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PaperclipPerfector  25d ago (text post)   3558 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 13, 2026

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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The "holdout juror" in the Clancy case is now apparently fully doxxed.

This is disturbing to me. The whole case was disgusting enough due to the fact of three toddlers being strangled to death by their primary caregiver, but to have the murderer's pink-clad supporters able to pervert the course of justice is a serious crime as well. There's no way the harassment of the juror doesn't affect the next jury.

The message seems to be that "a woman, ever wonderful, should be able to do as she wishes and have her words treated as 100% truths, even as she uses her freedom to literally murder all her offspring." She has over 1 million dollars waiting for her in a fundraiser.

How much more will it take for people to start recognizing feminism as a real problem? There is almost a stench of mass psychosis around this movement now.

IIRC the Floyd trial had juror intimidation. That was way more important and disruptive but nobody remembers it.

The Rittenhouse trial famously had news people running red lights while tailing yhe jurors.

How much more will it take for people to start recognizing feminism as a real problem?

That's not really the question. Everyone knows. Even the feminists.

The actual question is "how much more will it take for non-state actors to organize and physically block expressions of feminist power". And that's a much more difficult question to answer; the last generation that had any real reason to has died and they were the ones that created this problem in the first place.

I don't see how the people who created this problem are the ones with reasons to block Feminist power. It's trivial to find recent charts about young men being anti-feminist. Are the studies fake?

The people who will age into being beneficiaries of feminist power are the ones that need to deal with it.

Men were that way in the beginning of the 20th. It's Her Turn.

He had no legal expectation of privacy to begin with. But yes it's very chilling to harass a juror over giving the wrong verdict.

Also maybe raising $109k$175k in a GoFundMe will be enough consolation for the next holdout jurors.

He had no legal expectation of privacy to begin with.

He should. The jury system was very obviously not designed/intended to go up against hordes of angry activists trying to intimidate jurors into voting in favor of the mob.

Also maybe raising $109k$175k in a GoFundMe will be enough consolation for the next holdout jurors.

Wow! That's almost a 1/6th of what the murderer got!

Come now, that’s hardly a question.

How does it not qualify as a question?

It strikes me as a rant with a rhetorical and fairly presumptuous question imbedded. Is feminism really the issue here? How do you define that term to reach your conclusion?

Medical/neuroscience question for those of you with domain expertise.

It's well-established that the "clock speed" of a person's brain runs very quickly in their youth and slows down as they get older. This is why children's perceived sense of time is so much longer than adults': I'm sure you remember sitting in the back of class in primary school willing the clock to tick just a little faster, but nowadays you sit down at your desk at 9 a.m. and before you know it it's already lunchtime. Many people independently report a sensation of perceived "slow motion" when they find themselves in intense life-or-death situations, which is likely due to the same effect: your body produces massive amounts of adrenaline which temporarily jacks up your brain's clock speed.

Years ago I noticed a potentially related phenomenon. Back when I was a much more avid listener than I used to be, I would often listen to music first thing after waking up, before I'd even finished drinking a cup of tea. I noticed that songs I listened to at this time of day would sound like they were being played at a higher tempo, compared to listening to the same song later on when I'd woken up fully. My theory is that, as my brain hasn't fully woken up yet, its clock speed is marginally reduced (compare an old computer which runs a little slowly for a few minutes after a reboot), causing my perceived sense of time to temporarily speed up until I've fully woken up. The effect is subtle enough that I wouldn't really notice it unless being exposed to a stimulus whose perceived duration I'm already familiar with (i.e. a song I've already heard). And sometimes I get the opposite effect, where a song I've heard before sounds slower than I expect it to. Maybe this is a product of my brain's clock speed having increased, if I'm exerting myself physically?

Is this theory in any way neurologically plausible?

I've noticed a different one recently. The Doppler effect is caused when a moving object emits waves, and the position of the object (and hence the changing position of the source of those waves over time) causes the wave's perceived frequency to change over time. The pitch of a motorcycle engine appears to rise as it drives towards you, then falls as it drives away from you; the light of stars moving away from the earth exhibit a redshift.

On Saturday morning I woke up at 8 a.m. to run a half-marathon. I was tired and hungover, and listening to a favourite album I'd listened to several dozens of times before. In addition to changes in perceived tempo I described above, I noticed certain points in the album where the music actually sounded out of tune. (For reference, I have perfect pitch and can reliably identify the pitch of an individual note, play a song by ear or identify the key of a piece of music.) This definitely wasn't an error on the part of the artist, nor an encoding artefact (it's the same set of FLAC files I've been listening to this album on for nearly a decade, and I've never noticed anything sounding out of tune before). Any disruptions to perceived tonality had dissipated by the time I got to the halfway mark and began my return journey. This suggests it's a psychoacoustic effect caused by fatigue or being hungover.

The "changes to perceived tempo" thing is straightforward: reduced neural clock speed -> time seems to pass faster (and vice versa). But this change in perceived tonality is much odder. Why would a reduced clock speed affect the perceived pitch of a note, in addition to its duration? A computer that's running slowly takes longer to carry out computations (up to and including the display's frame and refresh rate), but it doesn't systematically make every pixel a few shades darker. And it isn't even happening globally: it's not as though the song was recorded in E major, but subjectively sounds as if it was recorded in E-flat until I've woken up fully. It sounds out of tune, meaning my brain is misinterpreting the pitches of certain notes but not others.

Any ideas?

I had no idea "clock speed" was different in youth vs old age. I always thought the reason youngsters experience time differently than older folk is because of humans' (or animal brains, really?) general logarithmic perception of stimuli.

In Psychology class, they taught us as a general rule that you would need to add 10% of extra weight to your weightlifting to feel a difference, as opposed to a fixed amount like 10 lbs. That is to say, the human brain reacts to percent-increases rather than fixed increases.

As such, 1 year is a long time to a young person ("high percentage of their life so far") but a short time to an old person ("low percentage of their life so far")

I think most of this is just memory. To kids, things are newer, so more is memorable. Looking back a day packed with memories will feel longer than an unmemorable one.

They've actually specifically tested the adrenaline effect. Skydivers given watches did not feel the seconds were passing any slower, but then looking back they did feel that time slowed down. Skydiving is memorable so this also points to the memory hypothesis.

That said, I have noticed differences in clock speed too, and think you're onto something. Dead by Daylight skill checks are purely timing-based, and at night it feels like they move at least double as quickly (half as much time to respond) as in the morning for me.

Dead by Daylight skill checks are purely timing-based, and at night it feels like they move at least double as quickly (half as much time to respond) as in the morning for me.

I assume you mean because you're more sleepy at night compared to the morning?

Yeah and generally worn out. The next morning skill checks feel like they're moving in slow motion.

One possible explanation that comes to mind is that this is some neurological effect of variation in your glucocorticoid level, which exhibits circadian fluctuations. Cortisol for example, probably the most prominent and well-known glucocorticoid, typically peaks when you wake up and then decreases throughout the rest of the day.

Obviously there's not too much research on the phenomenon you're describing but this study measured the effects of glucocorticoid levels on pitch-discrimination, and it turns out there is a positive correlation between the two, with higher glucocorticoid levels leading to higher perceptual sensitivity regarding pitch. I would not be surprised if the out-of-tuneness you're perceiving in the morning stems from exactly this; in the early morning when your cortisol levels peak you may have a greater sensitivity to slight microtonality or pitch fluctuations in the music you're listening to. Hell your brain may even be perceiving how wrong most music inherently is, since strictly speaking every note in equal temperament tuning is slightly out of tune and we only use it because trying to get perfectly tuned ratios between notes creates annoying enharmonic gaps. Also most music, apart from those that use pure sine waves, will possess many timbral harmonics and inharmonics that are not in tune at all.

This seems like the most likely answer.

I don't think your clock speed hypothesis explains why you're hearing things differently. I'm not extremely well-versed in the mechanics of auditory perception, but I don't see how differences in the subjective experience of time would impact the immediate experience of an auditory phenomenon. Perhaps you'd remark that an entire album was over faster than you anticipated, but literally perceiving individual songs as faster-tempoed seems unrelated. I don't believe the auditory cortex communicates much with the time-keeping areas of the brain, though I'm open to convincing.

Also, it was my understanding that older adults perceive time as faster because their lives have less novelty, more routine, and that individual years are lower in proportion (i.e. 1 year as a 5 year old is 20% of your life, 1 year as a 50 year old is 2% of your life). I'd be very interested in seeing the research discussing neurological explanations.

Another thing that crossed my mind is the cortisol awakening response. It seems like it could be worth investigating, even if I have no plausible hypothesis for how it could be affecting you.

No clue why you are experiencing different tonality. I wonder if it has anything to do with altered memory states after waking, where you're hearing the song and perceiving it sounds differently than you remember because your recall ability is worse, for example. Have you ever experimented during these instances? Next time it happens, maybe pull out a piano and see if you're hearing those tones differently, too.

The Doppler effect occurs due to wave peaks/troughs arriving at your sensor faster or slower. It’s only going to be affected by starting frequency and relative motion.

I think it’s more likely that you have some other sensory interference, like rushing blood or ringing, which changes during the day. For all I know the water content of your skull changes its frequency response. If your sinuses are stuffed you’re gonna get some weirdness.

I know the phenomenon I'm describing isn't actually caused by the Doppler effect, I was just using that as an example of changes to perceived pitch.

My wife wants me to tape something. I go to the packing tape roll. Naturally someone has come along and abused it such that the strip isn't ready and on the guard. Instead it's compacted into itself such that even finding the edge requires specialized lighting and a keen eye.

I wrestle with it. It fragments in every direction. There is no way to get the entire thing up and off the roll, but in time I manage to consign enough of the recalcitrant bits to oblivion that a whole stretch rises up and off the spindle.

The teeth do nothing. The tape is infinite and invincible. No combination of the cutting edge and brute force are enough to cause it to tear. Any amount of yardage is wasted attempting to get it into working order.

I manage to extract a couple of inches, make sure that the remainder is well-situated such that this won't happen again, and make the minor repair.

My wife wants me to tape something...

I've never found that it holds on the holder. Instead, I always foolproof it by folding the edge over and taping it to itself (sticky to sticky), creating about a 1/4" 'tab' that can be used to reset the next time around. It's never failed me.

Yes, this is my go-to as well. Still trying to convince everyone else to do it.

The teeth usually work on a specific diagonal motion. Not that much force, I just sort of pull it in different combinations of “down” and “side” until it catches.

Of course, I can’t rule out the possibility that your tape has mutated, acquiring resistance to slashing damage. Try blunt weapons next time.

Sounds like a clear packaging tape, those are of variable quality and get worse with age. We use a lot of FrogTape painter's tape, electrical tape, and good old duct tape, and those all work as advertised.

Any experience with reinforced paper packing tape, like 3M 570? On one hand, it's like 3x the price of regular clear packaging tape. On the other, regular clear packaging tape seems designed to make your life miserable.

Yeah it's just old. And near the bottom of the roll.

3m 8959 is your friend. Bi directional, glass fiber reinforced, extremely good adhesion once pressed properly. This is tape that should have "and stay put" as its moto.

Get a tape "gun"/"pistol" dispenser?

I only buy bargain basement home depot brand tape dispensers and never have this problem. Are you storing them in the sun or something?

Do the religious people on here actually believe in Christianity? Like do you actually believe that Christ rose from the dead, Garden of Eden, Jesus is the son of God, the Trinity, virgin birth, etc? Or is more Deism and you like the community from going to church? I have a hard time believing most adult converts i.e. JD Vance actually believe these things, but I'm curious if I'm wrong here.

Yes….?

If your model of the US is one where most educated practicing and professing Catholics don’t really believe it, you’re very wrong. Now of course, you can give some side eye to politicians, but if your assumption is that we all are mostly just larping, no.

I don’t have theory of mind for an educated person in the 21st century who believes in the Garden of Eden. My reaction is like Dawkins to Mehdi Hasan when Mehdi says he thinks Mohammed flew to heaven on a winged horse and split the moon. I know there are people who believe it, but I’m incapable of understanding how. I don’t want to rehash New Atheism either. I am mostly skeptical of adult converts, especially former rationalists and new atheists. People born into it I actually understand somewhat. I’ve read apologetics too like mere Christianity, and I just don’t get it.

Model the Christian God as a superintelligence, and the physical universe as a simulation. Then drop the usual model that any reality below the observable one should be assumed to work the way the observable one works. Consider that, if there were a deeper substrate reality under this one, you know nothing about how that reality operates at all, and none of our assumptions about the function of the universe necessarily obtain.

That's all fine at first, but doesn't it collapse into "Nothing is comprehensible, so believe whatever you will."?

I can take the universe as a senseless or even contradictory accident, or I can take it as the deliberate creation of some higher order, fine. But making from that the leap to the benevolent God who cares about each of individually, to an afterlife, to Jesus the Son of God, or any other specifica of any given faith, I can not.

Uncharitably it all seems like wishful thinking. The desire for there to be an actual purpose and place for us, and not just brief and pointless struggle against inevitable obliteration. I get that desire, and how it could capture the mind and make it believe. I get that it's probably healthy and prosocial. But I can't quite get myself to think it true.

What I keep circling back to is this - If there were a God who cared about each of us indivdually, who speaks to us, he'd do so unmistakeably, impossible to overlook or misunderstand. Not through vague signs, interpretations, exegeses, the words of supposed son and and prophets handed down through two millenia of misrepresentation, mistranslation and lost context.

It all seems too flimsy and accidental, too much held together by the transparent desire for God to be so. So maybe there is a superintelligence that spawned a simulation. But I don't hear it talking to me in any language I can understand.

That's all fine at first, but doesn't it collapse into "Nothing is comprehensible, so believe whatever you will."?

I am pretty sure that all humans do in fact believe whatever they will. That is, Belief formation is unavoidably a product of acts of the will, of choices made.

I used to think that beliefs were formed at least somewhat deterministically: you accumulate evidence, and the weight of the evidence eventually forces your mind down a channel. Then I spent a couple decades arguing logically with people, and realized that humans do not actually work this way.

Near as I can tell, there are three ways to form a belief:

  • You can accept (or reject) a belief proposed to you by others uncritically. This is a willful choice.
  • You can examine the proposed belief based on evidence. "Evidence" is an infinite class, and not one of the smaller infinities either, so it has to be pruned to a vanishing fraction. This pruning is a choice. Then it has to be weighed, and the metrics of the weighing are a choice. Then you can either draw a conclusion or go looking for more evidence, and this is also a choice.
  • If you want something deeper, you can use Axioms. Axioms have a shape, and some sets of evidence fit within them, and others don't, so this provides a more rigorous way of selecting and pruning evidence. But there are infinite axioms, and while you can have interplay between evidence and axioms, you still have to choose both your axioms and the evidence to test them against, making it, again, a willful choice.

People speak of motivated reason. But we reason for reasons, to accomplish some goal, and so it seems to me that all reason is motivated. This does not mean that reason is useless, only that its usefulness has an observable upper limit. It seems to me that those aware of this are better able to operate within those limits than those who believe their reasoning is not motivated, that their beliefs are not choices but rather deterministic machinery. One of the best ways to lose the ability to make good choices is to cement the belief that you aren't making choices at all, but are only a set of gears grinding out the mechanistic results of cause and effect.

But making from that the leap to the benevolent God who cares about each of individually, to an afterlife, to Jesus the Son of God, or any other specifica of any given faith, I can not.

Are you looking at this as a set of facts that compel belief mechanistically, or as an option that can be chosen? If the former, then I'm confident you will never find it, since it doesn't exist for this or any other belief. If the latter, the furthest I'd say is that it is clearly possible since I've done it myself, but whether it seems like a good idea to you is a very different question and one I obviously cannot answer.

What I keep circling back to is this - If there were a God who cared about each of us individually, who speaks to us, he'd do so unmistakably, impossible to overlook or misunderstand.

My theory is that compelling belief would violate peoples' ability to choose to love or not love him freely. I do not expect this theory to be compelling to others, though.

Not through vague signs, interpretations, exegeses, the words of supposed son and and prophets handed down through two millenia of misrepresentation, mistranslation and lost context.

I don't think the texts have actually been misrepresented, mistranslated, or had their context lost. I would rather not sidetrack into a tangential issue, but the short of it is that, from what I've observed, the evidentiary basis for this sort of argument was generated by the same intellectual cultures that gave us the Sokal hoaxes, Professor Arday, and all the other fruits of the Academy, and by similar methods.

It all seems too flimsy and accidental, too much held together by the transparent desire for God to be so.

I believe in God because I want to believe in God, straight up. When I didn't want to believe in God, I didn't believe in him. Belief in God is an Axiom, and axioms are chosen, not compelled. I appreciate that there's a ton of cultural baggage and associations that say it isn't supposed to work this way, but in perfect honesty, I think it's the cultural baggage and associations that are wrong. I've had versions of this conversation a number of times here, and I always emphasize the same point: I am not under the impression that I am going to convert my opposites to Christianity, but I really would like to get people to take a serious look at how beliefs are formed in the general case, both because I find the question fascinating, and because I think it provides significant insight into a lot of otherwise-mysterious aspects of human behavior.

Are you looking at this as a set of facts that compel belief mechanistically, or as an option that can be chosen? If the former, then I'm confident you will never find it, since it doesn't exist for this or any other belief.

This reminds me of Claude Shannon’s information theory. The idea is about sending a message. Before Shannon, you might think of sending a message as mere translation: you encode a message into a medium and send it, then the receiver receives it through that medium and reconstructs it. However, Shannon flips the perspective. Instead of viewing it from the sender’s perspective, he views it from the receiver’s perspective. If you already know the message, why do you even need to receive it? The receiver has to guess what the message is.

And guessing is different from translation. Translation can be done mechanistically: you already know the thing and simply replace one representation with another. Guessing begins with not knowing. There are multiple possibilities, and one of them has to be selected.

Translation naturally gives rise to an impression of objectivity and completeness. There is a singular truth, buried in the world itself, waiting to be excavated and laid bare for others to admire. The worldview of God.

From a human perspective, knowledge seems closer to guessing. Of course, “guessing” here does not mean choosing randomly. I do not quite know a better word for it, and perhaps I do not fully grasp the idea myself yet. My impression is that it makes more sense to see knowledge as both the question and the answer, not just the answer.

I will just add that a hugely underrated aspect of belief formation is your friend group and social circle. (Thankfully a professor of mine mentioned this to me relatively early in my life, and I have been blessed in some other respects as regards my career and geographic placement).

Who you are around shapes who you are, including your beliefs and your moral values. Your friends and whoever you spend time interacting with control your own personal Overton Window. Certainly many people are capable of withstanding the compulsive power of Overton Window but it's not generally a bet you want to take or a position you want to place yourself in. Bad company corrupts good morals. And you make a choice as to whether or not you spend time with bad company.

I am able to drop the usual model that any reality below the observable works the way the observable one works. Humans are probably incapable of understanding how the universe truly works. I don't think that's a controversial way to model the universe.

But then why the Christian God? I can get to A, but I can't go from A to B.

I suppose the way I'd put it is that, in my view, He's got a good pitch. That is, I find the deeper claims of Christianity map well onto the world I observe: things like sin and its consequences, What it has to say about how humans work, what is necessary, which things remain constant over time, etc. It promises things that I want, and in my experience it delivers on those promises in tangible ways in the material world. The arc of my life diverged markedly for the worse when I became an Atheist, and diverged markedly for the better when I became a Christian again. I don't expect my personal experiences to be persuasive to people who are not me, but they are very persuasive to me.

But that merely provides evidence for the idea that Christianity has significant pragmatic value for ordinary people navigating their lives and for societies organizing themselves, something which even atheist thinkers have been freely acknowledging for a while now.

But to tie this to OP's original question, you'd have to somehow demonstrate how these benefits imply the truth of the various historical and metaphysical claims Christianity makes. This is IMO very hard to do, especially given that the same psychological benefits are often believably claimed to be enjoyed by the practitioners of other, mutually incompatible religions as well.

As with many other atheists/agnostics with a sympathy towards Christianity, my problem is that I see the wholesome effects of dedicated Christian practice on an individual and societal level, I can even fully entertain the idea that there is and will never be a secular project with the same effects, at least at scale, but when I get to the part where I try to believe in the whole religious complex of ideas I inevitably run into a brick wall made out of serious scholarship on the Bible, early Church history and the surrounding historical sources, the non-specific/non-Christian/universalist nature of the strongest philosophical/theological arguments for the existence of God, the weaknesses of the theological arguments for a specific/historical version of God, and the plethora of presented evidence of similar epistemological strength for other, completely different religions that I'd have little principled reason to reject if I were to start accepting the equivalent Christian arguments.

If Rationalism is systematized winning, and Christianity has systemized "pragmatic value"/winning...

things like sin and its consequences

What exactly are the consequences? We've had this discussion before and you never really made it clear. I see people succeeding all the time despite sinning, and I see the virtuous suffer. The only time I see sin consistently punished in this life is when the sin is against someone who can strike back or has a patron who can. Otherwise, sin away - perhaps you'll pay up in the world to come, but I see no evidence that you will in this life. Why is that wrong?

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”. The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing. But ye'll have had experiences . . . it begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps criticising it. And yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine.

From personal experience, embrace of sin observably eats the self away even while you are still living. I could see myself becoming noticeably less human over time, more wretched, more insectile, ingrown in a miserable spiral of decay. And the reverse was true as well: pursuing Christ made me more human, allowed me out of myself in ways I had not been able to achieve while chasing appetite and pride, bitterness and vanity. I left Christianity because I believed it was making me miserable; as an atheist, I grew considerably more miserable, and eventually the contrast between my own life and the lives of my Christian family members grew too stark to ignore. I returned to the church, and my life now is incomparably better.

You must see how that just sounds like "separating from family made me feel worse". Those whose Christian family was, in fact, the miserable part of their lives, or those whose family was not religious at all, would have different experiences.

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Would you mind going into more detail on the return to Christianity? Not necessarily "how the arc of your life changed" (though if that's not too private, by all means), but more what got you to step back through the door? It seems all so strange in the particular to me that I find it unbelievable. Why Jesus at all? Why was he born there? Why the crucifixion? I don't expect a theologian's answers, but I'm trying to give the flavor of why it seems so strange in time and place and detail to me.

It's pretty impressive how the Catholic Church was able to survive as an institution for almost 2000 years, far longer than anything else currently extant in the Western world.

That's about all I can come up with.

But then why the Christian God? I can get to A, but I can't go from A to B.

Might as well pick something. Christianity isn't what I picked, but I get it.

What did you pick? If you are willing to share, of course

Nothing organized.

Religion is a difficult thing for me. I've never been able to square Christianity's Message with its Commandments.

If our assumptions based on the observable reality don't work for higher realities, then that should signal we can't derive how/if God works from what we see in our world. No matter how much evidence there is in favor of Christianity, it provides no truth value.

If our assumptions based on the observable reality don't work for higher realities, then that should signal we can't derive how/if God works from what we see in our world.

Say rather, you can't derive the mechanics of higher realities from observation of lower ones, and this is a point that most people theorizing about stacked realities appear to miss.

But God is not a mechanism. If a willful intelligence in a higher reality wants to talk to you, it can. If it makes claims about your reality, you can compare those to what you observe of your reality. If it tells you things about the higher reality, you can choose to believe it or not, and the perceived accuracy of its statements about the reality you are in can lend some degree of evidence for trust to operate.

In any case, what is "truth value"?

If a willful intelligence from a higher reality actually talked to me, as you're correct to point out it could if it wanted, my questions towards Christians and interrogations of the truthfulness of their faith would be much fewer.

(Allegedly divinely-inspired words of mortal men, "signs", feelings and vibes are no proper replacement for a conversation in my book. If it wanted to talk to me, it could talk to me.)

Are you familiar with the atheist arguments that God's relationship to us could not possibly be loving, because it's based on coercion through threats and bribes? In my view, there's a pretty solid argument that it has to be this way for our choice to be freely made.

Interrogation of truthfulness is a good thing; my main objection is that most people I see attempting it seem to me to be doing it poorly: strict Materialists incapable of recognizing breaks in Materialism, for example.

You could argue that any relationship built on communication with a higher entity would necessarily be one built on coercion, sure. But without communication there is no relationship. When one can't be sure if he's speaking with God or with the echoes of his own mind refracted through religious culture, where does freely made choice even come into it?

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Is this supposed to make him more or less credulous of Christianity?

More, I think. Have you seen a "new atheism" analogue for Simulation theory, Singularitarianism or the Doomish? I observe that a lot of the objections to theoretical violations of Materialism do not appear to be principled. There's a pretty noticeable gap between "do I have to believe this" and "do I have to not believe this", and a lot of human thought observably lives in that gap.

There’s no shortage of New Atheist styled critiques of everything from AI millenarianism to Yudkowsky’s lifestyle choices. You can find them here or in the NYT.

Simulation theory is bizarre and counterintuitive and not, I think, all that widespread. SBF tried to cite it and people (correctly) went, no, you’ve still got to give the money back. Drawing an analogy with Christianity isn’t exactly flattering.

Simulation theory is bizarre and counterintuitive and not, I think, all that widespread.

If this were a conversation in the general population, I'd agree. Maybe the rationalist stock has diluted somewhat here as well, but I've argued some of the points straight from the Sequences in the past. I maintain that the intellectual history of Rationalism shows that Materialism can break down and people mostly don't notice, much less ask "People just pretend to believe this, right?".

I…sure, I guess.

That’s not a particularly compelling argument for adopting another dualist belief, let alone a specific one.

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Simulation theory is bizarre and counterintuitive

Is it? How so?

Well, first you’ve got to consider the possibility. Our computer-literate, sci-fi-reading crowd probably has an easier time with that than the average Boomer.
Then you have to distrust all your senses, something which has been a sticking point since at least Descartes.
And you’ve also got to accept that you aren’t special.

Not that any of these make it impossible, but Christianity starts to look like an easier sell.

More comments

There are more Americans believing in literal young earth creationism than who go to church every week.

Maybe that's the difficulty - you have only encountered the weakest versions of Christianity. Most educated Christians for most of history regarded the first 11 chapters of Genesis as myths that present theological truths about our identity as humans in relationship with God. Reading the Garden of Eden as something that has to be literally true or else all of the Bible and Christianity is false is something that developed relatively recently.

Origen:

I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance and not literally" (The Fundamental Doctrines 4:1:16 [A.D. 225]).

Augustine:

"at least we know that [the Genesis creation day] is different from the ordinary day with which we are familiar" (Genesi Ad Litteram, AD 415).

Also St. Augustine:

It not infrequently happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of this world, about the motion and rotation or even the magnitude and distances of the stars, about definite eclipses of the sun and moon, about the passage of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, of fruits, of stones, and of other such things, may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian. It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are. In view of this and in keeping it in mind constantly while dealing with the book of Genesis, I have, insofar as I was able, explained in detail and set forth for consideration the meanings of obscure passages, taking care not to affirm rashly some one meaning to the prejudice of another and perhaps better explanation.

With the scriptures it is a matter of treating about the faith. For that reason, as I have noted repeatedly, if anyone, not understanding the mode of divine eloquence, should find something about these matters [about the physical universe] in our books, or hear of the same from those books, of such a kind that it seems to be at variance with the perceptions of his own rational faculties, let him believe that these other things are in no way necessary to the admonitions or accounts or predictions of the scriptures. In short, it must be said that our authors knew the truth about the nature of the skies, but it was not the intention of the Spirit of God, who spoke through them, to teach men anything that would not be of use to them for their salvation.

That said, it's not like there are no miracles either. There are books of the Bible that consider themselves to be histories, some that consider themselves to be biographies, some that are poetry, some that are advice. Each book needs to be read according to its genre. For example, this is an interesting look at how an event in 2 Kings shows up in the historical record of surrounding nations.

Most educated Christians for most of history regarded the first 11 chapters of Genesis as myths that present theological truths about our identity as humans in relationship with God.

That is not true.

It is true that denominations holding to traditions which predate, roughly, 1650 almost unanimously hold that the first eleven chapters of genesis do not have to be interpreted literally(although they also do not condemn such a belief). But the average educated Christian a thousand years ago believed the stories were completely literal(granted, they weren’t that far off from the contemporary scientific understanding of events either). The dissenters were mostly people like Augustine who held non-literal views but would be categorized as creationists today.

I hope I didn't give the impression that I thought all Christians knew about evolution and the big bang since the 1st Century. Of course St. Augustine thought the Earth was created in a spectacular way. If I recall correctly "science" at his time thought the Earth was created in Spring and the Genesis account didn't indicate that (or something like that I can't look it up right now), which is why he wrote what he did about following the science instead of treating the creation accounts as literal.

But it is true that the average Christian looked to the first 11 Chapters of Genesis for allegorical, theological truths primarily, and a description of the actual beginning of the Earth secondarily. Same with the book of Joshua, it was primarily seen as an allegory for the importance of excising sin from the soul, and only secondarily as an actual historical record of something that happened. And this way of reading the narratives is not a post hoc rationalization in the face of evidence that should have disproved it, but rather just the natural way it's been approached applied to our present knowledge.

Not actually true- up until the development of scientific evidence for evolution and an old earth, most Christians, including the apostolic churches, took those passages completely literally. It wasn't dogmatically required, but, like, Matins of Christmas talks about the earth being 4,000 years old at the time of Christ. The Byzantine calendar takes the same assumption. This was the mainstream assumption in 1800.

I think we're taking past each other. Venerable Bede wrote:

"The battles recorded in Holy Scripture are not left to us merely as records of ancient bloodshed, but as lessons in spiritual combat. The enemies that Joshua was commanded to strike down without mercy are the very temptations and evil desires that rise up within the soul. To make a covenant with the enemy is to yield to vice; to put them to the sword is to mortify the passions through spiritual discipline." — Thirty Questions on the Book of Kings, Question XI, Venerable Bede

The purpose of Joshua is not merely to record ancient bloodshed, but it was recorded as scripture for the a more allegorical purpose, in this case for spiritual combat. I can pull quotes from Origin, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Bernard of Clairvaux, etc that say the same.

Likewise, the beginning of the book of Genesis provided a thought provoking, textured, allegorical recounting of the origins of man. Everyone saw that there were two, contradictory accounts of the origin of man in the first two chapters. The purpose of handing down these chapters was not to present an accurate account of history but to present a Biblical anthropology. Most commentary on these stories focus on the relationship of God and man presented in the stories as perennial spiritual truths. They were also taken as the best account they had of the beginning of the human species.

And yet the dominant strains in the U.S. have a much higher regard for literalism. This is not a hallmark of logical consistency.

I think once one is five or six schisms removed, one shouldn’t get full credit for citing St. Augustine.

...I am not in schism with St. Augustine. I'm BFFs with his mama.

And the point is that the dumb form of Christianity is relatively recent, local, and not representative of Christianity, so if someone intelligent converts they are not necessarily going into the dumb version.

That's probably a true model, however. Most Catholics regardless of education are nonpracticing and only partial believers.

Right about non practicing Catholics of course. But mentioning Vance OP seemed to be asking whether practitioners actively believed it.

Best guess estimates is that there’s about 25% of practicing Catholics who don’t intend to believe much in the way of catholic doctrine, and this definitely applies to many democrat politicians, which we know because they’ve said so.

It’s not implausible to me that VP Vance could be in the same category with opposite political valence. It’s not the explanation I’d go with.

Eh, I tend to give Vance the benefit of the doubt because he converted from evangelical Protestantism. If he had merely been chasing clout for the "smart people" version of Christianity, he'd have gone to one of the mainline denominations - Episcopalians for most snobbery value but they probably would all have turned green and had a fit of the vapours at the very notion, so one of the Lutheran or Methodist liberal churches. Bill Clinton is Baptist, but American Baptist, the northern and more liberal sibling of the Southern Baptists. There are progressive Baptists, and one James Talarico is doing his best for the Democrats in Texas by being a (liberal) Presbyterian (heavy on the liberal, less so on the Christian as anything stronger than "Jesus wants us all to be nice" doctrines).

That is not how the American elite works.

It's probably true that the Episcopalians wouldn't have taken him, but the Lutherans are not known as a convert church. A convert to Lutheranism would probably look suspicious in American political context, even. Becoming Catholic is a sensible career decision for an aspiring member of the conservative elite- although staying Lutheran or Jewish or Mormon might be acceptable, converting over would not be. These are ethnic religions in America. His real alternative was eastern Orthodoxy, which is far smaller and lower profile(and would probably be regarded as eccentric kinda Catholics by most Americans anyways- including by professional sociographers).

an aspiring member of the conservative elite

Who would still not be Catholics (the working class religion of the Irish, Italians, Poles, etc.) but more likely Episcopalians, Catholicism-Lite but with Anglican class 😁 Look at St John the Divine in New York, with its list of famous funerals, or the National Cathedral in Washington - that's an Episcopal Church building, not a Catholic one. The Episcopalians have been influential amongst American elites out of all proportion to their numbers.

Lutheran churches may still have strong roots in national churches, but a move upwards from being a redneck Fundie to a progressive Lutheran? That would help in political ascension, reassurance that you're not going to wipe your boots on the tablecloth or spit on the floor.

Though possibly I'm looking at this through a British Isles lens, where Margaret Thatcher moved from Methodism to Anglicanism as she rose in the Tory party.

Yes, you’re confusing America and England. Anglicanism is a liberal elite religion here- establishment but very much not appropriate for the right wing of the Republican Party. Catholicism covers the whole class spectrum in America and the (relatively small) liberal wing is still more moderate than the episcopal church.

I want to register that I think this is wrong. Catholics have as good or (I suspect) better networking in the halls of political power than Protestants, very strong institutions, and they are accepted on both sides of the aisle. If you are a member of a Protestant mainline denomination Protestants will quickly ask "PCA or PCUSA" (or whatever the equivalent is for that denomination) and with Catholics unless you go to Latin Mass or something, just being Catholic isn't necessarily a political tell.

Going to Latin Mass isn't really a political tail either, unless you're trying to present yourself as a democrat. Desantis and Vance both do, and Abbott has some ties. Mike Johnson even hosted a Latin Mass, and he's not Catholic.

It's unclear whether JD Vance really believes in Catholicism, I'll give you that- but he did embrace the most high demand and relatively low prestige version he could find, so...

I believe 100% in the literal truth of the dogmas of the faith. I believe our God was born of a virgin, the highest created being, died and rose from the dead, and is literally and truly present in the eucharist. I believe in miracles, guardian angels, demons, purgatory, and the four last things. I am not a convert, but nor did I grow up religious.

You're not the Clavicular, are you?

Clav just posted about searching for deeper meaning in life... https://x.com/Clavicular0/status/2099036763696288248

We're through the looking-glass here, people.

Yes.

The Resurrection? Yes.

Jesus is the Son of God? Yes.

The Trinity? Yes.

Virgin Birth? Yes.

Garden of Eden? That's the "yes, but" one. Literally a garden etc.? No (but the apple pun is too good to give up). However, that we had First Parents, that they were the first true (ensouled) humans, and that we lost our relationship with God through misuse of our free will (probably but not limited to disobedience as pride was doing a lot of work there too)? Yeah. But here we're getting into the senses of Scripture and how to (and how not to) interpret Scripture. Sometimes you should take it literally, sometimes not, and the questions are where to make the distinction.

The fun one there is "Original Sin - yay or nay? transmissible or not?"

If I were writing it or gaming it out, I’d say that The Fruit Of Freewill Misalignment broke something epigenetic in the brain, and accepting Jesus is a package deal that includes the Holy Spirit standing in for it as long as we live.

Normally yes, but if I'm binge drinking while depressed, I tend to argue with myself whether all I really believe in is Aristotle's Unmoved Mover or alternatively that double-predestination is the way things work and I am a reprobate, damned from before time and existence.

Yes, literal bible, young earth creation etc, the whole gamut.

Uh. Why?

This is a genuine question. I cannot personally imagine what it feels like to believe some of those things. To think “yes, the Earth is only a few millenia old” and not feel a deep-seated confusion at the contradictions. I’m not trying to rehash the early-2000s smugness debates, but I really would like to know how your experience differs.

I can at least model how other people experience faith, even though I’ve never felt it particularly compelling. But YEC? Specific dogmas? Alien to me.

This is a genuine question. I cannot personally imagine what it feels like to believe some of those things. To think “yes, the Earth is only a few millenia old” and not feel a deep-seated confusion at the contradictions. I’m not trying to rehash the early-2000s smugness debates, but I really would like to know how your experience differs.

You just posted a big denial-ish of most of evolution/human behavioral biology.

The presence of nonwhite people has not changed the character, traditions, even the political landscape of the area.

But that could only be true if they are there in very low number.

Obviously I believe you genuinely believe this, and that you are wrong and that your system can't survive contact with high quality enough logic or evidence. Nonetheless, you have contact with lots of humans every day. How much contact do you have with abstract geology?

The only difference between being wrong about HBD and being wrong about the age of the Earth is that one has more practical applications in daily life but the direction of what normies around you say about your wrongness or rightness differs (practically it is reversed). If you are insulated to consensus statements then it is very easy to hold any belief in this square depending on your other personality inclinations.

So anyway you probably know what it feels like to believe wrong things (as do I, probably, in some other domain) but maybe you don't know what it's like to have a majority of random people disagree with you? Well I know what that feels like so I guess I know what he feels like despite not sharing his geological theory.

Why is that a big denial?

I think Clavicle was making a lazy, shorthand version of the argument. He doesn’t have numbers for the TX Indian population (it’s less than the Lizardman Constant). He didn’t show an example of failed assimilation. He just pointed at brown faces and said, hey, look how spooky this is! I’m sure he has his reasons, but this is awfully sloppy, and I can criticize it even if I agree with the model of human behavior.

In my experience, the presence of Indians and Hispanics has not in fact destroyed Texas culture. We’ve remained quite firmly American. Republican, even. I don’t know where our clavicular lives, but it sure looks like he’s formed an opinion based off one Twitter photo.

Now, I do think we disagree on the possibility of assimilation. Your link doesn’t appear to say anything about interbreeding, only that certain European populations performed and still perform better than others. Would you say that all those groups have failed to assimilate to American culture?

It also suggests that such groups can’t have assimilated because they don’t vote “like the rest of White America does.” This is obviously inane. I almost suspect that the author isn’t actually American; he’s ignoring the massive regional splits which have existed (and shifted) since the founding of the country. When the absolute whitest states in the country go solid blue, something else is obviously at play.

So yes, I think that cultural assimilation absolutely happens before genetic assimilation. It’s happened before and it is happening with Asian and Indian and Hispanic populations. I don’t see how this contradicts anything about “evolution.” People are more than their genes.

Your link doesn’t appear to say anything about interbreeding, only that certain European populations performed and still perform better than others. Would you say that all those groups have failed to assimilate to American culture?

Because they act differently from one another due to genetic reasons insofar as they have failed to interbreed appropriately.

I almost suspect that the author isn’t actually American;

IIRC he's Southern and the subtext is the wops and greaseballs (I'm being comedic here) never assimilated to that, which they didn't. And neither did the Scandinavians, have you seen Minnesota? And the Germans had to be forced to stop speaking it and then they interbreeded a lot with the English so that produced a mixture, which I think more or less destroyed or permanently crippled American liberty but I don't know for sure (Germans are admirable in many ways but they have never understood liberty).

It also suggests that such groups can’t have assimilated because they don’t vote “like the rest of White America does.”

That Anglo-German breeding group leans Republican while all the others, including other European strains that have been in the country for over a century, lean Democratic.

I don’t see how this contradicts anything about “evolution.” People are more than their genes.

But how much more? Genes predominate.

So yes, I think that cultural assimilation absolutely happens before genetic assimilation.

Interestingly even if that is true to a small extent, it is the spaghetti effect. Italians are assimilated because spaghetti is American food. I wonder how that happened ... tacos and burritos might as well be now too. Ah, but that's the least heritable and most shallow form of culture. The deep and heritable components require interbreeding.

How do you define assimilation? I think that word does a lot of work in your argument. I think I replied to you before that it was almost offensive how you seemed to water down culture into hats and sports. Then you also kind of imply if immigrants force natives towards their center of gravity that also counts -- you can't call Americans unassimilated for voting for the Democratic party, which heavily relies on non-legacy American votes, for example. Because everybody knows that party, and spaghetti, and fajitas are as American as Thomas Jefferson.

There are lots of YEC people. Mathematically, there are more of them than there are regular churchgoers. DFW is full of people believing it; there’s a creation museum in, I think, Carrollton. ‘People believe this’ is a thing you’d have to be willfully ignorant of, not simply something you never run into. Filter bubble effects might be real, but you work at a defense contractor in DFW.

Oh, I’m sure I know some. I don’t understand them, and I’m certainly not going to interrogate them about their mental state in person. Pretty sure I already lost one friend by telling him that UNSONG was comedy.

I didn’t know there was a museum like that in Dallas. My “favorite” is the one in Glen Rose, also known as Fossil Rim. No prizes for guessing what they’ve found there.

Ah yes, thats thé exhibit on where man walked with dinosaurs- there’s the proof(human and dinosaur footprints nearby). It also has a variety of dinosaur stuff which is fun for little boys regardless of their(parents’) opinions on the age of thé earth.

Why not?

A book claims to be the inspired word of a God who cannot lie, I see the options as you can either believe it is from beginning to end, you can decide you above everyone else who has approached this text are the true arbiter of what is and isn't God's word, or you don't believe any of it because a falsehood in the text invalidates the claims of the text.

I can and have learned about other traditions or explainations that differ, whether thats reading the Epic of Gilgamesh's flood account, other faith's creation accounts, or other interpretations of the same scriptures, or naturalist explanations of origin of life.

But at the end, I've made my choice, maybe not perfectly, but its mine.

Suppose I write a book of mixed sensible life advice and myths, then claim it is the inspired word of a God who cannot lie. Which of the three options would be the most sensible approach to such a book?

Yeah, I take option 3. What I struggle to understand is why you go for 1. It feels to me like the worst of the options, but obviously that’s not the case for you.

Which option would you say applies to Catholics?

you don't believe any of it because a falsehood in the text invalidates the claims of the text.

It's not really falsehood singular though, is it? How do you square the infallible word of God with the dozens if not hundreds of factual errors contained within the Bible?

Hypothetically, if this planet wasn't the first life-bearing planet God ever made, and it wasn't made literally from nothing, I think it is possible to have a young Earth without invalidating scientific dating methods.

But I am far from an expert on scientific dating methods.

If it was made from nothing it could easily be created to look like an older Earth too.

With God, all things are possible, and He sure does occasionally work in mysterious ways.

I would just rate that as less likely.

Yes. "Christ rose from the dead" is a very believable claim, just on the historical evidence - the rest of the core claims of Christianity are not particularly hard to believe if you believe that (e.g. if Christ rose from the dead then He certainly was not an ordinary human; thus believing that He is the Son of God, was born of a virgin, and are coming back again as He claimed aren't very difficult to swallow).

The one exception would be that while I tend to believe in a ~literal Garden of Eden, it's not really skin off of my nose if the Genesis account(s), not being written for 21st century scientists, was not intended to be interpreted as 21st century scientists would prefer to interpret them. (Notwithstanding this I toy with ideas that harmonize the Eden account with what 21st century scientists have deduced about the nature of early man, but that's more because I find it interesting than that I need to understand everything written in Scripture to believe in it.)

I'm starting to think that if "Christ rose from the dead" is something that historical evidence supports, despite all the other evidence to the contrary of such things being possible, then it is not that I should believe in the return of Christ more, but that I should believe in historical evidence less - including other areas of history.

It being impossible is the whole point! If people could just rise from the dead all the time on their own then it wouldn't be a big deal! Why is the objection to miracles "but that isn't what physics allows?" That's how you know it's a miracle. It's no surprise to the Gospel writers that it's impossible, that it was impossible and happened anyway is what made it paradigm-changing!

Also the point of Jesus healing people. He even said that His healings were given as proof He could forgive sins on the cosmic ledgers.

In McDowell’s Evidence That Demands A Verdict, the author flatly states that if we discount all Christian traditions and writings, we’d still find it historically attested that a Judaean man was known in the region as a miraculous healer, was executed by the state, and his thousands of disciples were convinced to the point of martyrdom that he rose from the dead and promised them likewise.

Like it or not, things God does non-deterministically are anecdotes and outliers, not to be included in the How Things Work “general revelation” dataset.

We also find it historically attested that a man in the 1800s has declared that he talked to an angel, wrote a new holy book and convinced millions of disciples to take what is, in plain terms, a blatant heresy of the dominant religion seriously.

Thankfully, USA is not ancient Rome, so the Mormons weren't yet widely tested for their capacity for martyrdom. Yet this is a modern example of how easy it is to become a prophet and found a religion. Extrapolate it from 200 years ago to 2000, with corredpondingly spottier reporting, and the story of Jesus of Nazareth doesn't look that out of place.

Not that high of a bar. It’d cover half the charismatic Christian spinoffs which ran afoul of the law. That’s just in America; go back before the Reformation and I bet you could find all sorts of martyrs.

The American cults have historical attestation in a culture of free press and newspapers, in a country with continuity of government, which has never been invaded. That’s the low bar.

The skeptics were also immediate (within the lifetime of the “prophets”) and covered each sketchy detail of e.g. Joseph Smith’s story.

Precisely. If you had Roman levels of communications and records, we’d have much less material on Smith. Self-proclaimed prophet flees across country, murdered by a mob. Followers remain dedicated enough build a city in the desert.

One man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens.

I think you missed the part where I don't believe that it happened.

I think what you end up finding if you adopt this approach is that all of reality becomes, to varying degrees, less comprehensible. It also makes the cherry-picking problem much worse.

People who generally evaluate historical writings as more-or-less accurate +/- the usual human margin of error and bias and then put their finger on the scale when anything supernatural happens are arguably cherry-picking what they want to read, but at least they have a methodology to it and you can agree on a certain level of ground truth (e.g. most non-Christian historians don't deny that Christ or Paul existed, for instance).

Whereas if you just insist that all historical evidence is downright bad, any pretense of methodological criteria can quickly go out the window and people can just cherry-pick what they like. You might think that the end result here is merely being more reserved about making historical claims, but in real life I think it ends up in weird places like believing in Great Tartaria.

I wouldn't insist that all historical evidence is bad. But from what I have read, an average layman does believe popular history more than they should. There's this "historical evidence on Sparta was largely written down by Sparta's political opponents" factoid that I recall of note.

There's this "historical evidence on Sparta was largely written down by Sparta's political opponents" factoid that I recall of note.

I would disagree with this, personally. The historical evidence we have on Sparta was largely written by foreigners in opposing or post-Spartan states, yes, but very often by foreigners who sympathized with Sparta for domestic political or philosophic reasons - as sympathizers of the aristocratic elite, Spartan 'virtuous oligarchy' appealed to them as contrast to Athenian democracy. Xenophon, who wrote The Constitution of the Lacedemonians, even defected to Sparta rather than return to Athens. A more accurate parallel would be somewhere between Tacitus' Germania and the tendency of Enlightenment-influenced writers to idealize Chinese government (I recall Bertrand Russell still gushing over China's rational and virtuous political system in the 1920s...).

I recall Bertrand Russell still gushing over China's rational and virtuous political system in the 1920s...

Historical political organisation with the imperial examinations, which he compares favourably with other premodern political systems -- it isn't unreasonable to see some merit in the qualified Mandate of Heaven compared to the less-qualified divine right of kings, and even a flawed meritocracy compared to none at all. In comparison to earlier sinophiles, his support appears to be more muted.

[...] no doubt, as a modern system, the "Eight Legs" deserve all the hard things that he says about them. But in the fourteenth century, when one considers the practicable alternatives, one can see that there was probably much to be said for such a plan. At any rate, for good or evil, the examination system profoundly affected the civilization of China. Among its good effects were: A widely-diffused respect for learning; the possibility of doing without a hereditary aristocracy; the selection of administrators who must at least have been capable of industry; and the preservation of Chinese civilization in spite of barbarian conquest. But, like so much else in traditional China, it has had to be swept away to meet modern needs...

He also recognised the terrible corruption in Chinese politics in the 1920s, though he uses this kind of as a mirror to criticise European imperialism and some parts of modernisation. In any case, I don't think he was under the impression that the anarchy in the late-Qing and Republican eras was good for Chinese society.

I find that in his writings on China he tends to be more generous (arguably excessively so) towards Chinese society rather than its political systems, though; and in his private letters you can see some of his frustrations while living and teaching in China.

Very interesting! I have not actually read The Problem of China, I'm going off memories of Skeptical Essays, which was much more inclined to make throwaway rhetorical comparisons of enlightened China against the brutish West.

The Problem of China isn't any less fawning of the Chinese compared to those essays (I suppose you were recalling the [Eastern and Western] Ideals of Happiness), but I think this is informed in large part by Russell's anti-imperialism and syndicalism/anarchism.

See again in The Problem of China:

The corruption and anarchy in Chinese politics do much less harm than one would be inclined to expect. But for the predatory desires of the Great Powers—especially Japan—the harm would be much less than is done by our own "efficient" Governments. Nine-tenths of the activities of a modern Government are harmful; therefore the worse they are performed, the better. In China, where the Government is lazy, corrupt, and stupid, there is a degree of individual liberty which has been wholly lost in the rest of the world.

I would hardly call that a glowing endorsement politically!

There's this "historical evidence on Sparta was largely written down by Sparta's political opponents" factoid that I recall of note.

Sure, I think careful scholars are cognizant of that sort of thing.

Early writings on Christ are interesting because we both have early writings from Christians (who mostly didn't profit much by believing in Christ as per their own writings) and writings from neutral or hostile third parties.

I haven't read as much of the early writings from and on Christians as I would like, but from what I can tell the pro- and anti- Christian writings often read exactly as you would expect, e.g. the Christians are writing about church discipline, doctrine, and defending their beliefs as intellectually legitimate and their opponents are calling them gullible retards from first principles.

I get the impression that the main difference between second century theological debates about Christianity and Reddit today is that a lot of Christian arguments have remained the same (sans the ones aimed at the pagan gods), whereas "Christ was not the Son of God, merely a magician" or "Christ was not the Son of God since God would never come to Earth as a peasant" have fallen out of favor. "Christianity will destroy our way of life because they are opposed to infanticide and licentiousness" still has some traction though.

Yeah I think if you're willing to interpret the rest of Genesis metaphorically, there's nothing really stopping you from interpreting the Garden of Eden as the pre-agricultural state of Man, and the 'knowledge of Good and Evil' as the spiritual/cultural prerequisite for the creation of agricultural society.

I wish I had a better handle on the current state of archeology (and Biblical studies!) but one of the things that I have found interesting from my understanding of the current state of things is that scientists have found evidence of a somewhat puzzling "intelligence explosion" in primitive man.

Genesis 4 can easily be interpreted as describing the same series of events (and also explains what happened to kick the intelligence explosion off).

My belief is that Genesis was written for its audience in a way that they would understand it, with the main goal being to establish an accurate anthropology and theology - a conception of man's place in the world and their relationship to God - but that this does not mean that it is "mythical" in the sense of being fictitious or made up. I don't think God describing something that happened to premodern tribesmen in a way that they can understand makes it "inaccurate" or "not literal."

The debate at that link is mostly about what may have happened around 100kya, way too early for the Cain/Abel story to work without being full of anachronisms.

Cain vs Abel is a pretty good parable for the conflicts of around 10kya, though, between early agriculturalists and pastoralists. That's a conflict that was still a major issue 5kya (or arguably even 0kya? the Hutu were a farming ethnicity and the Tutsi a pastoralist one...).

I don't think God describing something that happened to premodern tribesmen in a way that they can understand makes it "inaccurate" or "not literal."

I haven't been a Christian for decades now, but when I was (and even still) I always found this to be a pretty easy way to get around the scientific problems with literal readings of Genesis. Jesus regularly talks in parables! Telling a story whose details aren't literally true in order to aid understanding of a deeper truth was like God's entire M.O.! What else would we expect? "Okay, before primordial nucleosyntheis, when the cosmic microwave background hadn't even red-shifted yet, the photons were ... are you following any of this? ... okay, forget it, just write down: 'Let there be light'."

The debate at that link is mostly about what may have happened around 100kya, way too early for the Cain/Abel story to work without being full of anachronisms.

Setting aside the question of whether the archeological timeline is correct, isn't it true that in Genesis you only get to the more recent dates if you interpret ben as "son" and never "descendant"?

Cain vs Abel is a pretty good parable for the conflicts of around 10kya, though, between early agriculturalists and pastoralists.

A conflict that might be relevant to the Jews at the time Genesis was written.

Telling a story whose details aren't literally true in order to aid understanding of a deeper truth was like God's entire M.O.! What else would we expect? "Okay, before primordial nucleosyntheis, when the cosmic microwave background hadn't even red-shifted yet, the photons were ... are you following any of this? ... okay, forget it, just write down: 'Let there be light'."

Yes, I 100% agree with this.

I just think God is sneaky and capable of pulling off multiple levels of truth. In the afterlife we might all be like "oh wow that was all true in ways we didn't even think of evaluating."

Oh, I'm not saying anachronisms based on "100kya doesn't match up with the dates for Cain and Abel", but rather "100kya doesn't match up with the dates for farmed fields existing". IIRC there's some "people in a few places ate oats and seasonal nomads might have helped spread the seeds" evidence around 30kya, and then the real agricultural revolution isn't until tens of thousands of years later still ... and not too surprisingly so. Modern technology is amazing stuff, but I still spare some respect for the cultures who gradually figured out that they could become numerous and well-fed by figuring out how to breed and process and eat massive amounts of grass seeds.

A conflict that might be relevant to the Jews at the time Genesis was written.

I think that's very much the historical consensus, in part because it sidesteps the "how much of Genesis was directly worded by Moses vs written based on intact oral tradition vs written from the point of view of much later writers" question by having been a cultural dividing line for centuries. The initial "agriculturally developed Canaan looks like a land flowing with milk and honey to pastoral Israelite nomads" vs "but you have to learn some of their practices if you want to keep cultivating and harvesting it all" conflict alone would have been enough to set up legends forever, but would surely have died down as a contemporary cultural division, except that there's a lot of marginal land there that wasn't suitable for irrigation, so there was always a subpopulation of pastoralists living around the farmers. It's kind of reassuring that the canonical tale passed down to us was just "the first horrible person was one of Their Team" and not "Their Team are all horrible people".

Oh, I'm not saying anachronisms based on "100kya doesn't match up with the dates for Cain and Abel", but rather "100kya doesn't match up with the dates for farmed fields existing".

Oh, I gotcha. Yeah, I'm never super sure how seriously to take even our best date estimates for [thing], in part because they keep getting shifted around. I have a friend who works in a geology-related field, and he says dating is heavily reliant on assumptions, too. I certainly don't think we have enough geological evidence to rule out "a farm" 100kya, but it does look like you're correct that farming is believed to be much much more recent than, say, stone tools.

But I brought it up more as an example of the sort of thing I find interesting to toy around with, not (obviously) a systematic and well-thought-out theory I have.

The initial "agriculturally developed Canaan looks like a land flowing with milk and honey to pastoral Israelite nomads" vs "but you have to learn some of their practices if you want to keep cultivating and harvesting it all" conflict alone

Wouldn't the Egyptians also be agriculturalists by the standards of the time? My understanding is that the Creation myth in Genesis is thought by some to be essentially a refutation of the pagan creation myths the Israelites were likely familiar with, and it makes me wonder if the Israelites saw the Egyptians in Cain.

(Although interestingly one could argue that Egypt is portrayed fairly positively in Genesis.)

For a fascinating (yet long) set of reads from a rationalist-adjacent substack, you might enjoy this guy's Eve Theory of Consciousness, tackling things like the Sapient Paradox and generally tying myths to anthropology from a materialist perspective. There's nothing about theology in here, and of course the author treats myths the same way you do, as having kernels of truth.

I agree that if one can accept the Resurrection as related in the Gospels, the rest is small potatoes.

But I also agree with @sun_the_second. A miracle of this grade provides evidence against the historical record. How much other, non-Christian mystery hits the same threshold of evidence?

How much other, non-Christian mystery hits the same threshold of evidence?

A decent question - while I am not familiar with any non-Christian mysteries from the premodern period with comparable documentation, I assume there are a lot of non-Christian mysteries with at least similarly persuasive levels of evidence, since I think the supernatural is real and encounters with it are not limited to the Christian tradition.

For instance, I don't consider Michael Shermer's poltergeist-y experience a "Christian mystery" and there's good evidence that it's it really happened (admission against interest, multiple witnesses).

Yes.

In order: Christ rose from the dead (and he'll be back), Garden of Eden is almost certainly not historical (much like Genesis 1-11, for reasons that have a lot to do with the mustard seed not actually being the smallest of all seeds), yes, real, (if this is somehow proven not to be the case I'm going to have a much harder time than I did leaving YEC behind).

Maybe functionally I'm more of a deist? I haven't really found much community from church for reasons that have a lot to do with the second topic, but then again I haven't really looked that hard. I don't really bear many other markers that make it obvious from an outside glance I'm [still] a Christian; you wouldn't necessarily discover that from the way I talk.

I'm not an adult convert, though.

(Actually, adult converts in particular tend to act really weird to me for reasons that, while I think I understand why they act that way, I've never really found success with doing that myself. They seem to observe that God has an active role in both talking to them and shaping their lives. I have come to the somewhat-related conclusion I already possess all the help I'm ever going to receive and as such don't much bother to ask any more, but then that also puts me in a rough spot with these types of people. It's not even really jealousy- though it's not like I'm not- I've simply heard enough "God's plan for you"s to last me an eternity and I no longer want to be around the people who don't understand that, just like how all Rapture analysis is uninteresting naval-gazing since the conditions for its imminence are as trivially true as the writing inside your average fortune cookie.)

the mustard seed not actually being the smallest of all seeds

Have I got a tangent for you to go off on, given the mention of mustard seed!

Ah yes, the mustard seed, smallest of all agriculturally relevant seeds known by name by His audience and famed for its culinary uses.

Yes!!! I was very skeptical for a long time, but yes. I do believe in the core doctrines.

Yes.

Not a convert here, I’m still attending the same church of my youth. Yes, if I had a time machine I’d be gobsmacked if I could go further back than 10,000 years.

I fully believe that Materialist explanations of origins rest on Atheist biases, scientists are often bad philosophers, and God didn’t use random generative processes for everything.

So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up al-Shafi'i's The Epistle on Legal Theory. Backlog moving slowly.

I finished my re-read of Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. I first read them 20ish years ago and didn't remember much about them aside from the Shrike and big group of travelers. Overall I was disappointed and perhaps there's a reason I didn't remember much about them. The writing style was far clunkier than I expected and Fall suffered from the problem where chapters from different characters' POVs slows a novel to a halt. Fall also felt like he was being paid by the word, such as paragraphs describing something in detail that had already been described in detail. I was invested in some of the characters, but once it became a galactic struggle of humanity against the AIs, I mostly lost interest. Like most books involving some time travel, I'm fairly certain it's not internally consistent, but I don't care enough to reread it again and find the contradictions.

Now reading some silly vampire books. First was Coffin Moon by Rosson, which sold me with its badass cover. Solidly B grade but that's all I expected. Now working on The Dracula Tape from 1975, which retells the Dracula story from his point of view and came out a year before Anne Rice's famous vampire POV novel. It's well-written and captures a good "I'm the poor misunderstood victim" tone without much whining. Next will be Stainless by Grimson, which is a noir vampire book from 1996 that was hard to find for a while until McNally Editions issued a reprint.

The writing style was far clunkier than I expected

It's been a few years, but I recall thinking that the prose in Hyperion was pretty good. It's not something most (many?) science fiction authors are very strong in, though, and it may have been a relative observation.

Now reading some silly vampire books. First was Coffin Moon by Rosson, which sold me with its badass cover. Solidly B grade but that's all I expected.

If you're into that kind of thing, I'd really like to suggest the V-Wars anthologies, mostly fronted by Jon Maberry. It features multiple authors, each writing in a shared universe where "vampires" return to the modern world as a side effect of a global pandemic. The premise is a little handwavy, but all the authors do a good job of playing it straight, and they present a visceral, immediate window into how the world would fall apart.

I'll take a look at the first one and see what I think. I might be a little burnt-out on vampires after Stainless. It was brutal and bloody. I'll probably write something more about it on Sunday.

I'm currently reading David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Good Thing I'll Never Do Again. It's quite enjoyable, though I prefer his fiction a bit more. That said, now on my second DFW book, I can understand why his prose is considered a bit controversial. It's purpley at times and his word choice, while always apt and appropriate, does occasionally veer into the pointlessly obscure. Still, he's quite a remarkable author and I envy his ability to distill complex, nigh-indescribable emotions into a few sentences.

I love the title essay from that collection. I can only imagine how mortified the cruise director was catching the reporter who is supposed to be writing a puff piece thats as close to ad copy as possibe chumming the water off the back of the boat with au jus or trying to catch the housekeeper cleaning.

I once took a ride on the Zenith and couldn't help thinking of it as the Nadir.

I agree about his ability to distil emotions into a few sentences. The Kate Glompert description of depression, from Infinite Jest, is the one that made the concept real for me.

I haven't read Infinite Jest yet, so I'll have to take a rain check on that part but agreed. He is very good at writing about ugliness, not in an immediately grotesque and flashy way, but in the small ways ugliness creeps into everyday life under the guise of rationalizations, assumptions, and habit.

Do you think it's worth reading Infinite Jest? Any words of wisdom to someone planning on reading it?

I do, it's up there with Anna Karenina as one of the best novels I've ever read, but I'll caution anyone its not meamt to be a fun read, it's almost like a literary obfuscated novel competition entry, and unlike obfuscaded code, there's no compiler to assist in seeing what was hidden within. If you like his style in essays, I'd guess you'll like it.

The whole book is a exploration of addiction and the effects of addiction, it's lovingly and carefully made but it's often quite ugly. It's also prescient about the neat future in ways that rhyme.

My advice is theres a point where a huge clue that makes it possible to begin to piece together the plot is given to the reader, you have to gut it out until you get there. There are a few more coming after that one, too.

Also, if the Wardine parts are unintelligible, try reading them out loud or listen to them in an audiobook. Imagine a 3 year old is talking.

Read the foot and end notes, the first many are nerdy explanations, but some key plot points or details required to understand them are there.

Good notes, thanks! I'll start it once I have the mental bandwidth to tough it out - right now I'm a bit worse for wear. I might read it on Kindle so I can have hyperlink footnotes, I'm still deciding.

Kindle foot notes were pretty nice!

Does that collection include his account of going to a porn convention? Someone sent it to me and I started reading it, but found it so depressing that I had to stop. I believe the phrase "barely disguised gang rape" appeared in it.

I just checked and that essay is a part of his other collection, Consider the Lobster. I'll get to it next. Honestly, I can't imagine anyone better able to capture the despair of a porn convention than DFW.

I've read that collection and don't remember that particular essay so probably not

A new Bobiverse book "The Infinite Extent" by Dennis E. Taylor came out last week and I really enjoyed it.

I'm a big Dennis E. Taylor fan. I recommend his entire catalog apart from the Quantum Earth series.

I’ll 5 now?

I wonder if I can just read a long synapses of the first 2-3 and get back into it.

I loved reading the first 2 (or 3?) but never kept up with it … him hanging around with his monkey friend was a bit overlong tho)

It's 6 books. The first three form a rough ark featuring the Deltans, the Others, and evacuating Earth. Those storylines are more or less wrapped up by book 3 and Bob specifically mentions he doesn't want to end up "the Bob" again like he did with the Deltans.

ChatGPT should be able to give you a long synopsis as a refresher. You can probably just jump into Heaven's River (book 4) as it's kicking off new storylines and you don't really need to remember too many details from the first three books.

About 40% of the way through The Best Minds. I can already tell this book is going to make me feel sad when I finish it. Fresh out of college, Michael Laudor is offered a prestigious job in Bain Capital, but after a year finds he doesn't really like it, and decides to quit. And yet he's sure that, like the Mafia, Bain isn't an organisation one just leaves: he's convinced they're plotting some way to get him to come back to work for him, and thinks he spies agents of theirs following him. This passes largely without comment, until he accuses his own parents of being Nazis and threatens his mother with a knife, upon which he's committed to an institution. Knowing how the story ends makes it feel like I'm watching a car accident in slow motion.

I'm reminded of Scott's observation that paranoid schizophrenia adapts itself to whatever the sufferer considers evil. John Forbes Nash believed the Soviets were conspiring against him: of course Michael Laudor, a Jew whose family members were killed in the Holocaust, accuses his parents of being literal Nazis. I'm also impressed with how elegantly Rosen weaves in scholarship from various sources to demonstrate that, in the sixties and seventies, the question of whether there was even such a thing as "mental illness" was very much an open one, at least in certain corners of the progressive left. He cites people like Huxley, Zsasz and Foucault who forcefully argued to the contrary. (I was thitherto unaware that Foucault spent a lot of time in gay bathhouses in the US, rubbishing the threat posed by HIV by expressly pointing out how convenient it was that this disease just so happened to overwhelmingly affect gays, drug users and blacks. Uh, yeah dude.)

The Last Kings of Hollywood gifted to me by the same guy who gave me a few other film-related books. It follows the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg from the 60s to the 80s. It's a hardcover copy which I like but means I don't carry it on commutes, so may take a while.

I wonder if the Counting Crows took that line in Mrs. Potter's Lullaby from that book title.

Well Fischer's book came out this year, so it's likely the other way round. But I'm not sure.

Tender is the Flesh - one of the rare books that gives me ‘ the ick ‘ … 40% of the way through and not sure how I feel about it yet aside from thinking if I wrote a book I would write it as simply as this, which I appreciate.

Also reading Lolita (haven’t started) and that book about the tradwife blogger that randomly goes back in time to the 1800’s - about 10% in on that one.

Reading the latter two with my fiance so that’s going to be really fun (mean this seriously not ironically). Been trying to get her back into reading and I love reading all kinds of stuff (schlock)

Still powering through the Mother of Learning. I think decisively removing the antagonist less than halfway into the book was a major mistake. I thought the training montage in Arc 2 was bad, but Arc 3 is much worse, it's just a gigantic training montage with only Zorian's family issues being the only respite. And I don't expect a massive confrontation in the finale, Zach was already stronger than Red Robe when the latter escaped the loop, by the time he and Zach escape as well, the Z duo will be even more overpowered.

Want spoilers?

Nope.

I'm waiting on The Thrice-Bound Fool, sequel to Black-Tongue Thief

What is your favourite national anthem from a country other than your own? (Links are appreciated.) I was always fond of the Russian one.

The Russian one is great. Beyond that I think the French one is also good and the German one is ok.

National anthems are generally pretty trash though. There are plenty of marches or ballads that would have made great anthems but practically universally countries have gone with ponderously slow mediocre stuff with bland lyrics.

The Marseillaise is always a good one. Generally, the older anthems which were big on "let us crush the foe beneath our feet so that their blood flows in streams" are bangers, unlike the modern tendency to be all wishy-washy and inclusive.

let us crush the foe beneath our feet so that their blood flows in streams

An understandable sentiment when the foes are, reportedly, planning to pull your wives and sons from your arms to slit their throats.

Nous étions un vrai pays.

I always find it funny that God Save The King/Queen is generally panned as a national anthem in Britain, compared to Jerusalem, Rule Britannia, or even Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (for the rugby fans), but the Germans managed to remix it into an absolute banger

Hey that's pretty good! Really gotta finish Legend of Galactic Heroes.

I'm surprised they don't go with Land of Hope and Glory

When it comes to sporting events, such as rugby matches, the (unofficial) national anthems are great. Flower of Scotland for Scotland, Land of My Fathers (harder to sing in Welsh) for Wales.

We got stuck with Ireland's Call for the rugby (due to the all-island nature of the team) which is okay, but it's no Amhrán na bhFiann. Which is why Irish crowds tend to sing The Fields of Athenry instead at such events.

Oh that's another great candidate - harder to sing than the others, though, you need a bit of wind in the pipes.

The ancient Bulgarian one - Shumi Maritsa and the Old Soviet one.

Rough translation of the Bulgarian - Maritsa is a river in Bulgaria.

The Maritsa Roars

The Maritsa roars, stained with blood; a widow weeps, grievously wounded.

March, march, with our general! Into battle let us fly, the foe to defeat.

Children of Bulgaria, the whole world watches us; come, toward victory, glorious, let us march.

March, march, etc.

The Balkan Lion, in a titanic battle against enemy hordes, leads us on with wings.

March, march, etc.

Young and ardent, amid the whirlwinds of battle, we are worthy to gather laurels.

March, march, etc.

We are the people who, for honor and freedom, for our beloved nation, know how to die.

March, march, with our general— into battle let us fly, the foe to defeat.

As orchestral music, Il canto degli Italiani

As poetry, La Marseillaise turns the bloodthirstiness up so far that it goes through the "sick and violent"/"actually no, this has to be ironic" barrier multiple times, and I can't help but appreciate this.

People here will know that I’m not the always the biggest fan of Israel, but I am an absolute sucker for any sad song and Hatikvah never fails to make me cry.

Tuva is not a sovereign country, but theirs is the best.

Tannu what?

Exactly.

Does the country have to still exist? If not, then East Germany

Turkey and Ukraine. Hard to pick one.

  • the Soviet Armenian one with its unusual scale

  • Turkey as the pinnacle of the martial ones

  • Israel though Smetana's Moldau is the better version of the melody and the Czechs should just replace theirs with it

  • Taiwan does not stand out on any single quality, but is near the top in every category that I would score national anthems in: it's dignified, pleasant to listen to, the lyrics offer a positive vision for the country, the text is poetic and reflects the national character (with how it is entirely in four-character verse).

Let them shing!

Is it not inevitable that these 'frontier AI labs' calling for regulation are going to get eaten alive by the half dozen big tech companies that have accountants overseeing the nerds? The business case will prevent AI risk, the market won't stay solvent long enough to present X risk.

I may not be educated, but I can sanity check. This stuff is really expensive and when the bill comes due someone who has the revenue to pay it gets the assets.

They are operating on the idea that one of the frontier companies will make a major breakthrough that creates an insurmountable lead. Using customer data and a superhuman AGI they'll be able to immediately move into multiple high profit industries and take over.

The problem they are having is that so far training better models seems to be able to suck up an unlimited amount of money. That was unexpected.

Also the open models have been better at keeping up than they expected. You can fine tune the open models for specific tasks and get "good enough" results.

So they are in a weird spot since there are so man unknown unknowns. There are potentially massive returns. The huge costs are all in training models, so if they cut that back and just run inference with existing models then they can immediately become profitable. They can get to work doing low level speed optimizations on existing models and build out more capacity that way.

Right now they're going for a moon shot, but they can scale back training without being forced to sell of the companies at the risk of losing their leads.

Don't they need to service their debt as well?

They do, but the race is less about debt and more about the capability growth and its effects on revenue. OAI and Anthropic are both printing money. But the 50-100B a year they can theoretically print will vanish in a single year if a competitor leapfrogs them. Their revenue is only sustainable while they remain the only game in town, if open or big tech model competitors like gemini get capability parity, they go from serving inference at 80% margins to serving inference at 2% margins as competition intensifies (At least on API usage billing, consumers are probably more locked in, but still very willing to move on if someone else has a better model for their 20 dollars). Their debt is nothing if they keep leading the pack, everything if others catch up to their leads.

So they can't service their debt if they stop and they can't finance continuing (much longer) either?

They can't service their debt if their revenue falls off a cliff. Anthropic's debt is in the vicinity of 70 billion. Their revenue this year is projected to be a whopping 65 billion (If each quarter is as good as their last one). Their revenue last year was just under 10 billion. See the issue? Those are some very different numbers. OpenAI's debt is probably in the vicinity of 100 billion, but their revenue this year is on track to hit 40 billion. I don't know their rates, but the issue is those revenue numbers could theoretically as easily go to tens of billions as they could hundreds of millions, and those are revenue numbers, not profit. If the industry ends up with mostly comparable models, a race to the bottom on cost could destroy companies. But if the big names manage to hold their decisive advantage for as little as five years, they could well print over a trillion dollars before anyone catches up and begins to drive price down.

But to answer your question, they can service their debt unless revenue falls below well last year's numbers and remains that way. And the only realistic way that happens is serious competition on cost.

First the big tech companies need to demonstrate any kind of competency in building good models for that to be a concern.

Google very briefly caught up with 2.5, but has been a joke since then. Microsoft is all in on OpenAi. Apple have failed to do anything in that arena. Amazon seem happy just to be a cloud provider for other models. Musk is uncertain, he seems to flit between safety and acceleration depending on whatever he sees on Xitter that day. And then there's meta, who at least got a model that could appear in leaderboards this time, but no one's betting on those chumps

I mean thé point is they can just buy these models(and the labs that built them) in a fire sale when they run out of VC money.

I see. I'm not sure what this prediction does for x-risk beyond the simpler "finance bubble bursts and labs collapsed" thesis. Why does adding in a further step where the labs are bought out decrease risk? Indeed such a situation seems like it would increase risk somewhat. In the former scenario, development stops and nothing replaces it, while in the latter there is still big company financing, even if it is reduced by accountants. Plus, the big, founder led companies like X, Meta, and Amazon could easily push big funds past the protests of their shareholders.

But as I mentioned in my first response, these big guys are already invested. Google, X, and Meta are in the race, Microsoft is somewhat there (I don't think anyone knows the precise details of OpenAis weird corporate structure and ownership) and even in China the likes of Alibaba are already players. I would guess in the event of a bubble bursting taking out Anthropic and OAI, Musk or Google would simply push ahead

I have no idea if this is "all part of the plan" for Elon or anything, but I like the idea that his win condition is in NIMBYs making orbital datacenter construction profitable.

Feels like the faction goal of a competitive board game or something.

I'll caveat that it's not clear that a sell-off solves, rather than slows, AI risk; a competitor buying all this equipment at fire sales price might be less interested in building a machine god, but they'll still be interested in building a smarter system and have a lot of spare inference or training equipment to run.

Beyond that, it depends very heavily on what the end situation you expect.

The maximally-bullish case is some form of captured recursive self-improvement producing a massive and deep moat. Claude Fable 7.2 or Kimi 5 or (more likely) some internal specialized model produces a 5x efficiency boost, which makes throwing more processing power at the question economical, which unlocks another 5x efficiency boost, so on. At the more science fiction side of things, this could be new chips that combine FPGA-like re-programmability with ASIC efficiency; at the more plausible you've got software hacks, latency reduction, and conceptual refinements.

The good news from an X-risk perspective is that almost everything going this direction so far has been slow and in hardware, which put some limits on speed, since no matter how good an AI-designed chip or network layout is, logistics takes years. The bad news is that there have been some individual human-driven efforts already in software and model design (changes to KV architecture, MTP/DFlash) already, and it's the sort of space that I'd naively expect smart-enough LLMs to 'beat' humans by brute force. If it can pop off quickly, it will do so in months rather than years, and it will be a big surprise to almost everyone else.

That's not a massive moat, since eventually information (and models themselves) leak or a competitor open-sources them. But five or ten years of selling superintelligence at a tenth the cost of what your competitors are selling 'naive intern' can cover a hell of a lot of debt, as would being able to train smarter models for a hundredth of the price of your competitors. And at the really optimistic (from a business) or pessimistic (from an x-risk) cases, you stop being in a situation where 'revenue' or even 'competitors' makes sense as a question.

The more moderate bullish case is taking existing models and refinements to regulated fields, and getting a steep enough moat that the competitors can't step in easily. Higher education's the obvious option, if not likely huge and fast enough, between the external political pressures and underlying tensions in the business models for major colleges, but there's a lot of space in medicine and compliance that are heavily licensed in ways that could make it very hard for merely-good models to be used. Even some weird cases with general-purpose robotics could end up in a state where use is generally valuable, the liability risk of using sub-cutting edge models is extreme, and thus only the nerds can get business from the big companies.

Optimistically, this could come with a massive demand-side increase -- personalized instruction making everyone able to become experts in a field they find interesting, customized entertainment, productive hobbyist work. The middle case is Nothing Ever Changes despite it all, where we end up with gambling addicts and entertainment dollars redirecting at a 1:1 ratio, or some close approximation of it. Pessimistically, it could be the NSA wanting bulk data processing capabilities, and then 'selling the business' stops being an option: when state actors are a big enough portion of your financial model, your model stops being about finances.

The weakly-bearish case is just selling inference, well. The massive expenditures for training buildouts and heavy overpowered models eventually instead allow things like global prioritization and redirection based on load and spot energy costs, at a variety of different demand levels and latency limits.

((The actually-bearish case is a financial product one, where regardless of whether the hyperscalers are making profits, the book value of their assets drops catastrophically, either because of depreciation scaling or cost of servicing debts or financing existing products makes them sell out. But that's a much more complicated case than it sounds at first.))

If they try to shut it down, could the board just get rid of them? Otherwise, I think you are right. Google and Meta could just hire people who don't care about alignment and pass them fairly quickly. How many weeks/months are they behind Claude and OpenAI?

I think these frontier AI labs are going to be forced to sell by the VC's whose money they're burning for research when microsoft and google are making bucca bucks and these frontier research labs still haven't figured out a way to turn a profit, and the corporate accounting team at these big tech companies will prevent frontier expansion because they don't want to pay for research. AI really is going to be a big part of the future economy, it's not a bubble- but the people who make money off of it are largely going to be the people who already make money off of software, because that's who's figuring out how to monetize it right now(and OpenAI/Claude aren't doing a good job of that), and so they're going to take control of the entire industry among themselves and drastically slow the pace of research because there's no business case in AI X-risk.

AI really is going to be a big part of the future economy, it's not a bubble

Isn't both possible? I definitely think that AI is going to be a part of the future economy, but...houses were also going to be a part of the future economy in 2005. Specifically it seems plausible to me that OpenAI and/or Anthropic are over-invested and they can't figure out how to make a profit before their investor money runway runs out.


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