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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3639 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 23, 2023

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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Can someone redpill me on financial products like options, from the perspective of "how does this benefit society"? I understand why price discovery via supply/demand and markets integrating information is beneficial. What I don't understand is which contributions does a person who buys an option contract make to society, in theory. I want to be crystal clear that this is not a question about morality, I'm well aware that people are free to make contracts and profit. I'm just wondering if there is some benefit to options existing, and I'm maybe looking for some wider navel-gazing about how complex financial products are a social good.

My attempt at answering this is the following. Mind you I'm basically guessing from vague memory that options are a contract that you can buy, which allows you to buy another thing later at a specified price. There is no immediate benefit created by a person who profits off a correct bet he made. That part is zero-sum like gambling. However, there is a benefit when a market for such contracts exists, because it functions like a prediction market. People make real-money bets on how valuable certain products will be in the future. In this way, the options market aggregates information about predictions. This information may be useful to other people who observe the prices, because they can adjust their behavior accordingly. Maybe they are policy makers, for example, who can better stabilize their economies.

Is that correct? Furthermore, is there any simple real-world evidence that this happens, i.e. that people other than speculators benefit from complex financial products in positive-sum ways? For example, does this benefit the overall economy of a country? Does it benefit it in concrete ways so that politicians (or more realistically, economists) there might say, "hey, lets encourage options trading"?

Check out this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedge_(finance)#Agricultural_commodity_price_hedging

The original purpose of futures etc was (and remains) to allow productive sectors of the economy to manage risks: if you're a farmer planning to sell some wheat, you can short wheat to limit your losses in case the price is lower than expected; if you're a baker who will need to buy some flour in the future, you might go long on it in case the price rises. Speculators provide liquidity--they compensate those farmers and bakers when things go south and buffer the losses. Some prediction market component is applied automatically, as some speculators would physically stockpile resources.

Room-temperature and pressure superconductor discovered. It's not peer-reviewed, published, or replicated yet--what do you guys think the odds are that this is legit?

New paper from the Chinese Academy of Sciences proposes that the high-temperature steep change in resistance may have been due to Cu2S contamination. That's nice in the sense that it's a fully honest explanation -- Lee et all's original paper could be entirely measuring real things, no fraud or even measurement goofup! -- but would leave their samples as just weird rather than superconducting. There's still some space for exploration, since the XRDs from other labs pointed more to CuS2 and this doesn't explain the 110K behavior supposedly observed by the Southeast University of China, but it drastically raises likelihood of a prosaic explanation.

Thanks for keeping up with this story!

Replication of the semi-floating behavior, but (very) high (and increasing with decreasing temperature) resistance and evidence of ferromagnetism in addition to unusually high diagmagnetic behavior from a Chinese group. Their theory involves a complex scenario of ferromagnetic (maybe ferrimagnetic?) forces causing the specific half-floating behavior through torque, without much relevant impact from the large diagmagnetic components -- definitely a weird physics thing in general, and doubly so for a compound where none of the input ingredients were ferromagnetic (and many not even paramagnetic: lead, copper, and solid sulfur are all diamagnetic), but not something quite so obviously useful.

I'd be interested to see further experimentation, but it's a big impact in favor of 'weird and genuine thing, but not superconductivity' side. On the other hand, the difference between their temp vs resistance graph and most other replications is surprising : erroneous zero or near zero values are pretty common with resistance measures, but you don’t usually see entirely different slopes, which leaves open questions about contamination.

And another claimed semi-replication by randos, supposedly using a different approach and getting their sample entirely floating off the surface. It still looks a little different than most flux pinning examples I can find, but going to need either someone to scale up meaningful production sizes, or a more specialized lab looking at other traits used to identify superconductivity.

First publicly claimed partial replication of magnetic weirdness in America. Very small size compared to the input materials, and seems weirdly shiny compared to a lot of other attempts, which points to at least a difference in manufacturing.

There are still non-superconducting explanations -- the magnetic measurements could be 'just' extremely strong diamagnetism, and even the efforts to attempt resistivity and critical current measurements from other groups have not been amazing so far. But it at least drastically reduces the odds that this is a simple fraud.

There have also been some interesting failures to replicate.

A claimed Chinese replication including superconductivity... to 110K. Not outside of the realm of other past ambient-temp high-temperature superconductors (though higher than YBCO). This could plausibly represent manufacturing faults lowering max temp, or measurement faults giving false reads of superconductivity

If true. Also starting to see more jokes or grifts.

A claimed Chinese replication at very small scale and low purity showing reaction to magnet, some fascinating theoretical approximations that have give a weakly plausible theory, albeit with many limitations, and a number of failed replication attempts. Manifold's floating 40%+ for replication by 2025; I'm a little more skeptical than that, still, but I'm not sure I'm skeptical enough to sell at those prices.

And a guardedly-optimistic summary from Derek Lowe.

Funnest update of the week so far: lesbian Russian catgirl replication in an apartment, with a pile of scraps. I've no idea how to guess whether this is real or not, but either way it is hilarious.

Yeah I saw that one hahaha. Such a tiny speck floating, it could easily have just been clinging to the needle or something, but I definitely want to believe. If it's a real superconductor, 1) stuff like that should be possible, but 2) why are they not just experimenting using the original materials? Replication (at least, validation of the claims) should be easy with the actual material on hand.

The original protocol is trivial by superconductor (or even semiconductor!) research standards, but it's still filled with a number of individual materials that are expensive, controlled, or absolutely aren't safe to run in an apartment, along with a couple steps that require a long time with uncommon tooling. Iris_IGB's proposed approach cuts out some nasty chemicals and nearly half of the synthesis time; she probably just wouldn't have tried the original protocol at all.

Of course, optimizations only help if it works...

Of course. What I meant was, why not test the original material which the original researchers have already created? I'm dying to get some external validation and true replication could take months/years.

Not sure what's going on at that level. Most people seem convinced that the South Korean lab must be sending out samples for testing, or at least talking in person with MIT-level experts, but outside of saying that it's planned I've not seen much. The sorta people who have big XRD toolkits don't tend to spend too much time speculating on twitter, though.

I'm not reading all that lol (actually I don't know jack about shit when it comes to pixies, it's all magic to me once people start talking about ohms. I'll wait for someone I know with a full fat engineering degree to offer an opinion)

For real though: Those are Korean names and I know they do a decent amount of boring hard physical research there, so I'm upgrading my +-1% prediction to a slightly stronger +-1%.

EDIT: SHIT FUCK SHIT someone who knows about pixies thinks it might be real (15-20%) noooooo my fake internet Nostradamus points

30% that it's legit but a dead end in the sense that this whole line precludes higher currents, 60% that it's outright a fraud or some error motivated by wishful thinking, 10% that this is the beginning of a successful line that ends in viable high-temp superconductors in <20 years.

They have a website, a partially-linked and far more professional looking second paper, and a this video, and this less janky one. It's not obviously cranks coming out of the woodwork.

The Hirsch-Diaz feud and grifting's primed me to expect a lot of process-level-jank at best whenever new claims of high-temperature superconductivity come about, but this looks like it would either have to be incredibly overt fraud, the real thing, or some new electromagnetic behavior that would itself be very noteworthy if not as big a deal (eg, unusually high diamagnetic forces for a lead-copper compound, or even compared to graphites). You get a lot of current and resistance measurement problems with thin films, but the magnetic behavior is something different.

The biggest wierdness is how extremely simple the synthesis is. This isn't the first 'supermaterial' I've seen with the sort of production process that would be too easy for the Applied Science guy, but even if the process is picky as fuck and the yield tiny, these guys have a problem. If it's a fraud, a ton of materials labs will have disproved it by the weekend; if it's not, they're got patents on a material that are going to be Very Interesting to enforce. And not just for the 'you and what army' problems: if this approach works I don't see any clear reasons it'd be the only one.

EDIT: I'm seeing play-money bets around 15-30%, and I'd probably put some petty cash on the higher range, maybe 20-25% real, ~20% intentional fraud, remainder some incredibly specific measurement error or new weird thing. Which probably sounds a little pessimistic, but given how fucky this field's big names are, that's relatively impressed. The corporate stuff is still sketchy, though, and they're looking at indirect-enough measurements that "just amazingly diamagnetic" is definitely an option.

EDIT2: Even if true, I will note that all the critical currents are low so far. May be a production artifact, but if insurmountable would prevent some useful applications, especially if it can't scale up or can't scale up at reasonable costs. Still would be important.

EDIT3: Looks like they have one paper published in a (tiny) peer-reviewed journal on this already, albeit primarily in Korean and looking at lower-if-still-roomish-temps. I've got a low enough opinion on peer review that I don't think it changes much. Sorta thing you might do if trying to bilk naive investors as much as if serious.

Patent-wise, they seem to make some pretty broad claims:

A method for producing a superconducting ceramic compound comprising a step of synthesizing a ceramic compound according to Chemical Formula 1 by depositing a raw material.

A a B b (EO 4 ) c X d

A: (s-, p-block metals) Ca, Ba, Sr, Sn, Pb (lanthanides, etc.) Y, La, Ce or combinations thereof

B: (d-block metal) Cu, Cd, Zn, Mn, Fe, Ni, Ag or a combination thereof

E: P, As, V, Si, B, S or a combination thereof

X: F, Cl, OH, O, S, Se, Te or a combination thereof (a: 0 to 10, b: 0 to 10, c: 0 to 6, d: 0 to 4)

If this is actually real, it seems to cover most related candidate materials. Though of course there might be some alternative method to synthesize it.

If this turns out to be true it will be hilarious, I mean the first room temperature super conductor is an easy to synthesize material discovered by some Korean academics no one had ever heard of before! I mean their website isn’t even working right now.

Oh, yeah, there's absolutely a ton of hilarious stuff going on, including some drama. I'm still pessimistic, but the perversity of the universe trending to a maximum might even work in its favor, here.

Thanks, that's amazingly informative.

I read on this forum some time back that there is a saying in Russia that goes "a man shouldn't be prettier than an ape"

I'm been using the saying, but turns out that it isn't super widespread. I would like to quote it in the original russian. Could some other of our resident Russians tell me how to say it in Russian.

Мужчине достаточно быть чуть красивей обезьяны. It's sufficent for a man to be slightly prettier than an ape.

The meaning is ambiguous - "barely prettier than an ape" is either the upper allowed bound or the lower bound of male beauty.

"Мужчина должен быть чуть красивее обезьяны".

I believe it's supposed to be the «normative bound», that is, a man is ideally slightly prettier than an ape but not by too much as that'd be suspiciously gay.

@TheRealMcCoy you probably heard that from me, sorry if I was unclear.

Is there a term, or a study, or an article you can recommend, for this variety of narcissistic behavior I've noticed recently: the narcissism of pretending that you would be completely incapable of doing something. An illustrative example:

We're all familiar with the tough-guy fantasist narcissism of men who believe that they would have been great on D-Day or at Gettysburg, guys who are cocksure they would have been heroes given the opportunity. We've all rolled our eyes at men who are certain they would have been extraordinarily brave, with no proof.

Lately, I've been rolling my eyes at men who claim they would have been extraordinarily cowardly. Men who say "Man I would have been useless in the civil war, pissed myself and run away LOLOLOL" or "I probably wouldn't have made it off the boat on D-Day."

Because they probably would have been average. If they were drafted by the government, they probably wouldn't have had the immense courage necessary to run away. If they went to boot camp, they would have been pushed through it like everyone else, gotten stronger and learned to do what they were told. In battle, they probably would have followed orders and done what they were trained to do, at a bang average level. Maybe not great, but they would have been within a standard deviation of average.

There's something about this kind of extravagant self-deprecation that annoys me, gets under my skin. It dehumanizes the actual men who did (and continue to do) these kinds of things. It's a cheap effort to claim to be extraordinary, with no effort or evidence.

Wait, you hear this level of self-emasculating, and you’re bothered by the inaccuracy?

Anyway, I think it’s just plain old countersignaling. Especially because

we’re all familiar with

the archetype they’re subverting. No one takes a Navy SEAL copypasta seriously, so there is alpha in taking a relatively surprising position. As this enters the cultural awareness, and becomes a meme of its own, we’ll start to see—oh. Yeah, the counter-countersignal is already getting merchandised.

Charitably, these comments are less self-deprecation and more praise for the heroics or achievements of others. If there's any narcissism, it's in the need to be seen as publicly signaling one's respect, and inability to just say it plainly.

I guess it's in vogue among progressive circles to be a failed man? Look at me, I am non-masculine and therefore non-threatening. I distance myself from masculinity (which is toxic), therefore I am one of the good ones. I don't know what the term for that would be, but that's my guess anyway.

It's not narcissism, it is a cry for help.
These are people who give up on things at the slightest sign of trouble. "I have no spine, and so it is okay for me to give up", is how they justify whatever rut they're stuck in. "I can't quit this job I hate, to start my own company. I can't get in shape. I can't move out. I can't. I can't because I am not like those brave-hearts of WW2 who are dead enough that their superiority over me does not make me feel insecure." It is them allowing themselves to just 'be'. All initiative is for the brave, and in peaceful times like these, they find way to forgive their inaction, as if it isn't a sign of weakness.

Alternatively, it is an attempt at humility. "Yes, I am a highly accomplished person in my field through immense sacrifice, dedication & hard-work. Now, my white-collar elitism naturally lends itself to snark towards blue-collar folk. But hey, the blue-collar workers face real adversity. I could never survive such adversity." It's accomplished people saying, "I have all the social acclaim, so I'll pretend to not have certain traits that blue collar people pride themselves over, so you don't feel intimidated by me." Sometimes it is a real attempt at humility, other times it exists to reinforce your place among the elite.

If they went to boot camp

A lot of men today (including myself) can credibly say they wouldn't have been allowed in or made it through boot camp.

The 40s version of themselves obviously was more likely to have done so have but that version doesn't exist so why center them in any discussion? If I ask what you'd do on the Titanic it's not interesting to swap in a median English male of the time is it?

Finland has a conscription, with a possibility to obtain a deferment, a release or a possibility to do a civilian alternative. The last stat I managed to find was that, in 2016, 72 % of men who had turned thirty at the end of that year had completed military service. In 2008 that was still over 80 %. So at least a large amount of Finnish men are provably capable of going through a boot camp, and probably at least some share of those who chose a civilian alternative would have also been capable of doing it if push came to shove.

You might say they’re overwhelmingly sisu-fied.

It's not quite Weaponized Incompetence, but is possibly related.

I don't know of any studies but I certainly recognize this pattern. I don't think it's any flavor of narcissism. More along the lines of 4-d chess signaling.

I've noticed this type of signaling among more lefty types who want to come off as more "refined" than those brutish right-wing riff-raffs and their reverence for unsophisticated virtues such as courage,masculinity or just strength in general.

Or it could be some sort of costly signaling with the intent of "I'm so secure in my masculinity that I can proudly announce myself to be a pussy and not take a status hit, if anything I might gain status from it!".

I don't know of any studies but I certainly recognize this pattern. I don't think it's any flavor of narcissism. More along the lines of 4-d chess signaling.

Nothing 4D about it: I just don't want to sound like Mark Wahlberg.

Obviously I could assume some version of myself that matches the median person then (of course, I'm not really talking about myself then am I?) but I can't be sure everyone will read it that way can I?

Lossy communication but I assume the instances FiveHour is talking about aren't men making level-headed assessments of themselves and concluding what they (given time machine, not average man of that time) would have done. To me, it seems to come off as more performative.

Except it doesn't work if you're just average, just like crossdressing, its just cringy and annoying.

Just a particularly annoying version of Main Character Syndrome, right? The most likely outcome for anyone dropped into something like D-Day is that they'll behave approximately like the other people and only be remember in the sense that the performance of the aggregate group was remembered. Main characters though, they're valorous or cowardly or otherwise exceptional in a way that stands out.

When I read the D-day line, I assumed it meant “would catch a bullet” rather than “would freeze on the ramp.” Sort of an acknowledgment that he’s not the main character. “Oh, I’m definitely one of the extras.”

Oh, that would be a fair enough sentiment. I read it as not having the courage to get off the boat rather than, "yeah, I'd wind up being the poor sap that eats a bullet before I can even get to the damned beach". Might have been primed by how the post was written.

Yours was my intended meaning.

How the heck do you people program all day without pulling your hair out? I've spent 5+ hours just trying to clone a jupyter lab notebook from GitHub and open it, and good lord even with GPT's help it's like pulling teeth.

You are doing the hardest thing there is to do in programing: Anything other than programing.

Work on a supportive team. They'll have runbooks to help you through it, and if you find the runbook isn't working for you, the runbook author and/or senior engineers will be around to help you through it.

This is enough of a problem that GitHub Codespaces exists, advertised as solving exactly this problem, so it's not just you.

Some of this is just experience / familiarity with the tooling. While I agree with other comments in the thread that for professional development, I'm usually working on the same codebase for a while (and when I do spin up on a new codebase, they're sufficiently used to getting new hires set up that they have written instructions), for working in random open source repos, getting set up is usually a few quick rounds of installing whatever packages it complains are missing at most. And while not universal, a lot of GitHub repos do have instructions in how to get started working in the repo.

For a Python project, it's surprising you need anything more than the latest Python and pointing virtualenv at the requirements.txt file. I assume there were some dependencies that couldn't be installed that way for some reason.

(You mention in another comment that you're on Mac... which I've never used for development but I've fairly frequently heard of Linux devs switching to Mac saying the dev support is close enough to Linux and they like the rest of the OS better... so I assume it's plenty usable as a dev platform.)

I stay away from development whenever possible.

My job is 90% MATLAB. This is worthless for making final applications. It also keeps people from asking me to test it for production or to kuber deez netes. Instead, I get to play around the math and simulations, and cooperate with much more experienced developers when I contribute to a release.

Modafinil, caffeine, nicotine.

Mostly modafinil tbh. Every top developer I work with is on it, or on adderall.

Honestly, it's frustratingly common for it to be a big headache to get a new repo running properly on your local system. I've seen it plenty of times at companies and open-source projects of all sizes. Fortunately, at least companies usually have people who can help you out with initial setup. It's less common with open-source projects - if they had people willing to help newbies, they'd usually have already fixed the problems that make it so hard.

Anyways, not to get on too much of a tangent, but you're not crazy and it is painful. You can work through it though, and it'll get easier to onboard into new projects with time. It's also usually a lot less painful to actually do work in a project once you've got your local setup sorted out.

Some intellectual work is novel and intricate - at an extreme, research mathematics, but including coding. Other work is more rote, just application of potentially hundreds of relatively simple ideas - think filling out paperwork, law, medical practice.* The 'plumbing' part of programming - getting your environment set up, figuring out why you misconfigured dependency 37 and your build is failing with a new message, docker kubernetes terraform cloud yaml CI - is often the latter. You just need to know a few thousand distinct facts. Having a good command of the fundamentals is critical - what is a folder and a file, what is a program, what are users and file permissions, what's a packet, how are files laid out on my operating system, what's a git, what's a http... And then the facts specific to whatever frameworks/languages/systems you're using - what's my system package manager, my language package manager, do they conflict, what are rust crate features, what's a python wheel, what directory is pip installing to... The latter especially becomes a mess. In the past decade it's gotten a lot better, but that's come with new tools and ideas to learn.

So as for 'how you do it', you just need to pick up the thousand different facts. Read docs, follow tutorials, and figure out why each step works. And once you've done that for one or two things, it'll be easier to pick up new stuff, because you'll have a sense of why things work the way they do.

I'm curious what your issue specifically was, and if you got it to work?

*this is a continuum, there's no difference in kind, just lower and higher levels of complexity, which is philosophers have had trouble with in the past. Coding you have trouble with would be rote to someone incredibly smart, and even filling out a form requires a lot of generalization that we just don't notice, like we don't notice breathing or walking.

I'm curious what your issue specifically was, and if you got it to work?

Cloned the repo, but can't get jupyter lab to have the right PATH to that directory. Still working on it unfortunately.

Autism and passion.

As much as I love my fellow programmers, all of the best programmers have a degree of obsessiveness that allows them to revel in the annoying bits. Env setup is genuinely the worst part of the job, but the type of annoyance never goes away.

Look at the best computer scientists. Even among the stereotypically nerdy STEM fields, mathematicians and physicists are the only 2 groups that appear more 'autistic' at face value. Silicon Valley could not have been made about any other people. And it is a lot closer to a documentary, than feels comfortable to admit.

it's like pulling teeth.

It's a feature not a bug.

meta joke: I am currently on the Motte procrastinating because our envs are currently broken, and I don't feel like being the one to fix it.

When it comes to the programming I do for fun, I have no problem because I can program however I want, no code reviews, no deadlines, no scrum, no poorly spelled two sentence long ticket descriptions pretending to be a well-described set of requirements, etc...

When it comes to the programming that I do for money, well metaphorically speaking I do pull my hair out. I am somewhat burned out being a professional programmer at this point and I really am only doing it for the money. I could use a nice few months off. To be honest I am just driven by fear at this point, I do not want to lose the level of income that I have gotten used to.

I hope that we can both figure out how to pull our hair out less.

I sympathize man. I’m in sales and have been hating my career for years, but the golden handcuffs of high income are real! We are blessed at least to have the opportunity to make money, but it sure has a cost.

This is why docker is so widely used. It's like ctrl-c/ctrl-v, but for an entire computing environment (and there do exist docker containers specifically for running jupyter notebooks).

Getting the development environment running for a project is one of the worst aspects of programming IMO. Some people thrive on it and don't get bothered but for me, it goes something like this.

to fix this dependency conflict just run A B C in your terminal.

Then you find out that running A B C, each comes with its own A's B's, and C's and then they recurse forever. You just pray this is the last time you run random terminal commands from StackOverflow and this time it will work.

On the other hand, using ChatGPT is depriving you of learning the debugging skills many of us from the older days before language models had to earn through suffering but at least we know how to do it without gpt.

Also docker has been a godsend in this regard. Also if you are really struggling with getting the dev environment up, maybe its just because you are on Windows. Things are a lot easier to get up and running on Mac and Linux.

Thank you for illustrating the exact process I followed, in undergrad, as I decided not to pursue software engineering.

Then you find out that running A B C, each comes with its own A's B's, and C's and then they recurse forever. You just pray this is the last time you run random terminal commands from StackOverflow and this time it will work.

After programming for long enough, you get really good at installing software and fixing build errors.

On the other hand, using ChatGPT is depriving you of learning the debugging skills many of us from the older days before language models had to earn through suffering but at least we know how to do it without gpt.

Is this a bad thing? Like why would we need debugging skills if ChatGPT can solve that problem?

Oh and I actually have been using a Mac.

Like why would we need debugging skills if ChatGPT can solve that problem?

Because there are lots of problems where ChatGPT is not helpful or gives outright incorrect information that a layman won't even recognize as incorrect.

Eventually chatGPT runs into the fundamental problem of not having enough context. Impossible for it to debug many issues in medium and large codebases.

Thus my observation that all the examples I've seen of how ChatGPT is supposedly oh so helpful in programming are really examples of what'd be better called scripting.

Good luck getting ChatGPT to write you the required initialization code for ffmpeg mp4 encoder with sensible quality and speed settings since the defaults are utterly braindead (the required code is ~100 lines of largely undocumented structs and function calls).

Because..

A guy who uses chatGPT and knows how to debug is more powerful than a guy who uses chatGPT and doesn't know how to debug.

I know a lot of posters here have some insane timelines on AGI and think any endeavor of knowledge or skill acquisition is useless because AGI will make us all useless tomorrow. Which MIGHT HAPPEN.

But assuming LLM's don't improve all that much in the near future and we don't get the GOD AGI, what I said will hold. It certainly holds in the present.

The people who know how to code are more effective using GPT than those who don't, if anything they reap exponential gains relative to those who don't know "the basics"

More or less every example I've seen of ChatGPT's touted benefits to programming has had little to do with programming and has ended up being just fairly simple scripting.

Infrastructure stuff (like fiddling with repos and dependencies) is boring and frustrating. No one likes that stuff. But if everything is working smoothly and you can just focus on actual coding for an extended period of time then it’s fun.

My experience is that programming is like 98% fiddling with infrastructure stuff though…

What?

You set up the development environment, repositories and libraries once and don't have to deal with any of that until a non-trivial change / upgrade comes up in a year or two.

No?

It's a one-off thing unless the projects you are working with take no more than 2-3 days to finish.

If you are programming professionally (or on large projects), you might work on the same codebase for years on end.

Depends on what you’re doing.

If you’re doing a bunch of short projects in a row, possibly all using different languages and different frameworks etc, then yeah you’ll feel like you’re spending most of your time doing setup.

On bigger, longer-lived projects, there will be longer stretches of time where the infrastructure “just works” and you can focus on the code.

Ahh that's an interesting point, and does make a lot of sense. Perhaps I just haven't gone deep enough in the past to appreciate the nice side of things. Good to know.

How the heck do you people program all day without pulling your hair out?

How kind of you to assume that I still have hair to pull out...

Is religious faith necessary for maximizing happiness in a utilitarian framework? Consider these two thought experiments:

  • Two people are on a deserted island without food or water. Logic tells them that they will surely die, and there is nothing they can do. One of them has faith, the other does not. The one with faith will believe in an ultimately good final destination, and may even believe (in the face of reason) that God will find a way to save him if He so pleases. Of the two dying men, only one man can maximize his happiness in his last days. The atheist, even the most poetic and nostalgic atheist, could not be as happy without a fully fleshed out and trained belief in a final ultimately good hereafter. Maybe he will remember the good in his life, but human happiness is optimal only with hope and desire (the happy man is the man desiring to meet his wife, not the man who remembers the wife who passed away).

  • A man can bear extreme pain with positive feeling if he believes his pain is for a reason. For example, a soldier who knows that his death will save his loved ones and protect his community will die with a certain gladness, which exists in spite of and alongside the pain. Given this, consider a society in which everyone believes that all of their pain and misery is for an ultimate heroic purpose. This is a society in which everyone’s suffering is turned into something positive, and hence a society with greater sum total happiness.

The premise begs the question here, IMO. Reality is a deserted island; there is nowhere you can run to to escape the reaper because he lives inside you (skeleton joke).

I'd say that it is entirely individual. I've seen aetheists shrug off the their inevitable brain cancer end, I've seen Christians kill themselves with stress worrying about loss of kidney function and heart problems.

Is religious faith necessary for maximizing happiness in a utilitarian framework?

No because religion teaches you that many things are outside of your control. I believe that research indicates that having a higher internal locus of control is correlated with being happier.

An atheist can have a trained belief in a final ultimately good hereafter. You can believe that death can ultimately be defeated by humanity. Not in your lifetime but you can contribute to moving humanity in that direction by discovering something that extends the life expectancy of humans (like a vaccine or penicillin). That is your ultimate heroic purpose to get humanity closer to defeating death. If humanity always keeps moving in that direction than death may someday be defeated. You know you won’t physically or consciously live forever but because of your contribution to society a part of you will live on and be part of the reason that humanity was able to defeat death.

Also, it is possible to temporarily chemically achieve states of happiness that are happier than anything that is possible when sober. Or you could achieve non-religious enlightenment by believing you don’t really die (like thinking your real body is somewhere else and this world is just a simulation/dream. You don’t believe that you die upon death, but instead you just wake up somewhere else).

It seems to me this somewhat stacks the deck by making two assumptions:

  1. That this belief has no consequences outside of how the person feels in their final moments, but a lessened fear of death might very well lead to pointlessly shortening your life.

  2. That the consequence in question is positive, but for each man who dies foretasting Heaven, there's probably another who dies in terror of Hell. Similarly, believing your dead loved ones to be damned is probably as distressing as believing them blessed is uplifting.

In general, though, my real objection is that making yourself believe propositions because you benefit from such belief regardless of its truth is extremely dangerous. As the saying goes, once you've told a lie (even to yourself), truth is ever after your enemy. As I wrote in another post somewhen before, deluding yourself for expediency (and I contend that, even if the afterlife actually exists, believing that for any reason other than its factual truth is delusion) is the epistemic equivalent of the naive consequentialist doctor who would kill a patient to save five people with their organs. In the short term, it might work, but on the longer term it will poison your epistemology and make you unable to distinguish truth from falsehood.

Depends on whether the idea of life after death makes you feel better. Not so for me.

I feel the same way, and so arguments like this are puzzling to me. I find the idea of an afterlife incredibly disturbing, and felt that way even when I was a Christian. At the time though, I did enjoy feeling that there was a God looking out for me.

Same. I always hated the idea of living forever, even in paradise. It used to give me panic attacks as a kid. There's an idea that stories about the horror of immortality are just cope because we know we're going to die anyways, so we pretend it's a good thing, but for me it's very real. I have never found the idea of ceasing to exist too frightening (though it's a little creepy), though some people find it utterly terrifying. The only thing that frightens me about death is the possibility that it's not the end.

What about it seems disturbing to you? The idea that it never ends?

That's exactly it. I have a terrible fear of eternity and the infinite. Makes my mind want to crawl into a little hole and shut down.

That's really interesting. Do you like existing currently? We can overthink the meaning of "billions/trillions/quadrillions of years", but the duration is somewhat irrelevant. There's just Now, a moment which all of time passes through, and which I never want to end.

I love existing! But I love existing in this world that I know. Existing in some other form could be terrible and that's very scary to me.

Heaven is essentially defined as perfect felicity, though. And in any case you can imagine some post-life event which does make you feel better.

Sure, but if I'm just making up my own ideal eternal existence and deciding to believe in it I don't know if that really counts as 'religious.'

I'm much more skeptical about the New Atheist "you can have all of the beauty with none of the falseness" view. Been that way for a while now. There are clearly places where a religious worldview would be more comforting.

But you are leaving out all of the downsides here by picking examples with very limited options. What about people who self-deny for no purpose at all, since many of the original reasons for those strictures no longer matter?

What of the people who say the words but receive scant comfort but can't seek alternatives because their culture expects them to be satisfied?

Yep I mean, this is weirdly the framework I took when I decided to look more into Christianity. Strangely somewhere along the way it worked and now I... actually do believe in God for the first time. It's quite confusing and I try not to spend too much time thinking about it.

Can anyone recommend a write up or presentation on the various kinds of cellular phone location information that gets collected and who collects it? For example a cellular company clearly collects some information about your location (since they know which towers you can connect to) but I have no idea how accurate this (does your phone share it’s gos location with your carrier or are they just inferring location based on the cells you are attached to) is and it isn’t clear to me what if they are allowed to sell this to marketers. Also wondering where private companies (such as those referred to but not actually named here https://www.wired.com/story/fbi-purchase-location-data-wray-senate/ ) even collect this kind of data. Is this a case of some game that someone installs on their phone hoovering this information up or are there some other bigger harder to opt out of sources (such as your cellular phone company).

It's... complicated. There are several different categories of information, available through different means and at different levels of anonymization.

  • Cell tower location data, which identifies where your specific SIM card (or eSIM) and cell phone IMEI was, based on the cell signal returns to a specific tower or towers. This information is not especially precise in general -- there are certain situations where the triangulation works just perfectly or a specific tower covers only a tiny area (especially common for subway or convention center towers) that can be a couple hundred meters, but it's usually only good for five hundred meters, sometimes not even that. This is stored by your cellular provider. Historically, it could be provided to police in the United States on a mere request, but Carpenter v. United States in 2018 largely blew that apart, and now requires a warrant (or... uh, parallel construction). Standards in other countries vary. As a matter of law, cell phone providers are supposed to have enough information to connect the SIM data to a specific person who purchased the account (IMEIs are less controlled by law, though in practice they also are usually tied to a seller).

  • Cell signal interceptors (aka StingRays), which operate by spoofing a conventional cell tower for smaller areas, again tying to the SIM (or eSIM) and IMEI. Law enforcement have testified these can be accurate down to six feet, but law enforcement will testify to a lot, and the antenna and location matters a bunch. There's probably at least academic versions that can get within that range consistently, and might be commercial ones, based on more complicated antenna technologies, but it's not clear whether they've been commercially deployed. In this case, whoever operated the StingRay has the data immediately. It's... very far from clear what the legal environment for these things are.

  • Cell phone GPS location data. On iPhone, "find my iphone", on Android, "find my device". This takes the GPS (or, on newer phones, GPS data fused with magnetic, imu, and mapped wifi) on your phone and uploads it to centralized servers at Apple or Google. This is more accurate outdoors and in horizontal space (theoretically within a few feet) than indoors or in vertical space, but it's very precise. Update rate is usually tied to movement. Carpenter /probably/ requires a warrant for police to ask for it, but I don't think the specific question has risen yet. It's also (supposed to be) possible to turn this off on the phone itself, depending on how much you trust Apple or Google. This ties directly to your Apple or Google account, which will have your name and phone number and usually address as a matter of practice.

  • "Advertising Information". The same location services that provide cell phone GPS location data can be accessed by other software on the phone, including user-installed software and sometimes even web browser ads, who can then store the data wherever they want. Anyone selling ads can do it, and they can store the data in any location they want. Location quality varies; apps that are running in the background can send updates with similar levels of fidelity to the official location services, but stuff that gets backgrounded can end up only updating during someone's leisure or workplace time, and some people won't have anything going up at all. In theory, this stuff is supposed to be anonymized -- each user is converted into an "Advertising ID" that's not supposed to be individually identifiable, and should be mixed into groups before buyers can use it to tie an advertising ID to an individual -- but practice varies. You, personally, can buy city-wide scales of this data today; it's usually a couple thousand dollars. It's not clear what the legal status post-Carpenter is, especially since the sellers can probably individually identify a large portion of their database.

  • Wifi data. If you go near a ground Wifi site, you'll expose your MAC Address to it. It's possible (and sometimes easy) to spoof the MAC address, and probably no one has a database of who owns what MAC address, but it's at least theoretically possible. Not very accurate, only tied to the specific access point you're connecting to (or for corporate-run access points, their auth gateway), most devices won't save this at all.

Regarding wifi, another thing your phone leaks wherever it encounters an access point is "do you happen to serve such and such network" in plaintext, all the time Wifi is enabled, on the off chance the access point is part of a campus network where many access points provide the same network. The phone cannot know what bssid to look for so it has to ask. This is all plaintext and can be captured with the aircrack-ng suite and can fingerprint and possibly identify who the phone belongs to. You can probably learn the school, workplace, gym, cafe, etc, that the phone's owner goes to.

That said the last time I tried this was years ago, I'd be happy to learn this was fixed in more recent years.

Wifi data. If you go near a ground Wifi site, you'll expose your MAC Address to it. It's possible (and sometimes easy) to spoof the MAC address, and probably no one has a database of who owns what MAC address, but it's at least theoretically possible. Not very accurate, only tied to the specific access point you're connecting to (or for corporate-run access points, their auth gateway), most devices won't save this at all.

At least on Android your phone randomizes its MAC when communicating with a hotspot.

Yeah, Android 10+ made that a default on behavior, and iOS 14 did the same. I think both defaults to persisting the same MAC address per-network SSID, though, so there's still some potential for tracking depending on your level of paranoia.

Please link me any good analyses of the Barbie movie you've read, be it on Twitter, Substack, or wherever. CW stuff is especially desired.

Just my two cents, because the movie is weird in a way that I'm not quite sure the directors intended. Disclaimer: I enjoyed the film but I think everyone is misreading it, mostly because of the charisma of the two lead actors and their performances.

The Space Odyssey cold open of the children smashing their baby dolls in response to the appearance of Barbie should have clued people off, really. Barbie and Ken are not characters, despite the movie trying to make a gimmick of her ending up in the real world and fish-out-of-water comedy sequences. They don't make sense as characters, and the fact that they have any internal coherence at all is a necessary function for the main narrative thrust of the movie.

The tension in the movie is caused by the fact that Barbie and Ken are amalgams of ideas. Ken is the idea of men as accessories to women. The dramatic tension comes from how that idea is trying to reconcile itself with the idea that men could be fine on their own. This is why people reacted to his arc: they read it as a metaphor for women's liberation, because it's clearly meant to be played this way (even if the bro-patriarchy is an idea that was given to him from outside sources).

The cold open is Mattel saying to the little girls, "you didn't know what you wanted until we told it to you. Before us, toys told you that you could be mothers. After Barbie, toys told you that you could be anything." There's an arrogance to it, in claiming that Barbie is defining an aspirational idea of women. The fact that the movie seems incredibly defensive about this is not an accident - the feminists waged war against the pink toy aisle for years, with Barbie being the main culprit, and a quick Google will dredge up articles from as late as 2013 with mothers asking if it was actively harmful to be buying their girls Barbie dolls.

And then comes The Monologue - an impassioned delivery by America Ferrera playing the mom, who shows the movie's hand. It's a tour de force of bitching, a finely aged whine that complains about the incredibly contradictory and difficult values of what it means to be a woman today. It doesn't make any sense unless you understand that Barbie is supposed to be representative of women. This is why Barbie's neurosis comes from anyway; as an plastic avatar of female identity sold by Mattel(tm), she doesn't know who or what she is anymore because the contradictory demands of modern women and what they're supposed to be are messed up. This breaks the Barbies out of their brainwashing, something I didn't get until I realized it's because they've accepted the contradiction: it's okay if women don't know what they're supposed to be.

(Of course, the monologue truly shoots itself in the foot with the line "I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us." The possibility of, just, well, learning to deal with not being liked doesn't seem to occur. Except for a toy, being liked is everything. A little known fact: Barbie started as 'Lillie', a doll of a sex symbol/gold digger from a German comic.)

One other interesting anecdote: the musical theme of Kendom is "Push" by Matchbox Twenty, a song accused by feminists of popularizing misogynist lyrics. To the point where the songwriter had to explain that it had actually been written about an emotionally abusive girlfriend.

Another: the movie's veneration of Ruth Handler, an opportunist, perennial grifter, liar who avoided personal responsibility at every turn and was indicted on conspiracy charges.

Those articles were from a time when feminists thought women cared about being pretty because they were brainwashed into it. The new Barbie movie comes from a new strain of feminism where caring about fashion and makeup are okay. I don't understand when, how, or why the change happened, but yay?

Your post makes me think the movie could've been truly amazing if the script was revised to say that women are essentially equal in status to men now, but that both men and women feel listless. The movie as it exists implies that women are second class citizens, and the plight of the Kens (so far as I can tell) is meant to be read as "what if men experienced the same existential crisis women so? Wouldn't that be crazy?" But despite the film's bias, there is still a plausible centrist egalitarian reading there. I wonder if there was internal conflict behind the scenes over whether it's okay to portray the complicated nature of modern manhood and womanhood without explicitly saying that women have it worse.

I saw a copypasta on /tv/ that edited America Ferrera's monologue to be about men, and I think if it was toned down to be less incendiary, it would've been great if Ken delivered it.

"You have to be masculine, but not overly masculine that it's toxic. And you can never say you want to be manly. You have to say that you embrace your feminine side which is just as powerful... but you still have to be manly. You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's pitiful. You have to be a boss, but you must never tell a woman what to do. You have to make the decisions but you also have to listen to what women want, which they don't know, before you make a decision that will always be wrong. You're supposed to make time for your wife and kids or you're a cold and distant father, but not so much time that it hurts your career, or you're a failure of a provider. You have to be unselfish and think of others, but you can't be too selfless or people will see you as weak. You have to tolerate women's bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you're accused of being whiny and told to man up. You have to be chivalrous but not so much that it's chauvinistic. You have to be kind to women but not so kind that you're creepy or boring. You're supposed to be strong and confident for women, but not so strong and confident that they feel oppressed or that you make other men angry at you. You have to be romantic and spontaneous but not naive and cringeworthy. You have to take the initiative and make a move without being told to, unless of course your attention is unwanted. Always be grateful for your privilege and feel passively aware that being a man is easier than being a woman. Remember that this is the 21st century and it is time to think of women as equals but also remember that women are oppressed and dis-empowered, so do not think of them as equals. You have to never be too weak or too strong, never be too kind or too cruel, never be afraid or cocky, never be too quiet or too loud. And you must never, ever complain. Because you are a man, everything is easy for you and everything that goes wrong is your fault."

A movie like this couldn't exist today. It'd be pilloried for being stuck 20 years in the past. But it'd be great.

I think a huge part of the negative reaction to the movie as being "man-hating" is due to people with incredibly poor media literacy who seem to think that the filmmakers' farcical representation of Barbieland is a straight-faced endorsement of their idea of a utopia, which I think it pretty obviously is not.

Unfortunately, if you are making media to be consumed by the public, then you must be considering how the public is likely to interpret your media, regardless of whether they live up to your standards of media literacy. If I take a flight to Germany and wave around a flag emblazoned with a certain symbol auspicious to Buddhists, then I’ll likely be arrested anyway despite any claims of benign intentions on my part.

I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ve heard both the “men bad” interpretation and the “it’s actually a satire” interpretation from others who have watched it. Maybe my friend with the former interpretation, who took offense to the film, is simply lacking in media literacy. But for every one of him, there’s a woman equally lacking in media literacy who also interprets the film as professing “men bad”— and is inclined to agree with this message, and modify their behavior in life accordingly.

https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/157106z/weve_crossed_the_rubicon_withbarbie/

I made a response https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/157106z/weve_crossed_the_rubicon_withbarbie/jtexmoa

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Agree with problem_redditor - this national review article makes a good argument if you ignore the initial invective, noting the list item is one of a hundred, and the list is, otherwise, perfectly benign.

There are a lot of words out there. If you read a bunch of them and pick the words that look the worst out of context, you can make anything look racist, sexist, pedophilic, or whatever. Now, add your own misleading context, and feed it to a population who just doesn't care to check and already sees the speaker as outgroup... you get these responses to Conor on twitter

Here is the link to the education standards, and here is the primary section they are getting angry over. It isn't even saying that "slavery benefited blacks" per se, it's saying something much more defensible:

SS.68.AA.2.3 Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).

Benchmark Clarifications: Clarification 1: Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.

This isn't even wrong. Here is, for example, a page from George Washington University saying the very same thing:

Slaves had many noteworthy skills and talents which made plantations economically self-sufficient. The services of slave blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, shoemakers, tanners, spinners, weavers and other artisans were all used to keep plantations running smoothly, efficiently, and with little added expense to the owners. These same abilities were also used to improve conditions in the quarters so that slaves developed not only a spirit of self-reliance but experienced a measure of autonomy. These skills, when added to other talents for cooking, quilting, weaving, medicine, music, song, dance, and storytelling, instilled in slaves the sense that, as a group, they were not only competent but gifted. Slaves used their talents to deflect some of the daily assaults of bondage. They saw themselves then as strong, valuable people who were unjustly held against their will rather than as the perpetually dependent children or immoral scoundrels described by so many of their owners. Indeed, they found through their artistry some moments of happiness, particularly by telling tales which portrayed work in humorous terms or when singing satirical songs which lampooned their owners.

Richard Toler was trained as a blacksmith during slavery and later went on to try his hand as a carpenter and stonemason. He could also play the fiddle but recalled that he and his people were always treated poorly on the plantation:

https://www2.gwu.edu/~folklife/bighouse/panel19.html

But when Florida's education system says it, it's problematic and three million inflated hitpieces need to be written about how terrible Florida and Desantis is, despite the fact that educational institutions like GWU have explicitly taken the very same perspective. Politics is the ultimate mind-killer. I suppose you could make a coherent argument that if the picture being painted of slavery is primarily a positive one the Florida standards encourage teachers to lie by omission. Except it's clearly not doing so, because in a section right afterwards:

SS.912.AA.1.7 Compare the living conditions of slaves in British North American colonies, the Caribbean, Central America and South America, including infant mortality rates.

Benchmark Clarifications: Clarification 1: Instruction includes the harsh conditions and their consequences on British American plantations (e.g., undernourishment, climate conditions, infant and child mortality rates of the enslaved vs. the free). Clarification 2: Instruction includes the harsh conditions in the Caribbean plantations (i.e., poor nutrition, rigorous labor, disease). Clarification 3: Instruction includes how slavery was sustained in the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana and Brazil despite overwhelming death rates.

And in another one:

SS.912.AA.1.9 Evaluate how conditions for Africans changed in colonial North America from 1619-1776.

Benchmark Clarifications: Clarification 1: Instruction includes both judicial and legislative actions during the colonial period. Clarification 2: Instruction includes the history and development of slave codes in colonial North America including the John Punch case (1640). Clarification 3: Instruction includes how slave codes resulted in an enslaved person becoming property with no rights.

It's funny, because the critics are claiming that Florida's education standards are presenting a "sanitised" view of history, while in reality the people who want a sanitised half-truth to be painted are the critics themselves, who would readily strip demonstrable historical facts out of the record to support their political project.

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It's funny, because the critics are claiming that Florida's education standards are presenting a "sanitised" view of history, while in reality the people who want a sanitised half-truth to be painted are the critics themselves, who would readily strip demonstrable historical facts out of the record to support their political project.

Likewise. I see lots of leftists posting memes about how only monsters ban books, and how those who sanitize history are on the wrong side of history, etc. And I'm constantly thinking, "Oh, now you're against this, in this one specific case? This is exactly what I've been saying about you and the rest of the leftists for the past decade." But they don't even see it, they can't even fathom their own hypocrisy.

Yep.

There's no conflict between teaching that chattel slavery is a morally indefensible institution, and that in spite of this the owners still had incentives to develop the slaves' skills.

So, what are you reading? (Another book thread in the Fun Thread here)

I'm starting Lisa Herzog's Citizen Knowledge. It isn't out yet, but there's a PDF online, and will be open access when it comes out on September 1st. It looks like a mainstream yet academic take on the misinformation debate. I've recently been taken by a desire to learn how these people who say they know so much think (I mean this with only some sarcasm- these people do know a lot which I don't).

Paper I'm reading: Bannister's "The Survival of the Fittest is our Doctrine": History or Histrionics?

I think I've misinterpreted Kendi on "whiteness." It seems fair to give him the last word:

And yet racist power thrives on anti-White racist ideas- more hatred only makes their power greater. When Black people recoil from White racism and concentrate their hatred on everyday White people, as I did freshman year in college, they are not fighting racist power or racist policymakers. In losing focus on racist power, they fail to challenge anti-Black racist policies, which means those policies are more likely to flourish. Going after White people instead of racist power prolongs the policies harming Black life. In the end, anti-White racist ideas, in taking some or all of the focus off racist power, become anti-Black. In the end, hating White people becomes hating Black people.

He also says there's nothing wrong with white culture, only the "cultures of modern imperialism and racial capitalism."

To be antiracist is to never mistake the global march of White racism for the global march of White people.

I tried reading the Art of Raising a Puppy but it's less of an instruction manual and more of a preachy diatribe about how stupid and bad most dog owners are. Kind of frustrating.

It's like come on, most people are probably reading this book because they already know they have messed up and are looking for guidance. You don't have to rub it in guys. It's written by monks in New York so go figure I guess.

After bouncing around between many books for several days, I am now reading Laura by Vera Caspary. It's a mystery novel from the late 1930s or early 1940s, with an interesting perspective choice: the narrator is a fat, ineffectual middle-aged writer, who seems to have had an unrequited love for the unfortunate titular character. I like the writing style. This book was made into what was apparently a very good noir film starring Gene Tierney, which I have not seen.

Gene Tierney not to be confused with Gene Tunney. Love for Laura not to be confused with Love for Lydia.

I recently read The Elephant in the Brain and a review of it (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/12/31/book-review-the-elephant-in-the-brain/)

One of the main ideas is that humans have competitive tendencies that helps them gain access to limited resources and mates. Humans need to signal that they are a good ally and mate in order to get some of the things that they desire. Instead of directly signaling (such as trying to impress people with our bank statement) people send indirect signals (such as wearing expensive clothes). Signaling indirectly gives us plausible deniability and even allows us to deceive ourselves (example: I wasn’t wearing expense clothes to show off my wealth, I just wore them because I like the way they look).

The book goes through Body Language, Laughter, Conversation, Consumption, Art, Charity, Education, Medicine, Religion and Politics to explain hidden motives. Examples:

  • Conversation isn’t just about exchanging information it is also about signaling intelligence and social skills.

  • Politics isn’t just about policy, it is also about alliances.

What are some hidden motives that you’ve noticed?

Some I’ve noticed is dancing is about signaling social confidence to potential mates. Brightly colored hair usually signals loyalty to left-leaning politics, the signal is costly because non-leftists may detect the signal and be biased against the signaler.

Status signaling is a sacred cow in rationalist spaces, and while important rationalists tend to way overblow how much you can boil down to signaling. Zvi himself admits this when condescendling talking about wanting the "MacGuffin":

But let’s not take that too far. That’s not all such things are about. Y still matters: you need a McGuffin. From that McGuffin can arise all these complex behaviors. If the McGuffin wasn’t important, the fighters would leave the arena and play their games somewhere else. To play these games, one must make a plausible case one cares about the McGuffin, and is helping with the McGuffin.

Otherwise, the other players of the broad game notice that you’re not doing that. Which means you’ve been caught cheating.

Robin’s standard reasoning is to say, suppose X was about Y. But if all we cared about was Y, we’d simply do Z, which is way better at Y. Since we don’t do Z, we must care about something else instead. But there’s no instead; there’s only in addition to.

A fine move in the broad game is to actually move towards accomplishing the McGuffin, or point out others not doing so. It’s far from the only fine move, but it’s usually enough to get some amount of McGuffin produced.

Ultimately status signaling doesn't work as a fundamental explainer, because some people really must want some things some of the time, or the whole thing is nonsense. This reduces the explanatory power of the framework by a massive amount.

Because it's in the Sunday thread, I'll use a fun low stakes response.

There was a time in the early to mid 2010s where male grooming accidentally looped around both sides of the culture war. On the right, dudes started growing out beards because of the military special operations affiliation (SEALs etc. famously get to ignore grooming standards and push to an extreme.) I think this also coincided with a wave of Viking-related media which roughly coded right. Simultaneously, on the left, beards started being used to signal a sort of neo-hippy/bohemian/burning man/tech bro vibe. Guilfoyle in Silicon Valley leaned into this. Chunky dudes into Craft Beer and board games really took it far.

(un?)fortunately other fashion and grooming signals usually reduced the ambiguity. Right coded dudes often had the undercut haircut to go with the beard and wore the various tactical-inspired clothing styles (fitted polos, earth tone sneakers / boots). Left coded dudes would have band teeshirts, lots of flannel, flat brims, ear gauges. You could usually figure it out pretty easily.

But I'll always enjoy the time I watched an actual beardy-military dude and a very in shape rock climber exchange 90 minutes of workout advice and hiking / climbing stories, only to have Mr.SEAL go "Dude, where do you hunt?" and the Vegan Boulder stare him dead in the face and go "I would never hurt a living thing."

"I do not" at weddings probably has a less awkward silence.

It’s interesting to think that the Muslim world might be onto something by banning the female appearance competition spiral. If the thesis of the book is correct, then it’s never enough for a religion to say “don’t entertain vanity” — instead the religion must actively punish vanity and reinforce less vain competition. The fundamentalist Muslim world just says “every woman wears this plain garb, period”, and in one fell swoop they have immediately restore six hours a week of labor to every woman, billions of dollars kept in middle class pockets, improved grades, etc. Because now the marriage-driven and reputation-driven competition over appearances is eliminated, and women now are forced to look for other ways to compete against each other. An entire % of brain activity is redirected to something that is, at least in theory, better for everyone’s happiness.

Another question: is virtue signaling bad, or is it only bad when the signal lacks substance? If moral action is induced by a person displaying his own morality, then why not support that? Our concern then should just be ensuring that the “moral competition” has the correct exemplars and rules, so that the substance lines up with the competition. So a person who is being “Christ-like” by practicing humility would be, counterintuitively, obtaining reinforcement by his community which all believe in such a moral exemplar — and this would be good, and not bad, because it’s making the most of human nature.

So a lot of moral implications hinge on the question of this book: is human behavior, pessimistically and ultimately, always decided by what gives the most ”primal” rewards?

The fundamentalist Muslim world just says “every woman wears this plain garb, period”, and in one fell swoop they have immediately restore six hours a week of labor to every woman, billions of dollars kept in middle class pockets, improved grades, etc.

The sorts of societies inclined to enforce this strongly don't seem like the sort that're squeezing every bit of (non-fertility) productivity from their women.

Counterpoint: Iran has iirc one of the highest levels of women in STEM

They have the highest level of women with STEM degrees, you mean. Many of these women are either not in the workforce or working in non-STEM positions, and Iran’s technology sector remains unimpressive.

Iran is sanctioned by the world, yet does have impressive scientific output: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20291-iran-is-top-of-the-world-in-science-growth.html

Another question: is virtue signaling bad

I think virtue signaling itself is neutral, it is just communicating a fact about your beliefs to the world. The problems related to virtue signaling are:

  • If someone has what they believe is a virtue, but it is actually something bad for society.

  • The virtue signaling competition where people need to come up with more extreme signals to stand out. Then the signal becomes ridiculing the out group in extreme hyperbole that some people can misinterpret as literal.

Per the OP’s book, virtue signaling would not just be communicating a belief but communicating a positive value of yourself to others. And if this is done implicitly, then perhaps we can say that all morality hinges on signaling virtue. If that’s the case, our priority should be fleshing out good competitive parameters and norms for how we judge virtue to maximize moral actions.

In other words, it may be a bad idea to ignore the idea of signaling virtue (as an inherently virtue-less activity), and instead accept it as underlying all morality, in spite of what certain Christian teachings posit, and if develop a great criteria for judging real virtue from false, we would increase sum total virtue.

So a person who is being “Christ-like” by practicing humility would be, counterintuitively, obtaining reinforcement by his community which all believe in such a moral exemplar — and this would be good, and not bad, because it’s making the most of human nature.

I am not sure what your last part re: human nature means there, but I would suggest that at least in the fundamentalist-leaning or fully fundamentalist circles I was raised in and around, practicing humility would only be seen as desirable in certain contexts (e.g. in church with peers or in-group.) Once dealing with out-group (whoever that happens to be) these behaviors, or, types of signaling to use the language of OP, no longer seem to have the same standing.

It's always been odd to me that in many fundamentalist groups (I won't say all or even most, as I am speaking only from experience here) qualities like aggressiveness, retribution, even strong-arm or violence (see: War, but not just war, also in other contexts such as self-defense) are nearly always heralded as the moral choice when dealing with public issues (e.g. not issues within the church itself), and the counterpart to these qualities (passivity, turning-the-other-cheek, non-violence) are often dismissed as weak, or misunderstanding the gospel, etc.

Edit: I am also doubtful that Muslim women wearing covering in public at all times so neatly redistributes their schedule as suggested by OP, but I have no data or personal experience here.

It’s interesting to think that the Muslim world might be onto something by banning the female appearance competition spiral.

Yeah, without endorsing or condemning, I would bet that the arrangement of "every woman keeps her appearance hidden from view at all times in public" is one of the few stable and self-sustaining norms one can implement if one's goals are to maintain a patriarchal social order.

is virtue signaling bad, or is it only bad when the signal lacks substance

I think the point is that a reliable signal is supposed to be costly to the sender in some way. Else they can simply manipulate the signal in whatever way they wish to get the recipient to do the thing they want.

So signalling one's morality should, in this view, be associated with some penalty/cost for falsifying the signal or breaching the morals they're signalling.

Take, for example, a vehemently pro-life politician who nonetheless makes his mistress get an abortion when he accidentally knocks her up. If their moral signalling goes out the window they second it would cost them something to uphold it, then the entire false edifice of their beliefs and behaviors is laid bare for all to see, which tends to... dilute the strength of their signalling.

Take, for example, a vehemently pro-life politician who nonetheless makes his mistress get an abortion when he accidentally knocks her up.

I know it’s a hypothetical, but if this was a scenario that happened then you would expect it to be a major scandal that’s prominent in the news, even if said politician is like a West Virginia state legislator or something equally irrelevant. As strong on family values politicians get in trouble for having mistresses regularly enough for nobody to be surprised, and occasionally have children with those mistresses, but there’s not a lot of news stories about their mistresses getting abortions, we can surmise that their commitment to pro-life values extends at least that far.

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2017-10-04/pro-life-rep-tim-murphy-pressured-mistress-to-get-abortion

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2012/10/scott-desjarlais-recorded-abortion-call-with-mistress.html

Just reading the link gets you all the info you need in this case.

That's just the best examples from a quick Google. There's a few cattycorner examples mixed in there as well (campaign operatives, or having a girlfriend get an abortion as a teen) but these two are recent and on all fours with the hypothetical.

Now you can quibble with what this means: out of how many pro life politicians so maybe this isn't that many, or should we only count out of pro lifers who have affairs, or should we assume that this kind of thing happens 12 times in secret for every time it happens in public so this is only the tip of the iceberg, or whatever you want. But it's certainly not an absurdity.

Indeed, I included that as an example not to make a point about pro-life politicians or anything, but just because it is a handy example that has readily available real-world examples.

That's what virtue signalling is. You scream loudly about a moral position you claim to hold, but when the time comes to apply that position you back down instantly. So you get to feel good about 'supporting' the right thing but have no intention of behaving in accordance with it.

Your signal is unreliable, and you intend for others to believe it but you don't care to be bound by it nor incur the costs of enforcing it.

Robin Hanson’s importance to the early LessWrongers means that he shows up in a ton of related work. Scott essays and so on. Try reading this one about countersignaling.

Have you encountered the signaling theory of education? I want to say it’s Caplan’s work. The argument goes that almost all of the value in education is signaling compliance to employers. It doesn’t matter if one didn’t actually learn a technical skill; the point is looking like a good corporate drone. For obvious reasons, this is really appealing to people who were really bored in school and hated its structure.

Therein lies the problem, because the signaling lens is just too applicable. Take your hair-color example. It’s definitely used as a signal of blue-tribe allegiance. But so is “left-leaning politics.” So is valuing nonconformity. How far down do you have to go before you hit a real belief, rather than something intended as a signal?

The Hanson answer, as I understand it, is “all the way.” Signaling all the way down. This is tempting, because it preempts anyone trying to signal that they’re one layer deeper than you. It’s also prone to half-assed psychoanalysis! Sooner or later you end up like Freud, constructing a whole mythos to justify why someone might think blue hair is hot.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Thanks for sharing the link. I have encountered the signaling theory of education prior to reading the book and it is something I’ve felt intuitively for a long time.

How far down do you have to go before you hit a real belief, rather than something intended as a signal?

Well the real belief should be whatever the person would do in the privacy of their own home if they knew nobody could ever find out that they did it. For instance, wearing sweatpants in their own home because sweatpants are comfortable.

But when 2 people interact then a person’s behavior falls into 3 buckets:

  • Person A is intentionally sending a signal and is consciously aware of it (wearing a suit to an interview to impress the potential employer)
  • Person A is sending a signal but they are unconsciously aware that they are sending it
  • Person A is communicating a real belief

Then person B is interpreting the behavior and signals and trying to determine what is a real belief vs. signal. Then also using those observations to make predictions and assumptions about Person A.

If person A has a dog just because they like dogs (so a true belief) then person B might interpret that Person A is signaling that they are good with commitments and are good at raising kids. This interpretation happens even if Person A has a real belief that they don’t want kids.

If Person A wears sweatpants in public it will still get interpreted as having some meaning regardless of it is a true belief (Person A believes it is the most comfortable choice of attire) or signal (Person A intentionally did it to show they don’t care about appearance).

IIRC Hansen warns us against psychoanalysis. We can never be certain why another person behaves a certain way, it is always a guess.

It is also impossible to intentionally signal something and guarantee that other people interpret the signal in the way you intend.

To me the point of signals is:

  • Help predicting a person’s future behavior, but realize that this is just an uncertain prediction
  • Analyzing your own behavior to make sure you aren’t sending signals that you’re not intending to
  • Finding X is not just about Y situations so you can design good policies and procedures or explain unexpected outcomes

How far down do you have to go before you hit a real belief, rather than something intended as a signal?

Easy. Until you hit the point where the person stating the belief will actually pay a significant personal cost for their stated belief turning out to be false.

This is one form of 'revealed preference.' If you say you believe something but you suffer no consequence for being incorrect, then you have no incentive to be truthful, and thus the signal is cheap and likely unreliable. Your REAL beliefs, on the other hand, will be reflected in how you behave when actual consequences, rewards, or punishment are on the line based on whether you get things right or not.

This is incidentally why Hanson strongly endorses prediction markets as a method of finding consensuses on 'truth' and why Caplan places bets on many of his own predictions.

Putting this on my to read list.

I'm interested in seeing the for and against for the argument that "crime is a result of social deprivation and social workers are a better use of money than police for solving it". The only arguments I can muster up in favour of policing are common sense ones which don't (though they should) pass muster in online debates.

Caveat: I want to either use this information to win internet arguments or concede the point in my own head and stop starting that argument altogether.

Social work instead of policing is a false premise to begin with. They aren't substitutes - that's the point and the whole problem.

Policing is about addressing (swiftly) and preventing (through disciplined proactive action) violent or otherwise extremely damaging anti-social behavior. It's very immediate and constant. Social work is more oriented proactive and cooperative skill building and promoting pro-social behaviors.

A good analogy is to use the cousins of Police, firefighters. Firefighters (putting aside their EMT roles for a moment) is about stopping a fire immediately and quickly (hoses etc.) Additionally, fire departments have to proactively prevent fires by requiring buildings to be up to code. The whole point is about stopping fires, not about building new buildings or fixing up older ones that just need a little paint and spackle.

If you run over to me and go "oh my god, my house is on fire!" and my first response is "Well, let's pick up the trash in your yard, repaint the walls, and plant some new trees!" You're going to be furious. That is exactly, however, the argument for "social workers instead of cops."

I've always thought of it more on the marginal $$$ level.

EG, LA has a 11,800,000,000 dollar police budget. Did that last billion really buy any more crime reduction? What about the tenth billion? The Ninth?

That said, we will always need the pigs around. Some dudes really do just want to dress up as clowns and eat people. Can't social work your way out of that one.

Did that last billion really buy any more crime reduction?

Definitely not. We're in a strange situation in cities like Seattle (assume LA is similar) where the police were not really defunded, but have become essentially defanged. We are still spending obscene amounts of money on police but not getting the crime reduction we should be.

On the other hand, lack of value for money is not the worst-case scenario. Might we consider that spending more money on social workers could actually increase crime? Certainly, there is an argument that it's had that effect on homelessness.

Social work instead of policing is a false premise to begin with. They aren't substitutes.

I think there is a small bit of overlap. For instance, if someone is engaging in anti-social but not arrestable behavior the police often provide information/encouragement on social worker resources available to them (such as referring them to the homeless shelter or to a mental health facility). Police also do things like have public events and engage with the public to get feedback about what is happening in the neighborhoods. They understand who many of the repeat-offenders are and might know their backstory much like a social worker would know about their patients backgrounds after working with them for a while.

Imagine a hypothetical world where the US has universal mental health care and adequate supply of therapists. In that world it is conceivable that there might be less crime and therefore less money would need to be spent on policing.

When police have to prevent crime by making an arrest then the rest of the criminal justice system processes the arrest ultimately leading to a punishment to the person arrested if they are found guilty. At various stages of this process you can add an off-ramp from the criminal justice system to the social work system. Example: instead of going to trial you could give someone the option to go to rehab and be monitored by a social worker for a while. If they successfully complete the alternate punishment then the system theoretically won't have to police them on that issue in the future.

Imagine a hypothetical world where the US has universal mental health care and adequate supply of therapists

Since we're in the small-scale questions thread: has anyone actually come up with a number for the "adequate supply of therapists", given America's rising mental health issues?

Like, how much would one have to spend to actually eliminate the gap? Seems like an ever-moving target.

You are correct and I agree.

The image or function I had in my head was the 1-for-1 swapping of police for social work. That's what led to my lead-off assertion. Police certainly do de facto social work and I wouldn't call that a blatant misuse of them as a civic resource.

I also enjoy your point that the larger criminal justice system is often dysfunctional and can lead to good deeds going punished. A police might recommend to the DA that little timmy not be thrown in jail, but that same DA is facing a tough reelection in a "tough on crime" jurisdiction and throws the book at little timmy. Flip it around and you have what literally happened in Baltimore over the past several years where the DA declined to prosecute illegal firearms charges (with solid evidence) because of .... something.

I guess that's a good angle to consider. If we did flood the streets with social workers, how would that alter the criminal justice system of them? Would DAs bemoan the lack of casework coming their way? Would Cops only do the paperwork on the really violent crimes and let the middle-ground stuff (theft, possession with intent) just go into the ether? Pondering @Ponder's comment.

I think there is maybe a world where the argument makes sense.

If you've ever seen good will hunting, imagine every troubled youth had a therapist/helper like Robin Williams' character.

You could probably cut out a lot of crime with an army of competent caring people. This is probably what people imagine when they make the suggestion.

They maybe just think this is way cheaper than all of us think. So it comes down to haggling about costs and prices.

I would expect neither answer to be generally true.

(1) For example if people are stealing food because they are starving to death then distributing food would be an obviously good idea.

(2) If someone runs around with weapon and threatens to kill themselves/hostages/whoever then negotiation is likely a better idea than just charging with tanks like in Beslan school siege (or nerve gas like in Dubrovka Theater). Though combining both would work even better, and negotiations without threat of deadly force would be unlikely to work well. Except people on pure psychotic break I guess.

(3) If someone runs over pedestrians for fun then locking them up is an obviously good idea.

In typical sort-of-working country cases of the (1) type and (2) are rarer than (3).

The only arguments I can muster up in favour of policing are common sense ones which don't (though they should) pass muster in online debates.

If someone claims that gang of people systematically breaking in and stealing all valuable stuff would be solved if social worker would talk with them, then someone is really confused.

If someone claims that gang of people systematically breaking in and stealing all valuable stuff would be solved if social worker would talk with them, then someone is really confused.

Well the claim is usually that if there had been some type of non-policing interventions earlier in life than it never would have gotten to this point.

Well, but we do not have time travel.

So even if that would be true and would be used then criminals are capable of travelling from places where such ideal methods were not used.

So even if such methods would be 100% effective it is not changing that in some cases you will need to arrest people and jail/imprison them.

Also, no know methods fully preventing criminality exist anyway. Or at least they are not in use anywhere.

crime is a result of social deprivation and social workers are a better use of money than police for solving it

I would slightly incline towards "the first part of this sentence is in part true" but the second part is "oh hell no" after yet another anecdote from work involving druggie parents, kids, and social workers.

Before getting started: this is what a small town is like - everybody knows your business.

Okay, so: childcare service. Separated (if ever married in the first place) parents. Mother has a drug habit, and maybe a new drug-dealer boyfriend. Father isn't that great situation himself, but he is trying and he does want to be responsible for the kid - I'm not sure if he has custody or not. Everybody is what I suppose would be called the underclass, or maybe dad is working class if he can get/has a job.

Mother promises that this time, for sure, she will come and pick up the kid from daycare. Uh-huh, right.

Collection time is coming, and one of the service managers is on the bus to Da City (not a big city, but it's our county capital). And she rings the service about "Didn't A say she was picking up Kid today? Well, she's all dressed up, on the bus going to Da City, and is with a guy who could be her dealer".

Three guesses as to whether she ever turned up to collect the kid.

Dad can complain all he likes to the social worker handling the case about things like this, and about mom doing drugs (including stuff like coke) around the kid. Reply? "Sure, drugs are normal nowadays".

So that is why (1) I would like to know what the fuck they are teaching them in college before they turn them loose into the real world (2) yeah my arse social workers are going to be better than cops and (3) the next time somebody bangs on about decriminalising/legalising Fun Party Harmless Substances, they should be made stand in front of a crying five year old to explain "It's your mother's natural human right to prioritise getting and using Fun Party Harmless Substances over taking care of you, and you have no right to try and impose your morals on her with "don't you love me, mommy?"

Rant over.

Theoretical drug policy has been a hobbyhorse of mine lately so I’m going to push back a little on a few parts of your comment.

the next time somebody bangs on about decriminalising/legalising Fun Party Harmless Substances, they should be made stand in front of a crying five year old

Coke is illegal now and the bad outcome still happened. The law did not prevent the mom from using drugs and causing bad outcomes for her child. In this example Coke being illegal makes the situation worse because the mom faces stigma and potential legal consequences for using coke that make it harder to dig out of the hole (such as making it harder to find jobs/shelter if convicted of drug possession).

Now you might say making coke legal would make the bad outcome more prevalent but some people are just bad parents and will mess up their child regardless of what the laws are. Instead of being a cokehead they become an alcoholic. If alcohol was illegal they would find some other form of escapism such as getting high off chemicals from the hardware store or gambling.

But the thing that frustrates me most about drug debates is this tendency to group all illegal drugs together and make arguments that they should be treated the same (either legal or illegal). This prevents us from having any sort of sensible drug policy if we group all the Schedule 1 substance together and then apply the same laws to them. Some should be legal, some should be legal only under the supervision of medical professional, some should remain illegal. The ones that mess up more lives should be treated more harshly than the other ones.

Going through some of the main drugs:

  • Marijuana should be legal and treated similar to how alcohol is.
  • The psychedelics (LSD, Mescaline, Psilocybin) are medicines that allow people to quit more dangerous drugs like alcohol. They can inspire users to invent things, become more connected with the world, or feel a greater sense of purpose. They are non-addictive and physically safer than other drugs. Psychedelics should be legal.
  • MDMA has a track record of being used successfully in conjunction with therapy. It is showing promising results in clinical trials for PTSD. However, it is addictive and can be physically dangerous in high doses (serotonin syndrome, high blood pressure). It should be legal under medical supervision and follow a similar model as Ketamine therapy.
  • Coke/Meth/Opioids – These are the ones that seems to ruin the most lives and cause the most problems. They should remain on Schedule I/II and not be used outside of their current medically accepted uses.
  • All the other Schedule 1 drugs – I’m not informed enough on but they should probably stay illegal because they are physically dangerous/addictive.

Mostly concur, but would like to add a dose of your own (well stated!) nuance.

I don't like the bright line distinction between "legal" drug and "illegal drug." The fact of the matter is that while it is easy to say "hey, if we all just use drugs safely and don't put ourselves in the position to harm others, we can legalize all but the most chemically addictive / mind altering," there is going to he a HUGE percentage of the population that just can't adhere to those guardrails and, worse, will cause disproportionate negative impact to the rest of society. It can't just be 0-or-100 legal versus illegal for substances. I much prefer the illegal-decriminalized-legal spectrum, as well as penalties on associated behaviors.

The best example is alcohol. If I'm hammered inside of a bar (legal) and then go outside, I'm now drunk in public. This is anywhere from a fine to misdemeanor offense in most jurisdictions but, most importantly, is often not aggressively enforced. It's used as an automatic gotcha when someone who is technically drunk in public starts engaging in antisocial behavior; accosting passers by, opening urinating / defecating, dangerous pedestrian conduct around traffic etc. For most people who just sort of stumble home - even if they're truly wasted - they probably won't catch the charge.

So, for substances like weed, psychedelics, MDMA, I'd like to see something similar and heavily tilted towards fines instead of "on your permanent record!" charges. Let's say you take some mushrooms and stare at your hand in the park for hours. Cool, guy. Have fun. But if you take a bunch of mushrooms and run around naked and shouting, I'd like to see not only the disorderly conduct charge, but also something along the lines of "psychedlic safety fine." This goes towards sending a signal - and imposing a real material cost - that might modulate the behavior of marginal users (hardcore addicts / abusers is a different story and I acknowledge that ... as should we all). If you're on the borderline between problem usage and harmless recreation fun, I really want there to be a feedback loop for you to conclude, "every time I take mushrooms, I get a ticket, a summons, and it costs be $300 extra bucks. I can't keep afford to act this way.)

I haven't totally thought through the second order effects of these ideas, so if I've missed an obvious anti-pattern, I'll wipe the egg off my face.

I like the idea of a “psychedelic safety fine”. You could even design it so that it escalates if you get repeat offenses. Maybe on the first offense the fine is very small and you have to take a drug education course. Then if you get fined again it goes up to $500 and any future offenses would increase in dollar amount.

As you have noticed there is a lot of nuance and things to be worked out when it comes to psychedelic policy. One other thing I think about a lot is how to you encourage people to take psychedelics with a sober trip sitter? I think that would prevent a lot of the bad outcomes, but at the same time there are many people who can take psychedelics without a trip sitter and not experience any problems.

For now I’m just in favor in anything that moves psychedelics directionally toward decriminalization or legalization. There will be many things to optimize as the legal status changes.

If psychedelics become legal here are some other policy optimization considerations:

  • Affordable access – If psychedelics can only be done in clinical settings and insurers don’t cover the cost then how do you make it affordable for those in need?
  • What to do about things like Peyote and the Sonoran Desert toad that produce psychedelic compounds but are in danger of being overharvested. Synthetic analog compounds exist so maybe different policies are needed from an environmental conversation perspective.

It seems like "getting idiot social workers out of the decision loop" is the obvious solution to this scenario.

Your point (3) could be applied ten times over to alcohol.

social workers are a better use of money than police for solving it

Arguments for: It is more humane than locking people up and fining people for their anti-social behavior. In some cases it will be more effective than policing (If someone gets proper treatment for a mental health disorder it will prevent the anti-social behavior. This is more effective than processing them through the criminal justice system because it addresses the underlying cause of the anti-social behavior. If you don’t address the underlying cause of the behavior they may keep reoffending in spite of the legal consequences).

Arguments against: Look at San Francisco where social deprivation policing is way more lenient than it is in a more conversative city. If you don’t use police to deter social depravity crimes then more people will commit those crimes.

If we look at a wide cohort of “the socially deprived”, ie those who live in poverty and from single-parent homes, we see enormous differences in criminality according to ethnicity and subculture. If you compare two groups, both socially deprived, the Chinese immigrant or Indian immigrant is going to something like 1/50th as likely to be criminal than a Black American. They may be both socially deprived, they may live in the same neighborhood, but one group is going to be much more likely to be criminal, which means that “extent socially deprived” does not predict criminality. You can do this same analysis across nations. There are socially deprived teens in Japan and China; when you look at their criminality rate, it is nothing like Black American teens.

Next, we have to consider whether at-risk teens actually use the services offered to them such that we would expect if they desired improvement of character. This is surely not the case. The teens shooting each other in gangs do not take out books from the library or use any of the hundreds of thousands of resources they could access on a public library computer or device.

Finally, we can examine the actual soul of the criminal teens and young adults. Who are their idols and what do they value? Criminal rappers, and crime. No amount of “services offered” can change a culture that loves being criminals. Or rather, no one is willing to launch a real propaganda effort to manipulate the teens into hating crime / criminals and competing prosocially. I bet a Batman movie is going to be a better risk mitigation strategy than tens of millions of dollars in services the academics can cook up.

Would you not suspect that social deprivation as a construct is itself multidimensional, and therefore very difficult to track across different cultures (e.g. the China and India you mention?) Yes, there are troubled teens in Japan, but the similarity of their experiences to the experiences of Black Americans is probably not that major in various ways, as tempting as it may be to make the analogy.

those who live in poverty and from single-parent homes, we see enormous differences in criminality according to ethnicity and subculture. If you compare two groups, both socially deprived, the Chinese immigrant or Indian immigrant is going to something like 1/50th as likely to be criminal than a Black American

By that metric Chinese immigrants are very unlikely to be socially deprived- few of them live in single parent houses.

Cool rhetorical trick, calling poor Black boys raised by single mothers “socially deprived.” I’d argue these kids are the most socialized by their peers, who pass down toxic masculinity through their culture of guns, gangs, grifting, and seeing the police as just a gang keeping the wypeepo’s stuff safe.

Bill Cosby tried to change the culture, but the people who overlook the sex crimes of Roman Polanski, Kevin Spacey, Woody Allen, and Bill Clinton decided that this comedian would be the one they’d ruin.

Note that "crime is a result of social deprivation" does not necessarily imply that "social workers are a better use of money than police for solving it". My deprivation might enormously increase my propensity to burglarize cars, yet I probably will refrain from doing so if there is a cop on every block.

OTOH, there are declining returns to all uses of resources, so there is presumably a level of policing at which hiring one more cop will have less effect than hiring one more social worker. The trick is figuring out what level that is.

And reverse, social worker may be a good idea even if crime is a result of something else. Often combined with police, see hostage taking situations.

i could use some guidance

how do i create fake or alternative social media accounts. Like instagram, tiktok, etc... whenever i try to signup up they want you to have an email or phone number, but when i need to make email accounts i need to have phone numbers, so i just cant.

opsec threat model: i just don't want to be embarrassed by some of the things i like. Also probably like a lot of people here i have friends who are different "clique" and will absolutely hate each other and i want all my friends even if i know they wont get along.

i don't want to give my real credit card info to some risky website. in an ideal world i would by a prepaid card (USA) and get an a phone number for a short time to make email and social accounts.

thank you for your help.

There is some Russian website that you a cat cryptocurrency to for activating accounts with phone numbers, smsvna, smnva something something, it worked for me. They hand you a number for a service, you give that service the number during registration, they have a timeout window during which they will processs that registration for you, giving you the code or whatever.

Other than that, yes a burner phone is fine.

The "majors" - Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc - have gotten much harder to reliably make an email account on without a real phone number or other email. You can avoid this by going with second-tier providers, like Protonmail, Fastmail, etc. You may have to pay a small amount for it, but it's probably worth it. Not sure about phones - you can get a cheap temporary phone number with various apps, but IME they're usually filtered for all of the usual services that use phone number verification, and it might be necessary to buy an additional actual real phone to do it. Probably better to avoid if you can. You can handle payments by buying prepaid credit cards, with cash if you're particularly paranoid.

You can make a dummy Gmail account easily enough, you don't need to provide a phone number.

EDIT: It appears that the phone number is a requirement in the US, but not in most countries. Maybe use something like the Veepn Chrome extension to spoof yourself in the UK and then set it up.

Proton mail is also easy

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