickly parse the sources it gave on request (and I've previously watched videos on TCP's workings, so I'm familiar with slow start and congestion avoidance. Even I don't know why I did that).

hallucination rates are close to negligible

This has not been the case for me, unless you count “yes, you are correct, it seems that x is actually y” follow-ups when specifically prompted as negligible, which I would not. The eternal problem of “are you sure?” almost universally lowering its previously declared confidence in any subjective answer also remains. No specific examples, just my general experience over the past few weeks.

The appropriate response to hallucination handwringing from luddites is “it doesn’t matter”, not “it’s not happening”, by the way.

I'm not aware of a comprehensive hallucination benchmark, at least one that has been updated for recent SOTA models. If there was, I'd reference it, but hallucination rates have dropped drastically since the 3.5 days (something like 40% of its citations were hallucinate).

I almost never run into them, though I only check important claims. With something like GPT-5T, I'd estimate it's correct north of 95% of the time on factual questions, though I'm not sure if that means 96% or 99.9%.

The appropriate response to hallucination handwringing from luddites is “it doesn’t matter”, not “it’s not happening”, by the way.

Uh.. I don't think anything I've said should be interpreted as "they don't happen". Right now, they're uncommon enough that I think you should check only claims that matter, not the exact amount of salt to put in your soup.

I never ask AI anything factual at this point without enabling "search" and checking the source for whatever load-bearing point of evidence I'm looking for

It's not as fast as "type question, read answer" but it's still faster than the best alternative, Google and read 2-4 sources of potentially slop / not your exact question

The eternal problem of “are you sure?” almost universally lowering its previously declared confidence in any subjective answer also remains.

Works on people too though.

Any tool has its uses. LLMs are pretty useful as a first brush with a topic type question. It’s a good jumping off point for the start of a project, but it’s not going to do it all for you.

You can always ask followup questions, demand citations, or chase those up yourself.

Riddle me this: Why the fuck would I want to deal with an entity which requires me to do that and never learns enough so I won't have to anymore?

It's like being saddled with a particularly annoying intern for no reason at all.

Because the thing it's replacing, Google search, also doesn't have this feature and has been SEO-sloppified since like ~2020?

How many of your searches do you basically have to include "Reddit" on in order to get a half decent response? Basically any search involving recipes or product recommendations is pure SEO-slop article garbage at this point.

The amount of times I opened a website just to realize it was literally a copy/paste of the previous search result I had just been reading is obscene

Uh.. Your premise is faulty. Most LLM front-ends have memory or instruction features. You can literally make sure it remembers your preferences and takes them into account by default.

My custom instructions on ChatGPT include:

Never do any calculations manually, make sure to always use your analysis tools or write a program to calculate it.

And guess what? GPT-5 is absolutely scrupulous about this. Even for trivial calculations, it'll write and execute a Python program.

I, or you, could easily add something like:

"Always use your search functionality to review factual information. Always provide citations and references."

A more sensible approach would be to let it exercise its judgement (5T is very sensible about such things), or to tell it to do so for high stakes information.

So, yeah. A non-issue. It's been an effectively solved problem for a long time. You can even enable a general summary of all your conversations as part of the hidden context in the personalization settings, so the AI knows your more abstract preferences, tendencies and needs. It's even turned on by default for paying users.

Your premise is faulty. Most LLM front-ends have memory or instruction features. You can literally make sure it remembers your preferences and takes them into account by default.

No, it isn't. I'm not talking about remembering a bunch of explicit instructions or preferences. I'm talking about learning in the way a competent person goes from a newbie to a domain expert. That is completely missing in LLMs. No matter how much I guide an LLM, that doesn't help it generalize that guidance because LLMs are static snapshots. And if your answer is "but GPT-6 will totally have been trained better", then why on earth would I waste any time whatsoever with GPT-5?.

Like I said I have no use for or desire to be saddled with an annoying intern, whether a human or an LLM.

If you're trying to force everyone to use the solution you like, you better be damn sure your solution actually works for them instead of constantly resorting to "no, you're just using it wrong".

No, it isn't. I'm not talking about remembering a bunch of explicit instructions or preferences. I'm talking about learning in the way a competent person goes from a newbie to a domain expert. That is completely missing in LLMs. No matter how much I guide an LLM, that doesn't help it generalize that guidance because LLMs are static snapshots.

If you want truly online learning, you're in for an indefinite wait. Fortunately, most people get a great deal of mundane utility out of even static LLMs, and I'm not sure what you need that precludes this.

And if your answer is "but GPT-6 will totally have been trained better", then why on earth would I waste any time whatsoever with GPT-5?.

Because... it's the model we have? Can't have tomorrow's pie today, even if we're confident it's going to be tastier. Why buy an RTX 5090 when Nvidia will inevitably launch a better model after a few years? Why buy a car in the dealership today when you can wait for teleportation with complimentary blowjobs?

If you're trying to force everyone to use the solution you like, you better be damn sure your solution actually works for them instead of constantly resorting to "no, you're just using it wrong".

Hold your horses buddy. When have I forced anyone to do anything? @SubstantialFrivolity has clearly articulated his concerns about the weaknesses of LLMs as of Today AD. I invite you to tell me which of his concerns online learning is strictly needed to address? As far as I can tell, I have emphasized that his boss has a point, or is directionally correct, and that he could benefit from using LLMs more. I hope you've noticed multiple caveats and warnings attached.

If you are so convinced that even the best LLMs today are a waste of your precious time, then good luck with whatever you're using as an alternative. It's not like they're so entrenched that you can't lead a productive human life without one. They also happen to be very helpful for most people.

Patiently waiting for Scott's next prediction project, "teleportation with complimentary blowjobs 2027"

Pretty excited, should we start a Metaculus prediction market?

If you want truly online learning, you're in for an indefinite wait.

This is why I keep blackpilling on AGI. I have zero expectation of AGI without a system that can learn on its own.

It's certainly true that human output can be incorrect. But it's incorrect at a much lower rate than an LLM is, assuming you ask a human who knows the topic. But that aside, it seems to me like "have you asked AI" is the 2025 equivalent of "let me Google that for you", and is just as annoying as that was. If I trusted an AI to give me a good answer I would just ask it, I don't need someone else to remind me that it exists.

"have you asked AI" is the 2025 equivalent of "let me Google that for you"

Yes, but also if you're asking questions the computer can easily answer, maybe you should be doing this first?

But that aside, it seems to me like "have you asked AI" is the 2025 equivalent of "let me Google that for you", and is just as annoying as that was.

At one of my first professional jobs, I had a very knowledgeable teammate who I relied on for a lot of advice and information. Constantly asking, have you tried googling it, what actually one of the most helpful pieces of mentorship I ever received.

On the other hand, your boss doesn’t realize it, but he’s digging his own grave. You respect him now, but you won’t still when you realize he’s outsourced his job to ChatGPT, while getting paid more than 20$/mo.

I’ve had this with several of my senior leadership, including a C-level or two. The folks who are doing their jobs, specifically the leadership parts and insight-providing parts, withAI have lost the troops.

While I use AI constantly behind the scenes, I absolutely never let it mediate communication with my team or peers.

"Let me Google that for you" wasn't always an invalid response. Very many questions that people can/do ask are trivially solved by a Google search.

LLMs are far more powerful than Google (until Google Search began using a dumb LLM). The breadth of queries they can reliably answer is enormous.

If I trusted an AI to give me a good answer I would just ask it, I don't need someone else to remind me that it exists.

The specific question you asked your boss is in their capabilities! I checked! I can share the conversation if you want.

I ask a lot of hard questions. They are correct probably >95% of the time, and errors are usually of the omission/neglect type than falsity.

My point is that you aren't trusting LLMs enough. You don't, and shouldn't, take them as oracles and arbiters of truth, but they're good. Your boss is directionally correct, and will be increasingly so in the future. Especially so for conceptual, technical questions that don't depend heavily on your workplace and tacit knowledge (though they can ingest and make use of the context if you tell them).

If you asked most of your questions using an LLM, you will usually receive good answers. If the answers seem incomplete or unhelpful and there's an aspect you believe that only your boss can answer, then by all means ask him. But in all likelihood, that approach will save both you and him time.

On a practical note, I really hope either you or your boss pay for or have used the very best LLMs out today. GPT-5T is incredibly smart, and so is Gemini 2.5 Pro or Sonnet 4.5. They are very meaningfully better than the default experience of a free user, especially on ChatGPT. 90% of the disappointment going from 4o to 5 was because users were (by what might well be called a dark pattern) using basic bitch 5 instead of 5 Thinking. If your boss is using free Grok, it's not the worst, but he could do better.

And coding/IT is a very strong suit. To be fair, so is medicine, but I have had great results on most topics under the sun. If I had need for research grade maths or physics, they're still useful!

I am more than happy to field what you think is the hardest programming query you can come up with through 5T, ideally one that free ChatGPT can't handle. You have to push their limits to know them, and these days I can barely manage that with my normal requirements.

GPT-5T is incredibly smart

Do you find it reliably better than default 5? It seems to me that it's rather over-done and prone to skip ahead to something that is not necessarily what I want, rather than answering the specific query and working through with me as I prefer.

Yes, enormously so although "default 5" is also just not a high bar to clear (non-thinking 5 is similar quality to 4o, 5t is slightly better than o3 for most use cases other than "I want to run the 300 most obvious searches and combine the results in the obvious way in a table", where o3 still is unbeaten). 5T does seem to additionally be tuned to prioritize sounding smart over accuracy and pedagogy, and I haven't managed to tune the user instructions to fully fix this.

But yeah. Big difference.

I'm not a frequent enough LLM user to say how much of this was solid improvement vs luck, but my experience with free ChatGPT 5 (or any current free model, for that matter) versus paid GPT-5-Thinking was night vs day. In response to a somewhat obscure topology question, the free models all quickly spat out a false example (I'm guessing it was in the dataset as a true example for a different but similar-sounding question), and in the free tier the only difference between the better models and the worse models was that, when I pointed out the error in the example, the better models acknowledged it and gave me a different (but still false) example instead, while the worse models tried to gaslight me. GPT-5-Thinking took minutes to come back with an answer, but when it did the answer was actually correct, and accompanied by a link to a PDF of a paper from the 1980s that proved the answer on like page 6 out of 20.

I followed up with a harder question, and GPT-5-Thinking did something even more surprising to me: after a few minutes, it admitted it didn't know. It offered several suggestions for followup steps to try to figure out the answer, but it didn't hallucinate anything, didn't try to gaslight me about anything, didn't at all waste my time the way I'm used to my time being wasted when an LLM is wrong.

I've gotten used to using LLMs when their output is something that I can't answer quickly myself (else I'd answer it myself) but can verify quickly myself (else I can't trust their answer), but they seem to be on the cusp of being much more powerful than that. In an eschatological sense, maybe there's still some major architectural improvement that's necessary for AGI but still eluding us. But in an economic sense, the hassle I've always had with LLMs is their somewhat low signal-to-noise ratio, and yet there's already so much signal there that all they really have to do to have a winning product is get rid of most of the noise.

If you know the right prompt, you can get the models to leak OAI's profile of you. That includes usage stats. I believe I'm now at 95%+ GPT-5T usage, and almost zero for plain 5. The only time I use it is by accident, when the app "forgets" that I chose 5T in the model picker.

For any problem where you need even a modicum of rigor, I can't see a scenario where I wouldn't pick 5T over 5. If I need an instant answer, I use Claude. The free tier lets you use 4.5 Sonnet without reasoning, but it's still solid.

I will admit that I have barely used 5, because I gave it a few tries, found it barely better than 4o, and never touched it again. I just like 5T too. It has a bit of o3 in it, even if not quite as autistic. I really appreciate the lack of nonsense or sycophancy. 5 is far from the Pareto frontier on any aspect I care about.

I am more than happy to field what you think is the hardest programming query you can come up with through 5T, ideally one that free ChatGPT can't handle.

It's more of a technical question, but here goes: "I have two Kerberized Hadoop clusters, X and Y. The nodes in both clusters have access to two networks, A and B, I think this is called multi-homed clusters. Right now everything uses network A, which is the network the DNS server resolves hostnames to. I need to keep intracluster communications and all communications with external hosts on network A, but communication between the clusters (e.g., cluster X reading data from cluster Y) must happen via network B. How do I set up my clusters to achieve this? Please include all relevant configuration options that must be changed for this to work."

https://chatgpt.com/s/t_68ecbb45a2b08191af89ddb956c1236e

Thanks. As expected, it misses several configurations that are critical, like hadoop.security.token.service.use_ip.

That is unfortunate. I shared your feedback, and it acknowledges it as an important omission and also provided additional configuration options it missed the first go around:

https://chatgpt.com/share/68ecf793-909c-800b-b56f-cedc5c798eaf

And this is why you have to know at least as much as the LLM to ask it advanced questions. "Good catch! You are absolutely right, you have to clamp the vein or the patient might die. ☠ If you want, I can prepare a step-by-step surgery checklist with detailed instructions."

More comments

For a person with maximum love for others and maximum love for wisdom, these things being chief enjoyments superseding all others, is there ever a scenario in which the most moral decision conflicts with the most hedonic desire?

In Classical philosophy, this question is generally framed as "should the philosopher engage in political life", where he can maximally help his city but at the cost of cultivating wisdom. The simple answer is generally no, because the best way the wise man can help others is making them wiser, and some of those he teaches will go out and help the city themselves (and much better than if they didn't have his teaching).

In a mathematical sense you can't simultaneously maximize two preferences unless they have a perfect correlation of 1.

Suppose we give this person a choice. Option 1 will make others very happy and well off and prosperous. Very very happy. It's basically a lifetime worth of doing good in the world. But will cause this person to lose all of their wisdom. They will be unwise and make bad decisions the rest of their life. The total good from this one decision is enough to make up for it, but they will sacrifice their wisdom.

Option 2 will not make people happy, but will make the person very wise in the future. They can spend the rest of their life making good decisions and making people happier via normal means, and if you add it all up it's almost as large as the amount of good they could have done from Option 1, but not quite. But they will be wise and have wisdom.

The kindest most loving thing to others is to choose option 1. The most hedonic desire for a person who values wisdom in its own right in addition to loving others is Option 2. Depending on how you balance the numbers, you could scale how good Option 1 is in order to equal this out against any preference strength.

U(A) = aX_1+bY_1

U(B) = aX2+bY_2

Where a and b are the coefficients of preference for loving others vs loving wisdom, X and Y are the amount of good done and wisdom had in each scenario. For any finite a,b =/= 0, this has nontrivial solutions, which implies either can by larger. But also for any finite a,b =/= 0 you can't really say both have been "maximized" because one trades off against the other.

If you specify that for this person the maximally moral impulses produce ‘max enjoyment’ ie max hedons, then tautologically not?

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