When I read the fact about chicken suffering, I got the impression that laying an egg was just as painful as a human giving birth. I'm unbelievably relieved that this is not the case, and that I can still feel okay about buying eggs from ethically treated chickens.
Humans are way out on the extreme end of birth difficulty by species, though there are a few others that have their own unique challenges. Evolution kept making our heads bigger until childbirth was just barely survivable.
It would not be the case if it was so? I really don't understand something about such views, like how ethical vegans for example work. I would not torture an animal to death to eat it. But if it is already tortured to death, I will buy the carcass and eat it. That is because at that point it is not my responsibility. Someone else did it. And just "generating demand" for torturing animals to death with my money, which seems how all ethical vegans think, does not make sense to me at all. "Generating demand" is not direct causation. They could still decide to not do this and make money some different way. Giving people who torture animals to death does not in any way forces them to do so. Hence there is no direct responsibility. This is the same about everything, like buying things with conflict minerals in it. Ad absurdum even buying lampshades of human skin would not be wrong. As long as you did not do the deed or did not tell someone to do it for you, you are not responsible.
There is something in this logic that completely does not make sense to me.
I was confused by your statement about tuberculosis being treatable, since I'd heard of antibiotic resistance in tuberculosis; it turns out (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidrug-resistant_tuberculosis ) that antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis is usually just resistant to the specific antibiotics usually used to treat it, & then has to be treated with different antibiotics (which often are more expensive &/or have worse side effects).
Re: Dickens, I must say I feel the issue is as much the modern American teenager's ability to understand Dickens's English as anything deeper, and I'm curious how they would fare with a text of equal intellectual complexity, but with a syntax and vocabulary closer to their own. As it stands, they were being tested not simply on understanding complex prose written in their own language, but complex prose written in — if not a foreign language, then at least a foreign dialect. There must come a point when a distant century's English becomes at least partly impenetrable to the modern reader. Understanding unannotated Shakespeare is not just matter of understanding figurative language — let alone understanding Beowulf. It pains me, but I really think, at least for Americans, Dickens is trending that way, and fast. It is what it is.
And that's without taking into account a wealth of cultural assumptions that have gone from old-fashioned to utterly obscure, which are again in play with Shakespeare. I was surprised that the post's commentary doesn't discuss the fact that the Megalosaurus metaphor is clearly failing to parse for students not so much because they don't understand metaphors, as because they can't conceive of the evident associative link in Dickens's mind between prehistoric reptiles and the biblical flood, upon which the entire tangent relies without ever making it explicit. To students who know that an asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs and have never thought otherwise, it's gibberish.
Now, obviously, I would want someone teaching a class on Bleak House to understand these allusions! But failing to do so, I feel, isn't precisely a lack of *literacy*; it's a lack of historical background. The needed remedies — the things they need more classes about — aren't the same.
I think the historical background/literacy distinction you're making is pretty false! According to the simple view of reading (which is generally accepted in cognitive science), reading is made up of two skills: decoding the words on the page and having enough background information to follow what's going on. A lot of reading comprehension problems in the higher grades are problems with the second half: people don't know words that mostly only appear in books, don't understand the references being made, can't place a piece of writing in its historical and genre context, etc. And this problem is a vicious cycle: if you don't have the background information, reading is effortful and unrewarding, so you don't pick up the information that people only get from books, so reading is even more effortful and unrewarding, so...
I take the point, but I think the linked post is, at times, trying to make a stronger case than yours, claiming to show that students lack some sort of understanding of what a metaphor *is*; that they lack a kind of mental capacity for abstraction, hence being unable to think of the waddling Megalosaurus as anything else than a literal dinosaur which must diegetically exist within the story. Which would imply that teachers are failing to properly convey basic ideas about how literature works; that these students don't really understand what a metaphor is, generally. That they haven't internalised the idea that sometimes a book will talk about things that aren't really there.
Whereas, if I'm right, they might very well understand this principle perfectly. It's just that the Megalosaurus tangent is equally baffling to them whether interpreted literally or figuratively. So, due to a separate issue of badly misjudging Bleak House's genre, they tentatively bet on the literal reading, which (to them) is bizarre but at least intelligible.
I don't want to be pedantic about whether this still counts as a lack of "literacy"; my core point is that one perspective suggests schools are bad at teaching students about the abstract concept of figurative language etc., whereas the other suggests schools are just lacking at giving their students broad knowledge about the arcana of the real world.
(As a wholly separate point, you cited "people not knowing certain words" again, but I want to stress that when I talked about Dickens's English being difficult to grasp, I meant his syntax, his sentence structures, as much as any individual word.)
Yeah TBC I don't entirely agree with the linked post; I do expect that English majors are familiar with the basic concept of figurative language. I think the problem is multifactorial. Some of it is lack of information (about Charles Dickens, the Bible, Victorian London...). Some of it is finding decoding effortful (either because of vocab/syntax or because you're straightforwardly not that good at phonics), so you're focusing on that and don't have the brain space for also figuring out the meaning and monitoring your comprehension. Some of it is experiencing the first two so often that it doesn't really occur to you that books are supposed to be understood, and that if a zombie dinosaur has appeared in the first paragraph but disappeared for the next six then perhaps something confusing is happening and you should double-check your understanding.
But surely "how much background information about chancery courts in 1830s London should the average person be expected to have?" is a fair question when a text requires the reader to have, or quickly acquire, a fair bit of it if they are to understand what's going on, much less derive any pleasure or improvement from reading it.
Also, I've voiced in a separate comment my strong suspicion that the students' failure to look up all of the unfamiliar terms despite being "allowed" to do so may have been due to social pressure, fear of being thought stupid (not an unjustified fear, it turns out), and/or courteous disinclination to "waste" the interviewer's time looking up multiple references in a single sentence. But the study authors never even consider those possibilities, instead leaping to the conclusion that the students are simply baffled and overwhelmed.
Dorothy Thompson obviously has more experience with Nazis than I do, but Who Goes Nazi? strikes me as both patently false and deeply harmful to the cause of anti-Nazisim. The Nazi party had 8 million people in it; caricaturing them all as being "visibly evil" in a comic book kind of way is nonsense.
The average Nazi was a conformist; that is, a normal human. Antisemitism was common even outside of the Nazi ranks, it was just a fact of life in Germany at the time. People engaged in it not because they were jealous, bullies, insecure, or whatever, but simply because it's what everyone around them was doing. Many of them had some severe cognitive dissonance on the subject, having positive impressions of individual Jews they knew, while still regarding "the Jews" as suspect.
I highly recommend Melita Maschmann's Account Rendered to get a sense of this. Of course as the narrator of her own life she's going to see herself though rose-tinted glasses, but I think any reader would have a pretty hard time coming away from that book with the sense that she would have been anything but a normal, pleasant, well-liked, person if not for the culture in which she was surrounded.
The real predictor of Nazism is just (lack of) intellectual honesty. The ability to actually *see* what the people around you are doing and evaluate it on its own merits, without the self-preservation instinct to just get along, just blend in, that leads people to suppress and rationalize away any thoughts too controversial.
I could give specific groups. The carnists who recognize that torturing animals is wrong in theory, but are perfectly happy to keep doing it as long as it's considered socially acceptable. The "anti-racists" who form whole communities around bullying any socially awkward white man who lacks the privilege or social skills to fight back, and who love fascistic iconography and polices as long as they're relabeled "communist" first. Etc.
But this sort of pop-psychoanalyzing people is actively detrimental to the quest for a better world. Everyone wants an excuse to call their outgroup evil, and doing so leads to exactly the sort of dynamics that lead to Nazism in the first place. It's precisely the people who lack the introspective ability to even consider how they themselves could be susceptible to a hateful ideology—the people who think that Nazis are just inherently inferior, and that since "I'm just not a Nazi" anything they do must be morally pure—who would themselves "go Nazi" at the first opportunity.
Also a lot of people were afraid of the Communists, who actually had started a bloody revolution a decade or so back. There was also massive inflation the centrist parties had failed to control (and in the thousands of percents, not 3-8% like we had). The last election is in 1933, right? The Holocaust's still in the future; the Nazis hadn't committed genocide yet.
By 1941 most of the Germans who went Nazi were too terrified to do anything else.
I think I agree with you up to a point. The essay's statement that "Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi" hits me as so glaringly false that it throws the entire rest of it into question. However, I do think she is correct about one thing, which is that the main thing separating the "un-Nazifiable" people from those who can be pulled in is the presence of some form of internal motivation that the person feels more accountable to than pleasing others, fulfilling a societal role, or any of the other external validation drives that fascism appeals to. Your own example of intellectual honesty can be one such internal motivation: the unshakeable pedants who object that Nazis are wrong not in a moral sense, but in a "that is incorrect" sense, will not be absorbed by Nazism, though in that case the main difference it will usually make is that they will be attacked by it instead.
I was reminded of a bit in C. S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters, where one demon advises another that they are to try and prevent the person they are tempting from doing anything that they really enjoy, in and of itself, for its own sake. Instead, they encourage their assigned humans to only think of what's fashionable, or high-status, or in keeping with their station. This is in aim of diminishing any ability of the subject to know their own mind, their own preferences, and to assert themselves as a separate entity from the society around them, all of which the demons view as hazardous to their manipulations.
> American environmentalism is partisan today not for ideological reasons but because of political alliances
This is not just an American thing, it happened (at least a little bit) in basically every country. It's kinda inevitable given that:
1) There will always be people with a wider moral circle (~the left) and a narrower moral circle (~the right)
2) Capitalism is a system that funnels wealth/power into the hands of those that are egotistical enough to externalize their costs towards the planet at large
3) People with a wider moral circle will want to change that
4) The wealth/power gained from externalizing costs can be used to set those with a narrower moral circle against those with a wider moral circle
As long as capitalism exists these polarization dynamics will continue. You can change things on the margin by implementing better/non-deterministic voting systems, teaching people critical thinking skills, collectivizing social media platforms (and we should do all of those), but the fundamental cause will not go away as long as capitalism remains.
“The reconciliation bill would take money from the poor, give money to the rich, and increase the deficit.”
This is a partisan and misleading take. The bill does not “take money” from the poor except in the sense that it cuts benefits programs. It only “gives money to the rich” in the sense that it cuts taxes on the rich—and the middle class! The Washington Post has coverage here:
I think a naive reader would assume actual money was being taken from the poor, rather than a cut in services the poor get that are theoretically estimated as worth $x per recipient.
I will eat my hat if even a single Ozy reader thought that it meant the government was directly commandeering money from the poor. Should we also be worried that when people write things like "The university took thousands from me this semester" or "The university is bleeding its students dry" others will interpret that as university staff robbing/cutting their students?
> Claude was once lured into an alliance because o3 convinced it that they could do a four-way tie and then multiple AIs could win (they could not, that is not how Diplomacy works).
On Backstabbr at least, you can choose to end the game in a draw between some number of players. I've played one-turn-per-day games with coworkers twice, and chose to end both in a two-way draw with my closest ally.
I've played quite a bit of Diplomacy, and draws are overwhelmingly the most common way for games to end*. It's possible that the rules for this specific AI competition prevented draws, though.
I'm very, very suspicious of the conclusion reached by the authors of the literacy study (and uncritically accepted by the blogger) that the inability of the subjects of the study to translate Dickens into modern English on demand necessarily reflects their ability to read. It seems blazingly obvious to me that *most* of the subjects had *most* of their difficulties not with the complexity or length of the sentences, but with the barrage of archaic and foreign references presented to them--or, in other words, their simple lack of familiarity with the built environment, legal and social customs, and geography of early 19th century London. Yes, they were allowed to look up words or names they didn't understand, but it is far from clear to me that the interviewers stressed (or told them at all) that it was permissible for them take all the time they needed to do so.
I suspect very strongly that some of these "Competent" and "Problematic" readers could have understood and translated the text reasonably well if they had actually looked up each of the unfamiliar references in each sentence--as a person good at reading but lacking in historical/geographical/legal knowledge might do if reading Dickens for pleasure at home might do--but that they simply didn't want to take up too much of the interviewer's time, or were afraid of looking stupid (as indeed the study's authors all but make them out to be). I couldn't help but notice that the authors point out several times that subjects did not look things up, even though they could have. I also notice that they didn't ask the subjects why not; they seem just to have jumped to the conclusion that the subjects were either lazy or thoroughly befuddled.
(I will grant that a proficient or even competent reader should be able to recognize that the Megalosaurus walking the streets of London is not meant to be taken literally. This, anyway, is an actual example of illiteracy.)
The fact that college students in Kansas are so completely lacking in the background knowledge required to read Dickens easily may be an indictment of the history, geography, and law that they have been taught, or more precisely not taught, in school, but the study was supposed to be about reading proficiency.
Another thing that annoyed me, in an unrelated way, about that study was the way that the authors sort of sandbagged on behalf of their one "proficient" reader. That person was reading the easiest passage by far! No archaic words, no knowledge of things like Michaelmas Terms or chancery courts required, just a straightforward description of people getting pissy with one another in a very muddy street! They even give their special angel a little break by failing to call them on the actual mistake they make in translating the passage (thinking that the previous thousands of footsteps in the mud happened in generations past, when Dickens clearly is referring to footsteps that morning). This fucking study is stupid in both directions! Gah!
> Building semiconductor factories in the United Arab Emirates is not a good way to make sure that AI is democratic. It’s honestly insulting that Sam Altman believes he can get away with this rhetoric. Who does he think he’s going to fool?
... maybe because that's what "democracy" has consistently meant in US foreign policy since 1945? Fork found in kitchen. Anyone with knowledge of history could tell this would be the result of the AI arms race narrative that OpenPhil-cluster EAs, AI industry lobbyists, and the Situational Awareness white paper have been pushing for the past year.
You tell us a lot of irrelevant things about this cuban rapper, but ignore the only thing that matters - does he have permission to be in the United States? His politics are irrelevant. What would or wouldn't happen to him in his home country is irrelevant. All that matters is whether he has legal authorization to be in the United States. This should not be political. This is a matter of basic rule of law. If Americans can't even agree on that, then what are we left with? Anarchy and the slow collapse of society?
The U.S. government has considerable discretion about whether to give people legal residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act. As a citizen of the United States, I can certainly offer an opinion about whether I think my government is using this discretion wisely. (I think it was not.)
What would or wouldn't happen to him in his home country is extremely relevant, *especially* if it is for political reasons. As stated in 8 USC § 1158(b)(1)(B)(i), someone seeking political asylum in the US "must establish that race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion was or will be at least one central reason for persecuting the applicant."
"Environmentalism was mostly nonpartisan until the 1980s."
Why do people keep confusing party affiliation / politicians with climate change? Thatcher and Reagan might have wanted to do something about climate change, but that only means they were not conservative about that issue, but pragmatic. They were not following the conservative ideological rulebook of minimal intervention into markets, maximum GDP growth, and doing the complete opposite of everything that looks like socialism.
When I read the fact about chicken suffering, I got the impression that laying an egg was just as painful as a human giving birth. I'm unbelievably relieved that this is not the case, and that I can still feel okay about buying eggs from ethically treated chickens.
Humans are way out on the extreme end of birth difficulty by species, though there are a few others that have their own unique challenges. Evolution kept making our heads bigger until childbirth was just barely survivable.
And on top of that it also kept make our hip-bones bigger to aid walking upright.
It would not be the case if it was so? I really don't understand something about such views, like how ethical vegans for example work. I would not torture an animal to death to eat it. But if it is already tortured to death, I will buy the carcass and eat it. That is because at that point it is not my responsibility. Someone else did it. And just "generating demand" for torturing animals to death with my money, which seems how all ethical vegans think, does not make sense to me at all. "Generating demand" is not direct causation. They could still decide to not do this and make money some different way. Giving people who torture animals to death does not in any way forces them to do so. Hence there is no direct responsibility. This is the same about everything, like buying things with conflict minerals in it. Ad absurdum even buying lampshades of human skin would not be wrong. As long as you did not do the deed or did not tell someone to do it for you, you are not responsible.
There is something in this logic that completely does not make sense to me.
The screwworm has since spread back north of Panama; it's been found in southern Mexico, & sterile male flies are being distributed as a precaution against its spread to Texas. (See, e.g., https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/cattle/ticks/screwworm/outbreak-central-america & https://www.expressnews.com/business/article/new-world-screwworm-usda-rollins-south-texas-20384104.php )
I was confused by your statement about tuberculosis being treatable, since I'd heard of antibiotic resistance in tuberculosis; it turns out (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidrug-resistant_tuberculosis ) that antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis is usually just resistant to the specific antibiotics usually used to treat it, & then has to be treated with different antibiotics (which often are more expensive &/or have worse side effects).
Re: Dickens, I must say I feel the issue is as much the modern American teenager's ability to understand Dickens's English as anything deeper, and I'm curious how they would fare with a text of equal intellectual complexity, but with a syntax and vocabulary closer to their own. As it stands, they were being tested not simply on understanding complex prose written in their own language, but complex prose written in — if not a foreign language, then at least a foreign dialect. There must come a point when a distant century's English becomes at least partly impenetrable to the modern reader. Understanding unannotated Shakespeare is not just matter of understanding figurative language — let alone understanding Beowulf. It pains me, but I really think, at least for Americans, Dickens is trending that way, and fast. It is what it is.
And that's without taking into account a wealth of cultural assumptions that have gone from old-fashioned to utterly obscure, which are again in play with Shakespeare. I was surprised that the post's commentary doesn't discuss the fact that the Megalosaurus metaphor is clearly failing to parse for students not so much because they don't understand metaphors, as because they can't conceive of the evident associative link in Dickens's mind between prehistoric reptiles and the biblical flood, upon which the entire tangent relies without ever making it explicit. To students who know that an asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs and have never thought otherwise, it's gibberish.
Now, obviously, I would want someone teaching a class on Bleak House to understand these allusions! But failing to do so, I feel, isn't precisely a lack of *literacy*; it's a lack of historical background. The needed remedies — the things they need more classes about — aren't the same.
I think the historical background/literacy distinction you're making is pretty false! According to the simple view of reading (which is generally accepted in cognitive science), reading is made up of two skills: decoding the words on the page and having enough background information to follow what's going on. A lot of reading comprehension problems in the higher grades are problems with the second half: people don't know words that mostly only appear in books, don't understand the references being made, can't place a piece of writing in its historical and genre context, etc. And this problem is a vicious cycle: if you don't have the background information, reading is effortful and unrewarding, so you don't pick up the information that people only get from books, so reading is even more effortful and unrewarding, so...
I take the point, but I think the linked post is, at times, trying to make a stronger case than yours, claiming to show that students lack some sort of understanding of what a metaphor *is*; that they lack a kind of mental capacity for abstraction, hence being unable to think of the waddling Megalosaurus as anything else than a literal dinosaur which must diegetically exist within the story. Which would imply that teachers are failing to properly convey basic ideas about how literature works; that these students don't really understand what a metaphor is, generally. That they haven't internalised the idea that sometimes a book will talk about things that aren't really there.
Whereas, if I'm right, they might very well understand this principle perfectly. It's just that the Megalosaurus tangent is equally baffling to them whether interpreted literally or figuratively. So, due to a separate issue of badly misjudging Bleak House's genre, they tentatively bet on the literal reading, which (to them) is bizarre but at least intelligible.
I don't want to be pedantic about whether this still counts as a lack of "literacy"; my core point is that one perspective suggests schools are bad at teaching students about the abstract concept of figurative language etc., whereas the other suggests schools are just lacking at giving their students broad knowledge about the arcana of the real world.
(As a wholly separate point, you cited "people not knowing certain words" again, but I want to stress that when I talked about Dickens's English being difficult to grasp, I meant his syntax, his sentence structures, as much as any individual word.)
Yeah TBC I don't entirely agree with the linked post; I do expect that English majors are familiar with the basic concept of figurative language. I think the problem is multifactorial. Some of it is lack of information (about Charles Dickens, the Bible, Victorian London...). Some of it is finding decoding effortful (either because of vocab/syntax or because you're straightforwardly not that good at phonics), so you're focusing on that and don't have the brain space for also figuring out the meaning and monitoring your comprehension. Some of it is experiencing the first two so often that it doesn't really occur to you that books are supposed to be understood, and that if a zombie dinosaur has appeared in the first paragraph but disappeared for the next six then perhaps something confusing is happening and you should double-check your understanding.
But surely "how much background information about chancery courts in 1830s London should the average person be expected to have?" is a fair question when a text requires the reader to have, or quickly acquire, a fair bit of it if they are to understand what's going on, much less derive any pleasure or improvement from reading it.
Also, I've voiced in a separate comment my strong suspicion that the students' failure to look up all of the unfamiliar terms despite being "allowed" to do so may have been due to social pressure, fear of being thought stupid (not an unjustified fear, it turns out), and/or courteous disinclination to "waste" the interviewer's time looking up multiple references in a single sentence. But the study authors never even consider those possibilities, instead leaping to the conclusion that the students are simply baffled and overwhelmed.
Dorothy Thompson obviously has more experience with Nazis than I do, but Who Goes Nazi? strikes me as both patently false and deeply harmful to the cause of anti-Nazisim. The Nazi party had 8 million people in it; caricaturing them all as being "visibly evil" in a comic book kind of way is nonsense.
The average Nazi was a conformist; that is, a normal human. Antisemitism was common even outside of the Nazi ranks, it was just a fact of life in Germany at the time. People engaged in it not because they were jealous, bullies, insecure, or whatever, but simply because it's what everyone around them was doing. Many of them had some severe cognitive dissonance on the subject, having positive impressions of individual Jews they knew, while still regarding "the Jews" as suspect.
I highly recommend Melita Maschmann's Account Rendered to get a sense of this. Of course as the narrator of her own life she's going to see herself though rose-tinted glasses, but I think any reader would have a pretty hard time coming away from that book with the sense that she would have been anything but a normal, pleasant, well-liked, person if not for the culture in which she was surrounded.
The real predictor of Nazism is just (lack of) intellectual honesty. The ability to actually *see* what the people around you are doing and evaluate it on its own merits, without the self-preservation instinct to just get along, just blend in, that leads people to suppress and rationalize away any thoughts too controversial.
I could give specific groups. The carnists who recognize that torturing animals is wrong in theory, but are perfectly happy to keep doing it as long as it's considered socially acceptable. The "anti-racists" who form whole communities around bullying any socially awkward white man who lacks the privilege or social skills to fight back, and who love fascistic iconography and polices as long as they're relabeled "communist" first. Etc.
But this sort of pop-psychoanalyzing people is actively detrimental to the quest for a better world. Everyone wants an excuse to call their outgroup evil, and doing so leads to exactly the sort of dynamics that lead to Nazism in the first place. It's precisely the people who lack the introspective ability to even consider how they themselves could be susceptible to a hateful ideology—the people who think that Nazis are just inherently inferior, and that since "I'm just not a Nazi" anything they do must be morally pure—who would themselves "go Nazi" at the first opportunity.
Also a lot of people were afraid of the Communists, who actually had started a bloody revolution a decade or so back. There was also massive inflation the centrist parties had failed to control (and in the thousands of percents, not 3-8% like we had). The last election is in 1933, right? The Holocaust's still in the future; the Nazis hadn't committed genocide yet.
By 1941 most of the Germans who went Nazi were too terrified to do anything else.
I think I agree with you up to a point. The essay's statement that "Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi" hits me as so glaringly false that it throws the entire rest of it into question. However, I do think she is correct about one thing, which is that the main thing separating the "un-Nazifiable" people from those who can be pulled in is the presence of some form of internal motivation that the person feels more accountable to than pleasing others, fulfilling a societal role, or any of the other external validation drives that fascism appeals to. Your own example of intellectual honesty can be one such internal motivation: the unshakeable pedants who object that Nazis are wrong not in a moral sense, but in a "that is incorrect" sense, will not be absorbed by Nazism, though in that case the main difference it will usually make is that they will be attacked by it instead.
I was reminded of a bit in C. S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters, where one demon advises another that they are to try and prevent the person they are tempting from doing anything that they really enjoy, in and of itself, for its own sake. Instead, they encourage their assigned humans to only think of what's fashionable, or high-status, or in keeping with their station. This is in aim of diminishing any ability of the subject to know their own mind, their own preferences, and to assert themselves as a separate entity from the society around them, all of which the demons view as hazardous to their manipulations.
> American environmentalism is partisan today not for ideological reasons but because of political alliances
This is not just an American thing, it happened (at least a little bit) in basically every country. It's kinda inevitable given that:
1) There will always be people with a wider moral circle (~the left) and a narrower moral circle (~the right)
2) Capitalism is a system that funnels wealth/power into the hands of those that are egotistical enough to externalize their costs towards the planet at large
3) People with a wider moral circle will want to change that
4) The wealth/power gained from externalizing costs can be used to set those with a narrower moral circle against those with a wider moral circle
As long as capitalism exists these polarization dynamics will continue. You can change things on the margin by implementing better/non-deterministic voting systems, teaching people critical thinking skills, collectivizing social media platforms (and we should do all of those), but the fundamental cause will not go away as long as capitalism remains.
This video explain how this happened in France: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XAD3za9pMw
“The reconciliation bill would take money from the poor, give money to the rich, and increase the deficit.”
This is a partisan and misleading take. The bill does not “take money” from the poor except in the sense that it cuts benefits programs. It only “gives money to the rich” in the sense that it cuts taxes on the rich—and the middle class! The Washington Post has coverage here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2025/trump-big-beautiful-bill-your-taxes-cuts/?itid=sr_0_a488bced-25cc-4f60-99a9-837e9d6be430
I don't think "take money from the poor and give to the rich" is a misleading gloss on "cut benefits for the poor and cut taxes on the rich".
I think a naive reader would assume actual money was being taken from the poor, rather than a cut in services the poor get that are theoretically estimated as worth $x per recipient.
I will eat my hat if even a single Ozy reader thought that it meant the government was directly commandeering money from the poor. Should we also be worried that when people write things like "The university took thousands from me this semester" or "The university is bleeding its students dry" others will interpret that as university staff robbing/cutting their students?
I don’t think any objective observer would describe a bill that will leave almost all of us better off that way.
> Claude was once lured into an alliance because o3 convinced it that they could do a four-way tie and then multiple AIs could win (they could not, that is not how Diplomacy works).
On Backstabbr at least, you can choose to end the game in a draw between some number of players. I've played one-turn-per-day games with coworkers twice, and chose to end both in a two-way draw with my closest ally.
I've played quite a bit of Diplomacy, and draws are overwhelmingly the most common way for games to end*. It's possible that the rules for this specific AI competition prevented draws, though.
Yeah, this makes me suspect that Claude got confused between the rules and its substantial knowledge of draw games.
* Apart from running out of time, which is generally considered to be a form of draw.
I'm very, very suspicious of the conclusion reached by the authors of the literacy study (and uncritically accepted by the blogger) that the inability of the subjects of the study to translate Dickens into modern English on demand necessarily reflects their ability to read. It seems blazingly obvious to me that *most* of the subjects had *most* of their difficulties not with the complexity or length of the sentences, but with the barrage of archaic and foreign references presented to them--or, in other words, their simple lack of familiarity with the built environment, legal and social customs, and geography of early 19th century London. Yes, they were allowed to look up words or names they didn't understand, but it is far from clear to me that the interviewers stressed (or told them at all) that it was permissible for them take all the time they needed to do so.
I suspect very strongly that some of these "Competent" and "Problematic" readers could have understood and translated the text reasonably well if they had actually looked up each of the unfamiliar references in each sentence--as a person good at reading but lacking in historical/geographical/legal knowledge might do if reading Dickens for pleasure at home might do--but that they simply didn't want to take up too much of the interviewer's time, or were afraid of looking stupid (as indeed the study's authors all but make them out to be). I couldn't help but notice that the authors point out several times that subjects did not look things up, even though they could have. I also notice that they didn't ask the subjects why not; they seem just to have jumped to the conclusion that the subjects were either lazy or thoroughly befuddled.
(I will grant that a proficient or even competent reader should be able to recognize that the Megalosaurus walking the streets of London is not meant to be taken literally. This, anyway, is an actual example of illiteracy.)
The fact that college students in Kansas are so completely lacking in the background knowledge required to read Dickens easily may be an indictment of the history, geography, and law that they have been taught, or more precisely not taught, in school, but the study was supposed to be about reading proficiency.
Another thing that annoyed me, in an unrelated way, about that study was the way that the authors sort of sandbagged on behalf of their one "proficient" reader. That person was reading the easiest passage by far! No archaic words, no knowledge of things like Michaelmas Terms or chancery courts required, just a straightforward description of people getting pissy with one another in a very muddy street! They even give their special angel a little break by failing to call them on the actual mistake they make in translating the passage (thinking that the previous thousands of footsteps in the mud happened in generations past, when Dickens clearly is referring to footsteps that morning). This fucking study is stupid in both directions! Gah!
> Building semiconductor factories in the United Arab Emirates is not a good way to make sure that AI is democratic. It’s honestly insulting that Sam Altman believes he can get away with this rhetoric. Who does he think he’s going to fool?
... maybe because that's what "democracy" has consistently meant in US foreign policy since 1945? Fork found in kitchen. Anyone with knowledge of history could tell this would be the result of the AI arms race narrative that OpenPhil-cluster EAs, AI industry lobbyists, and the Situational Awareness white paper have been pushing for the past year.
You tell us a lot of irrelevant things about this cuban rapper, but ignore the only thing that matters - does he have permission to be in the United States? His politics are irrelevant. What would or wouldn't happen to him in his home country is irrelevant. All that matters is whether he has legal authorization to be in the United States. This should not be political. This is a matter of basic rule of law. If Americans can't even agree on that, then what are we left with? Anarchy and the slow collapse of society?
The U.S. government has considerable discretion about whether to give people legal residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act. As a citizen of the United States, I can certainly offer an opinion about whether I think my government is using this discretion wisely. (I think it was not.)
What would or wouldn't happen to him in his home country is extremely relevant, *especially* if it is for political reasons. As stated in 8 USC § 1158(b)(1)(B)(i), someone seeking political asylum in the US "must establish that race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion was or will be at least one central reason for persecuting the applicant."
As I understand the facts, the initial application which was denied was not for political asylum, it was for a different immigration status.
If there's one thing that could make AIs anti-social, it's subjecting them to games of Diplomacy.
"Environmentalism was mostly nonpartisan until the 1980s."
Why do people keep confusing party affiliation / politicians with climate change? Thatcher and Reagan might have wanted to do something about climate change, but that only means they were not conservative about that issue, but pragmatic. They were not following the conservative ideological rulebook of minimal intervention into markets, maximum GDP growth, and doing the complete opposite of everything that looks like socialism.
Just finished your latest monthly Linkposts. My emotional support animal is filing a complaint.