Quickies A game theory curiosity: what is the role of infrastructure? It’s interesting that though Assad, ISIS, China, Russia etc all know that computers & networks are heavily pwned by their enemies like the USA, they still can’t bring themselves to take it down or stop using them. ISIS, while losing, continued to heavily use smartphones and the internet despite knowing it’s of intense interest to its enemies/the West and despite the West signaling its estimate of the danger to ISIS by allowing the networks & phones to continue to operate instead of destroying/disabling them (as would be trivial to do with a few bombing missions). An easier example is North Korea continues to allow tourists to pay it thousands of dollars, knowing that the tourists claim that they are in fact undermining the regime through consciousness-raising & contact with foreigners. Both NK and the tourists can’t both be right; but while it’s obvious who’s right in the case of NK (it’s NK, and the tourists are immoral and evil for going and helping prop up the regime with the hard foreign currency it desperately needs to buy off its elite & run things like its ICBM & nuclear bomb programs), it’s not so obvious in other cases. To me, it seems like ISIS is hurt rather than helped on net by the cellphone towers in its territory, as the data can be used against it in so many ways while the benefits of propaganda are limited and ISIS certainly cannot ‘hack back’ and benefit a similar degree by collecting info on US/Iraqi forces - but apparently they disagree. So this is an odd sort of situation. ISIS must believe it is helped on net and the US is harmed on net by cellphones & limited Internet, so it doesn’t blow up all the cellphone towers in its territory (they’re easy to find). Wile the US seems to believe it is helped on net and ISIS is harmed on net by cellphones & limited Internet (so it doesn’t blow up or brick all the cellphone towers in ISIS territory, they’re easy find). But they can’t both be right, and they both know the other’s view on it. Some possible explanations: one side is wrong, irrational, and too irrational to realize that it’s a bad sign that the enemy is permitting them to keep using smartphones/Internet; one or more sides thinks that leaving the infrastructure alone is hurting it but the benefits to civilians is enough (yeah, right); or one side agrees it’s worse off, but lacks the internal discipline to enforce proper OPSEC (plausible for ISIS), so has to keep using it (a partial abandonment being worse than full use). Big blocks are critical to Bitcoin’s scaling to higher transaction rates; after a lot of arguing with no progress, some people made Bitcoin Unlimited and other forks, and promptly screwed up the coding and seem to’ve engaged in some highly unethical tactics as well, thereby helping discredit allowing larger blocks in the original Bitcoin; does this make it a real-world example of the unilateralist’s curse? The most recent SEP entry on logical empiricism really reinforces how much America benefited from WWII and the diaspora of logicians, mathematicians, philosophers and geniuses of every stripe from Europe (something I’ve remarked on while reading academic biographies). You can trace back so much in just computing alone to all of their work! It’s impossible to miss; in intellectual history, there is always “before WWII”, and “after WWII”. In retrospect, it’s crazy that the US government was so blind and did so little to create or at least assist this brain drain, and it was accomplished by neglect and accident and by other researchers working privately to bring over the likes of Albert Einstein and John von Neumann and all the others to Princeton and elsewhere. Was this not one of the greatest bonanzas of R&D in human history? The US got much of the cream of Europe, a generation’s geniuses, at a critical moment in history. (And to the extent that it didn’t, because they died during the war or were captured by the Soviets, that merely indicates the lack of efforts made before the war - very few were so ideological Marxists, say, that they would have refused lucrative offers to stay in Europe in order to try to join the USSR instead.) This admittedly is hindsight but it’s striking to think of what enormous returns some investments of $1-2m & frictionless green cards would have generated in 1930-1940. If someone could have just go around to all the promising Jewish grad students in Germany and offer them a no-strings-attached green card + a stipend of $1k salary for a few years… For the cost of a few battleships or bombers, how many of the people in the German rocketry or nuclear program could’ve been lured away, and not ultimately have to take the technology developed with their talents to the Soviets? Despite the mad scramble of Operation Paperclip, which one would think have impressed on the US the importance of lubricating brain drain, this oversight continues: not only does US immigration law make life hard on grad students or researchers, it’s amazing to think that if war or depression broke out right now in East Asia, the US isn’t standing ready to cream off all the Chinese/Korean/Japanese researchers - but instead they must trickle through the broken US system, with no points-based skill immigration assistance! It’s unfortunate that we’re unable to learn from that and do anything comparable in the US, even basic measures like PhDs qualifying for green cards. So much of the strange and unique culture of California, like the ‘human potential movement’, seems to historically trace back to German Romanticism. All the physical culture, anti-vaxxers, granola, nudism, homeopathy, homosexuality, pornography, all of it seems to stem either intellectually or through emigration to Germans, in a way that is almost entirely unrecognized in any discussions I’ve seen. (Consider the Nazis’ associations with things like vegetarianism or animal rights or anti-smoking campaigns, among other things.) No one does rationality and science and technology quite like the Germans… but also no one goes insane quite like the Germans. So, LED lights are much cheaper to operate and run cooler, so they can emit much more light. When something gets cheaper, people buy a lot more of it. The leading theory right now about myopia is that it’s caused by the adaptive growing eye not receiving enough bright sunlight, which is orders of magnitude brighter than indoors, and growing incorrectly. So would the spread of LED lighting lead to a reduction in the sky-high myopia rates of industrialized countries? What about smartphone use, as they are bright light sources beamed straight into growing eyes? People often note a ‘sophomore slump’ or ‘sequelitis’ where the second work in a series or the other works by an author are noticeably worse than the first and most popular. Some of this can be inherent to the successor, since they cannot, for example, benefit from the magic of world-building a second time. But some of this is also going to be regression to the mean: by definition, if you start with an author’s best work, the next one can’t be better and probably will be worse. For the next one to be as good or better, either the author would need to be extremely consistent in output quality or you would need to start with one of their lesser works; the former is hard and few authors can manage it (and the ones who can are probably writing unchallenging dreck like pulp fiction), but the second, as inept as it might seem (why a reader want to start with the second-best book?) actually does happen because media markets are characterized by extreme levels of noise exacerbated by winner-take-all dynamics and long tails of extreme outcomes. So an author’s most popular work may well not be their best, because it is simply a fluke of luck; in most universes, J.K. Rowling does not become a billionaire on the strength of a mega-blockbuster book & movie series but publishes a few obscure well-regarded children’s books and does something else (note how few people read her non-Harry Potter books, and how many of them do so because they are a fan of HP). What might it look like in terms of ratings when an author publishes several works and then one of them takes off for random reasons and then publishes more? Probably the initial works will meander around the author’s mean as their few fans rate them relatively objectively, the popular work will receive very high ratings from the vast masses who cotton onto it, and then subsequent works will be biased upwards by the extreme fans now devoted to a famous author but still below the original since “it’s just doesn’t have the same magic”. Authors don’t improve that much over time, so the discontinuity between pre- and post-popular ratings or sales can be attributed to the popularity and give an idea of how biased media markets are. A striking demonstration that entertainment don’t matter much is how over the last 10 or 20 years, the size of the corpuses you can access easily and for free have increased by several orders of magnitude without making even a hiccup on happiness or life satisfaction surveys or longevity or suicide rates. Going back to the media abundance numbers: there are billions of videos on YouTube; millions of books on Libgen; god knows how much on the Internet Archive or the Internet in general; all of this for free and typically within a few clicks. In contrast, historically, people are media-poor to an almost unfathomable degree. A single book might cost a month or a year’s salary. A village’s only book might be a copy of the Bible. The nearest library might well be a private collection, and if one could get access, have a few dozen books at most, many of which would be common (but extremely expensive) books - hence the infinite number of medieval manuscripts of the Bible, Plato, or works like Roman de la Rose (hugely popular but now of interest only to specialists) while critically important works like Tacitus or Lucretius survive as a handful or a single manuscript, indicating few circulating copies. So in a lucky lifetime, one might read (assuming, of course, one is lucky enough to be literate) a few dozen or hundred books of any type. It’s no wonder that everyone is deeply familiar with any throwaway Biblical or Greek mythical allusion, when that might be the only book available, read repeatedly when shared across many people. What about stories and recitations and music? Oral culture, based on familiar standards, traditions, religions, and involving in ritual functions (one of the key aspects of ritual is that it repeats), does not offer much abundance to the individual either; hence the ability to construct phylogenetic trees of folk takes and follow their slow dissemination and mutation over the centuries, or perhaps as far back as 6 millennia in the case of “The Smith and the Devil”. Why does hardly anyone seem to have noticed? Why is it not the central issue of our time? Why do brief discussions of copyright or YouTube get immediately pushed out of discussions by funny cat pics? Why are people so much agonized by inflation going up 1% this year or wages remaining static when the available art price/quantity increases so much every year, if art is such a panacea? The answer of course is that “art is not about esthetics”, and people bloviating about how a novel saved their life are deluded or virtue-signaling; it did no such thing. Media/art is almost perfectly substitutable, there is already far more than is necessary, the effect of media on one’s beliefs or personality is nil, and so on. It’s always surprising to read about classical music and how recent the popularity of much of it is. Some classical music pieces are oddly recent things, like crosswords only recently turning 100 years old. For example, Vivaldi’s 1721 “Four Seasons” - what could be more commonplace or popular than it? It’s up there with “Ode to Joy” or Pachelbel’s Canon in terms of being overexposed to the point of nausea. Yet, if you read Wikipedia, Vivaldi was effectively forgotten after 1800, all the way until the 1930s and “Four Seasons” didn’t even get recorded until 1939! Pachelbel’s canon turns out to be another one: not even published until 1919 and not recorded until 1940 and only popularized in 1968! Since it might’ve been composed as early as 1680, it took almost 300 years to become famous. One thing I notice about different intellectual fields is the vastly different levels of cleverness and rigor applied. Mathematicians and theoretical physicists make the most astonishingly intricate & difficult theories & calculations that few humans could ever appreciate even after decades of intense study, while in another field like education research, one is grateful if a researcher can use a t-test and understands correlation!=causation. (Hence notorious phenomenon like physicists moving into a random field and casually making an important improvement; one thinks of dclayh’s anecdote about the mathematician who casually made a major improvement in computer circuit design and then stopped - as the topic was clearly unworthy of him.) This holds true for the average researcher and is reflected in things like GRE scores by major, and reproducibility rates of papers. (Aubrey de Grey: “It has always appalled me that really bright scientists almost all work in the most competitive fields, the ones in which they are making the least difference. In other words, if they were hit by a truck, the same discovery would be made by somebody else about 10 minutes later.”) This does not reflect relative importances of fields, either - is education less important to human society than refining physics’s Standard Model? Arguably, as physicists & mathematicians need to be taught a great deal before they can be good physicists/mathematicians, it is more important to get education right than continue to tweak some equation here or speculate about unobservable new particles. (At the least, education doesn’t seem like the least important field, but in terms of brainpower, it’s at the bottom, and the research is generally of staggeringly bad quality.) And the low level of talent among education researchers suggest considerable potential returns. But the equilibriums persist: the smartest students pile into the same fields to compete with each other, while other fields go begging. People keep saying self-driving cars will lead to massive sprawl by reducing the psychological & temporal costs of driving, but I wonder if it might not do the opposite, by revealing those reduced costs? Consumers suffer from a number of systematic cognitive biases in spending, and one of the big ones seems to be per-unit billing vs lump-sum pre-paids or hidden or opportunity costs. Whenever I bring up estimates of cars costing >$0.30/mile, when correctly including all costs like gas, time, people usually seem surprised & dismayed & try to deny it. (After calculating the total round-trip cost of driving into town to shop, I increased my online shopping substantially because I realized the in-person discounts were not nearly enough to compensate.) And Brad Templeton suggests ride-sharing is already cheaper for many people and use-cases, when you take into account these hidden costs. Similarly, the costs of car driving are reliably some of the most controversial topics in home economics (see for example the car posts on the Mr Money Moustache blog, where MMM is critical of cars). And have you noticed how much people grumble about taxi fares and even (subsidized) Uber/Lyft fares, while obsessing over penny differences in gas prices and ignoring insurance/repair/tire costs? Paying 10% more at the pump every week is well-remembered pain; the pain of paying an extra $100 to your mechanic or insurer once a year is merely a number on a piece of paper. The price illusion, that when you own your own car, you can drive around for “free”, is too strong. So I get the impression that people just don’t get just how expensive cars are as a form of transport. Any new form of car ownership which made these hidden prices more salient would feel like a painful jacking up of the price. People will whine about how ‘expensive’ the cars are for billing them $0.3/mile, but self-driving cars will be far too convenient for most people to not switch. (In the transition, people may keep owning their own cars, but this is unstable, since car ownership has so many fixed costs, and many fence-straddlers will switch fully at some point.) This would be similar to cases of urban dwellers who crunch the numbers and realize that relying entirely on Uber+public-transit would work out better than owning their own car; I bet they wind up driving fewer total miles each month than when they could drive around for ‘free’. So, the result of a transition to self-driving cars could be a much smaller increase in total miles-driven than forecast, due to backlash from this price illusion. Education stickiness: what happened to the ronin trope in anime? Justin Sevakis, “How Tough Is It To Get Into College In Japan?”, on Japanese college entrance exams: There’s a documented increase in teen suicide around that time of year, and many kids struggle with the stress. The good news is that in recent years, with Japan’s population decreasing, schools have become far less competitive. The very top tier schools are still very tough to get into, obviously, but many schools have started taking in more applying students in order to keep their seats full. So “ronin” is a word that gets used less and less often these days. In macroeconomics, we have the topic of wage stickiness and inflation: a small amount of inflation is seen as a good thing because workers dislike less a nominal paycut of 0% but a real paycut of 2% due to 2% inflation than inflation of 0% + 2% pay cut. So inflation allows wages to adjust subtly, avoiding unemployment and depression. Deflation, on the other hand, is the opposite, causing a static salary to increase in its burden to the employer, while the employee doesn’t feel like they are getting a real pay increase, and many workers would need to have pay cuts to enjoy a reasonable pay increase (and likewise, a burden on anyone using credit). What about higher education? In higher education, being a zero-sum signaling game, the ‘real value’ of a degree is analogous to its scarcity and eliteness: the fewer people who can get it, the more it’s worth. If everyone gets a high school diploma, it becomes worthless; if only a few people go that far, it maintains a salary/wage premium. Just like inflation/deflation, people’s demand for specific degrees/schools will make the degrees more or less valuable. Or perhaps a better analogy here might be to gold standards: if the mines don’t mine enough gold each year to offset population growth and the regular loss of gold to ordinary wear-and-tear, there will be deflation, but if they mine more than growth+loss, there will be some inflation. What are elite universities like the Ivy Leagues equivalent to? Gold mines which aren’t keeping up. Every year, Harvard is more competitive to get into because - shades of California - they refuse to expand in proportion to the total US student population, while per-student demands for Harvard remain the same or go up. They may increase enrollment a little each year, but if it’s not increasing fast enough, it is deflationary. As Harvard is the monopoly issuer of Harvard degrees, they can engage in rent-seeking (and their endowment would seem to reflect this). This means students must sink in more to the signaling arms race as the entire distribution of education credentials gets distorted, risking leaving students at a bottom tier school earning worthless signals. While with a decreasing population, it effectively become easier each year as the fixed enrollment allows a larger percentage of the student population, to maintain fixed enrollment. Since education is signaling and an arms-race, this makes students better off (at least initially). And this will happen despite the university’s interest in not relaxing its criteria and trying to keep its eliteness rent-wage constant. There may be legal requirements on a top tier school to take a certain number, it may be difficult for them to justify steep reductions, and of course there are many relevant internal dynamics which push towards growth (which adjuncts and deans and vice-presidents of diversity outreach will be fired now that there are fewer absolute students?). A fantasy I am haunted by, the Cosmic Spectator. What if, some day or night, a vast Daemon stole into my solitude and made a simple offer - “choose, and I shall take you off the mortal plane, and you mayest go whither in the Universe thou pleases down to the Final Day, an you give up any influence on the world forevermore, forever a spectator; else, remain as you are, to live in the real world and die in a score or three of years like any man?” Or, I wouldn’t sell my soul to the Devil for as little as Enoch Soames does, merely looking himself up in the library, but for a library from the end of history? Would I take it? Would you take it? I think I would. “How does it turn out?” is a curiosity that gnaws at me. What does it all amount to? What seeds now planted will in the fullness of time reveal unexpected twists and turns? What does human history culminate in? A sputter, a spurt, a scream, a spectacular? Was it AI, genetics, or something else entirely? (“Lessing, the most honest of theoretical men…”) Becoming a ghost, condemned to watch posterity’s indefinite activities down through deep time as the universe unfolds to timelike infinity, grants the consolation of an answer and an end to hunger - just to know, for the shock of looking around and seeing every last thing in the world radically transformed as suddenly I know to what end they all tend, what hidden potentials lurked to manifest later, what trajectory minimizes their energy between the Big Bang and the Big Crunch, everything that I and everyone else was mistaken about and over or underestimated, all questions given a final answer or firmly relegated to the refuse bin of the unknowable & not worth knowing, the gnawing hunger of curiosity at last slaked to the point where there could be curiosity no more, vanishing into nirvana like a blown-out candle. Have you ever noticed that amateur anime/illustrations online have gotten dramatically better since the 1990s? The very best has gotten better, but I’m convinced that the average/median/mode/whatevers have also gotten much better. Some of that is just the boring observation that hard drives can now store high-resolution images and Internet connections can send them without breaking the bank, and some of that is Gimp/Photoshop/formerly-high-end tools becoming democratized by piracy/FLOSS/freeware and more obscure (to non-artists) technological improvements like cheap high-accuracy touchpads you can sketch on, but I feel that these seem insufficient to explain the drastic leap in sophistication and complexity and colorizing. I think a lot of it comes from social mechanisms - I’ve noticed that many ‘digital native’ artists seem to rely heavily on online communities to learn from. They look at raw intermediates like .PSD files to see how it was gone, they watch videos of livestreamed art or ‘speedsketches’, they compete in informal and formal contests and try to win community approbation (‘mimetic desire’, anyone?), they follow pop culture which creates a constantly varying set of artistic styles to riff off of, they post everything they do to Deviantart or Tumblr and get instant feedback (however crude), they have enormous libraries of existing materials to trace in order to learn or simply outright copy into something they are working on… None of that will necessarily give one inspiration to create divine works of visual art, necessarily, but it sure does help with being a skilled technician. The same thing appears to have happened with music, coalescing around things like SoundCloud as well as YouTube. Somewhat like chess, all of this could have been done before in a pre-Internet era, but the competitiveness & communities hypercharge it all. There was another video game example I had in mind where I read recently a discussion which concluded that YouTube video tutorials/competitions had led to more progress in the past few years than in the prior 20 or so years since the game’s release. Tool-assisted or speedrun or video game hacking in general has been super-charged The Count of Zarathustra: The count of Monte Cristo as a Nietzschean hero?

Poem title: ‘The Scarecrow Appeals to Glenda the Good’

Twitter SF novel idea: an ancient British family has a 144 character (no spaces) string which encodes the political outcomes of the future eg. the Restoration, the Glorious Rebellion, Napoleon, Nazis etc. Thus the family has been able to pick the winning side every time and maintain its power & wealth. But they cannot interpret the remaining characters pertaining to our time, so they hire researchers/librarians to crack it. One of them is our narrator. In the course of figuring it out, he becomes one of the sides mentioned. Possible plot device: he has a corrupted copy?

A : “But who is to say that a butterfly could not dream of a man? You are not the butterfly to say so!” B : “No. Better to ask what manner of beast could dream of a man dreaming a butterfly, and a butterfly dreaming a man.”

Mr. T(athagata), the modern Bodhisattva: he remains in this world because he pities da fools trapped in the Wheel of Reincarnation.

A report from Geneva culinary crimes tribunal: ‘King Krryllok stated that Crustacistan had submitted a preliminary indictment of Gary Krug, “the butcher of Boston”, laying out in detail his systematic genocide of lobsters, shrimp, and others conducted in his Red Lobster franchisee; international law experts predicted that Krug’s legal team would challenge the origin of the records under the poisoned tree doctrine, pointing to news reports that said records were obtained via industrial espionage of Red Lobster Inc. When reached for comment, Krug evinced confusion and asked the reporter whether he would like tonight’s special on fried scallops.’

“Men, we face an acute situation. Within arcminutes, we will reach the enemy tangent. I expect each and every one of you to give the maximum. Marines, do not listen to the filthy Polars! Remember: the Emperor of Mankind watches over you at the Zero! Without his constant efforts at the Origin, all mankind would be lost, and unable to navigate the Warp (and Woof) of the x and y axes. You fight not just for him, but for all that is good and real! Our foes are degenerate, pathological, and rootless; these topologists don’t know their mouth from their anus! BURN THE QUATERNION HERETIC! CLEANSE THE HAMILTONIAN UNCLEAN!” And in the distance, sets of green-skinned freaks could be heard shouting: “Diagonals for the Orthogonal God! Affines for the Affine God! More lemma! WAAAAAAAAAAAAGGHHH!!!!!!” Many good men would be factored into pieces that day. In the grim future of Mathhammer 4e4, there is only proof!

Psychology Decluttering Ego depletion: Ego depletion refers to the idea that self-control and other mental processes that require focused conscious effort rely on energy that can be used up. When that energy is low (rather than high), mental activity that requires self-control is impaired. In other words, using one’s self-control impairs the ability to control one’s self later on. In this sense, the idea of (limited) willpower is correct. Wonder whether this has any connection with minimalism? Clutter might damage executive functions; Killingsworth & Gilbert 2010 correlated distraction with later unhappiness, and from “Henry Morton Stanley’s Unbreakable Will”, Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney: You might think the energy spent shaving in the jungle would be better devoted to looking for food. But Stanley’s belief in the link between external order and inner self-discipline has been confirmed recently in studies. In one experiment, a group of participants answered questions sitting in a nice neat laboratory, while others sat in the kind of place that inspires parents to shout, “Clean up your room!” The people in the messy room scored lower self-control, such as being unwilling to wait a week for a larger sum of money as opposed to taking a smaller sum right away. When offered snacks and drinks, people in the neat lab room more often chose apples and milk instead of the candy and sugary colas preferred by their peers in the pigsty. In a similar experiment online, some participants answered questions on a clean, well-designed website. Others were asked the same questions on a sloppy website with spelling errors and other problems. On the messy site, people were more likely to say that they would gamble rather than take a sure thing, curse and swear, and take an immediate but small reward rather than a larger but delayed reward. The orderly websites, like the neat lab rooms, provided subtle cues guiding people toward self-disciplined decisions and actions helping others. Paul Graham, “Stuff”: For example, in my house in Cambridge, which was built in 1876, the bedrooms don’t have closets. In those days people’s stuff fit in a chest of drawers. Even as recently as a few decades ago there was a lot less stuff. When I look back at photos from the 1970s, I’m surprised how empty houses look. As a kid I had what I thought was a huge fleet of toy cars, but they’d be dwarfed by the number of toys my nephews have. All together my Matchboxes and Corgis took up about a third of the surface of my bed. In my nephews’ rooms the bed is the only clear space. Stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, but our attitudes toward it haven’t changed correspondingly. We overvalue stuff. …And unless you’re extremely organized, a house full of stuff can be very depressing. A cluttered room saps one’s spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there’s less room for people in a room full of stuff. But there’s more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what’s around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting. (This could explain why clutter doesn’t seem to bother kids as much as adults. Kids are less perceptive. They build a coarser model of their surroundings, and this consumes less energy.)…Another way to resist acquiring stuff is to think of the overall cost of owning it. The purchase price is just the beginning. You’re going to have to think about that thing for years-perhaps for the rest of your life. Every thing you own takes energy away from you. Some give more than they take. Those are the only things worth having. Michael Lewis, “Obama’s Way”: This time he covered a lot more ground and was willing to talk about the mundane details of presidential existence. “You have to exercise,” he said, for instance. “Or at some point you’ll just break down.” You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” It’s striking how cluttered a big city is when you visit them from a rural area; it’s also striking how mental disease seems to correlate with cities and how mental performance improves with natural vista and not urban vistas. See also latent inhibition: Latent inhibition is a process by which exposure to a stimulus of little or no consequence prevents conditioned associations with that stimulus being formed. The ability to disregard or even inhibit formation of memory, by preventing associative learning of observed stimuli, is an automatic response and is thought to prevent information overload. Latent inhibition is observed in many species, and is believed to be an integral part of the observation/learning process, to allow the self to interact successfully in a social environment. Most people are able to shut out the constant stream of incoming stimuli, but those with low latent inhibition cannot. It is hypothesized that a low level of latent inhibition can cause either psychosis, a high level of creativity[1] or both, which is usually dependent on the subject’s intelligence.[2][3] Those of above average intelligence are thought to be capable of processing this stream effectively, an ability that greatly aids their creativity and ability to recall trivial events in incredible detail and which categorizes them as almost creative geniuses. Those with less than average intelligence, on the other hand, are less able to cope, and so as a result are more likely to suffer from mental illness. Interesting decluttering approach: “100 Things Challenge” https://web.archive.org/web/20100301094213/http://www.guynameddave.com/100-thing-challenge.html

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1812048,00.html

http://www.denverpost.com/room/ci_8060057 Optimizing the alphabet Here’s an interesting idea: the glyphs of the Phoenician-style alphabet are not optimized in any sense. They are bad in several ways, and modern glyphs are little better. For example, ‘v’ and ‘w’, or ‘m’ and ‘n’. People confuse them all the time, both in reading and in writing. So that’s one criterion: glyphs should be as distinct from all the rest as possible. What’s a related criterion? ‘m’ and ‘w’ are another pair which seem suboptimal, yet they are as dissimilar as, say, ‘a’ and ‘b’, under many reasonable metrics. ‘m’ and ‘w’ are related via symmetry. Even though they share relatively few pixels, they are still identical under rotation, and we can see that. We could confuse them if we were reading upside down, or at an angle, or just confuse them period. So that’s our next criterion: the distinctness must also hold when the glyph is rotated by any degree and then compared to the rest. OK, so we now have a set of unique and dissimilar glyphs that are unambiguous about their orientation. What else? Well, we might want them to be easy to write as well as read. How do we define ‘easy to write’? We could have a complicated physiological model about what strokes can easily follow what movements and so on, but we will cop out and say: it is made of as few straight lines and curves as possible. Rather than unwritable pixels in a grid, our primitives will be little geometric primitives. The fewer the primitives and the closer to integers or common fractions the positioning of said primitives, the simpler and the better. We throw all these rules in, add a random starting population or better yet a population modeled after the existing alphabet, and begin our genetic algorithm. What 26 glyphs will we get? Problem: our current glyphs may be optimal in a deep sense: Dehaene describes some fascinating and convincing evidence for the first kind of innateness. In one of the most interesting chapters, he argues that the shapes we use to make written letters mirror the shapes that primates use to recognize objects. After all, I could use any arbitrary squiggle to encode the sound at the start of “Tree” instead of a T. But actually the shapes of written symbols are strikingly similar across many languages. It turns out that T shapes are important to monkeys, too. When a monkey sees a T shape in the world, it is very likely to indicate the edge of an object - something the monkey can grab and maybe even eat. A particular area of its brain pays special attention to those important shapes. Human brains use the same area to process letters. Dehaene makes a compelling case that these brain areas have been “recycled” for reading. “We did not invent most of our letter shapes,” he writes. “They lay dormant in our brains for millions of years, and were merely rediscovered when our species invented writing and the alphabet.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/books/review/Gopnik-t.html “Dimensions of Dialogue”, Joel Simon: “Here, new writing systems are created by challenging two neural networks to communicate information via images. Using the magic of machine learning, the networks attempt to create their own emergent language isolate that is robust to noise.” Multiple interpretations theory of humor My theory is that humor is when there is a connection between the joke & punchline which is obvious to the person in retrospect, but not initially. Hence, a pun is funny because the connection is unpredictable in advance, but clear in retrospect; Eliezer’s joke about the motorist and the asylum inmate is funny because we were predicting some other response other than the logical one; similarly for ‘why did the duck cross the road? to get to the other side’ is not funny to someone who has never heard any of the road jokes, but to someone who has and is thinking of zany explanations, the reversion to normality is unpredicted. Your theory doesn’t work with absurdist humor. There isn’t initially 1 valid decoding, much less 2. Mm. This might work for some proofs - Lewis Carroll, as we all know, was a mathematician - but a proof for something you already believe that is conducted via tedious steps is not humorous by anyone’s lights. Proving P/=NP is not funny, but proving 2+2=3 is funny. ‘A man walks into a bar and says “Ow.”’ How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb? Two. One to hold the giraffe, and one to put the clocks in the bathtub. Exactly. What are the 2 valid decodings of that? I struggle to come up with just 1 valid decoding involving giraffes and bathtubs; like the duck crossing the road, the joke is the frustration of our attempt to find the connection. Efficient natural language Split out to “How Complex Are Individual Differences?” Cryonics cluster When one looks at cryonics enthusiasts, there’s an interesting cluster of beliefs. There’s psychological materialism, as one would expect (it’s possible to believe your personal identity is your soul and also that cryonics works, but it’s a rather unstable and unusual possibility), since the mind cannot be materially preserved if it is not material. Then there’s libertarianism with its appeal to free markets and invisible entities like deadweight loss. And then there is ethical utilitarianism, usually act utilitarianism . They’re often accused of being nerdy and specifically autistic or Asperger’s; with considerable truth. Most have programming experience, or have read a good deal about logic and math and computers. Romain 2010 gives the stereotypical image: Cryonics is a particularly American social practice, created and taken up by a particular type of American: primarily a small faction of white, male, atheist, Libertarian, middle- and upper-middle-income, computer-engineering “geeks” who believe passionately in the free market and its ability to support technological progress…When I interviewed him, Jerry Lemler, former president of Alcor, claimed that a “typical cryonicist” is highly educated, white, American, male, well-read, employed in a computer or technical field, “not very social,” often single, has few or no children, is atheistic or agnostic, and is not wealthy but financially stable. Lemler also told me that cryonicists tend to have very strong Libertarian political views, believing in the rights of the individual and the power of the free market, although Lemler himself is a self-proclaimed “bleeding heart Liberal.” Less than 25% of Alcor’s members were women, and only a small fraction of these women joined purely out of their own interest; most female Alcor members were the wives, partners, daughters, or mothers of a man who joined first. Lemler also said that cryonicists are highly adventurous, although he added, “You may not see that in their current lives. In fact, we have the bookish types, if you will, as I just described. You wouldn’t think that they’d be willing to take a chance on this particular adventure.”…Like any group, the cryonics community is by no means uniform in demography, thought, or opinion. The majority of cryonicists I met were, indeed, software or mechanical engineers. But I also encountered venture capitalists, traders, homemakers, a shaman, a journalist, a university professor, cryobiologists, an insurance broker, artificial intelligence designers, a musician, men, women, children, people of color, people in perfect health, and people who were terminally ill. Nevertheless, a sort of Weberian “ideal type” (Weber 2001[1930]) of the typical cryonicist has emerged, and this is how cryonicists recognize themselves and one another. …In an effort to bring the quite passionate technical discussion to a close, one member made a public aside to me, the anthropologist, loud enough for the benefit of everyone in the room. He said, “You know that a typical cryonicist is a male computer programmer, don’t you?” Everyone laughed. Another member shouted out, “And a Libertarian!” Everyone laughed harder. Everyone appeared to enjoy the joke, which seemed to reaffirm the group’s identity and to promote a kind of solidarity among them. The results of one long-running online survey (from the sample size, LessWrongers probably made up <0.5% of the sample); “Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Roots of an Individualist Ideology” (as summarized by the WSJ): Perhaps more intriguingly, when libertarians reacted to moral dilemmas and in other tests, they displayed less emotion, less empathy and less disgust than either conservatives or liberals. They appeared to use “cold” calculation to reach utilitarian conclusions about whether (for instance) to save lives by sacrificing fewer lives. They reached correct, rather than intuitive, answers to math and logic problems, and they enjoyed “effortful and thoughtful cognitive tasks” more than others do. The researchers found that libertarians had the most “masculine” psychological profile, while liberals had the most feminine, and these results held up even when they examined each gender separately, which “may explain why libertarianism appeals to men more than women.” This clustering could be due solely to social networks and whatnot. But suppose they’re not. Is there any perspective which explains this, and cryonic’s “hostile wife phenomenon” as well? Let’s look at the key quotes about that phenomenon, and a few quotes giving the reaction The authors of this article know of a number of high profile cryonicists who need to hide their cryonics activities from their wives and ex-high profile cryonicists who had to choose between cryonics and their relationship. We also know of men who would like to make cryonics arrangements but have not been able to do so because of resistance from their wives or girlfriends. In such cases, the female partner can be described as nothing less than hostile toward cryonics. As a result, these men face certain death as a consequence of their partner’s hostility. While it is not unusual for any two people to have differing points of view regarding cryonics, men are more interested in making cryonics arrangements. A recent membership update from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation reports that 667 males and 198 females have made cryonics arrangements. Although no formal data are available, it is common knowledge that a substantial number of these female cryonicists signed up after being persuaded by their husbands or boyfriends. For whatever reason, males are more interested in cryonics than females. These issues raise an obvious question: are women more hostile to cryonics than men? …Over the 40 years of his active involvement, one of us (Darwin) has kept a log of the instances where, in his personal experience, hostile spouses or girlfriends have prevented, reduced or reversed the involvement of their male partner in cryonics. This list (see appendix) is restricted to situations where Darwin had direct knowledge of the conflict and was an Officer, Director or employee of the cryonics organization under whose auspices the incident took place. This log spans the years 1978 to 1986, an 8 year period…The 91 people listed in this table include 3 whose deaths are directly attributable to hostility or active intervention on the part of women. This does not include the many instances since 1987 where wives, mothers, sisters, or female business partners have materially interfered with a patient’s cryopreservation(3) or actually caused the patient not to be cryopreserved or removed from cryopreservation(4). Nor does it reflect the doubtless many more cases where we had no idea… …The most immediate and straightforward reasons posited for the hostility of women to cryonics are financial. When the partner with cryonics arrangements dies, life insurance and inheritance funds will go to the cryonics organization instead of to the partner or their children. Some nasty battles have been fought over the inheritance of cryonics patients, including attempts of family members to delay informing the cryonics organization that the member had died, if an attempt was made at all(5). On average, women live longer than men and can have a financial interest in their husbands’ forgoing cryonics arrangements. Many women also cite the “social injustice” of cryonics and profess to feel guilt and shame that their families’ money is being spent on a trivial, useless, and above all, selfish action when so many people who could be saved are dying of poverty and hunger now…Another, perhaps more credible, but unarguably more selfish, interpretation of this position is what one of us (Darwin) has termed “post reanimation jealousy.” When women with strong religious convictions who give “separation in the afterlife” as the reason they object to their husbands’ cryopreservation are closely questioned, it emerges that this is not, in fact, their primary concern. The concern that emerges from such discussion is that if cryonics is successful for the husband, he will not only resume living, he may well do so for a vast period of time during which he can reasonably be expected to form romantic attachments to other women, engage in purely sexual relationships or have sexual encounters with other women, or even marry another woman (or women), father children with them and start a new family. This prospect evokes obvious insecurity, jealousy and a nearly universal expression on the part of the wives that such a situation is unfair, wrong and unnatural. Interestingly, a few women who are neither religious nor believers in a metaphysical afterlife have voiced the same concerns. The message here may be “If I’ve got to die then you’ve got to die too!” As La Rochefoucauld famously said, with a different meaning in mind, “Jealousy is always born with love, but does not always die with it.”…While cryonics is mostly a male pursuit, there are women involved and active, and many of them are single. Wives (or girlfriends) justifiably worry that another woman who shares their husbands’ enthusiasm for cryonics, shares his newly acquired world view and offers the prospect of a truly durable relationship - one that may last for centuries or millennia - may win their husbands’ affections. This is by no means a theoretical fear because this has happened a number of times over the years in cryonics. Perhaps the first and most publicly acknowledged instance of this was the divorce of Fred Chamberlain from his wife (and separation from his two children) and the break-up of the long-term relationship between Linda McClintock (nee Linda Chamberlain) and her long-time significant other as a result of Fred and Linda working together on a committee to organize the Third National Conference On Cryonics (sponsored the Cryonics Society of California). Going back to Romain 2010, reproduction is also a theorized concern: For many cryonicists, having children is considered an unnecessary diversion of resources that can and should be devoted to the self, especially if one is to achieve immortality. Phil, one of the few cryonicists I know with children, once said to me, “They’re good kids. But if their moms hadn’t wanted them, they wouldn’t exist.” He did not see much value in passing on genes or creating new generations and preferred to work toward a world in which people no longer need to procreate since the extension of human lifespans would maintain the human species. Indeed, I have heard some in the community theorize that having children is an evolutionary byproduct that could very well become vestigial as humans come closer and closer to becoming immortal. I have also heard several lay theories within the cryonics community about genetic or brain structure differences between men and women that cause men to favor life-extension philosophies and women to favor procreation and the conservative maintenance of cultural traditions…In a very different example, Allison wanted to have children but decided that she will wait until post-reanimation because she was single and in her mid-30s and thus approaching age-related infertility (medicine of the future would also reverse loss of fertility, she assumed). When I suggested that she might freeze her eggs so that she could possibly have genetically related children later in life, she responded that she has too much work to accomplish in the immediate future and would rather wait until she “came back” to experience parenthood. Eliezer Yudkowsky, remarking on the number of women in one cryonics gathering, inadvertently demonstrates that the gender disparity is still large: This conference was just young people who took the action of signing up for cryonics, and who were willing to spend a couple of paid days in Florida meeting older cryonicists. The gathering was 34% female, around half of whom were single, and a few kids. This may sound normal enough, unless you’ve been to a lot of contrarian-cluster conferences, in which case you just spit coffee all over your computer screen and shouted “WHAT?” I did sometimes hear “my husband persuaded me to sign up”, but no more frequently than “I persuaded my husband to sign up”. Around 25% of the people present were from the computer world, 25% from science, and 15% were doing something in music or entertainment - with possible overlap, since I’m working from a show of hands. I was expecting there to be some nutcases in that room, people who’d signed up for cryonics for just the same reason they subscribed to homeopathy or astrology, i.e., that it sounded cool. None of the younger cryonicists showed any sign of it. There were a couple of older cryonicists who’d gone strange, but none of the young ones that I saw. Only three hands went up that did not identify as atheist/agnostic, and I think those also might have all been old cryonicists. Some female perspectives: Well, as a woman, I do have the exact same gut reaction [to cryonics]. I’d never want to be involved with a guy who wanted this. It just seems horribly inappropriate and wrong, and no it’s nothing to do at all with throwing away the money, I mean I would rather not throw away money but I could be with a guy who spent money foolishly without these strong feelings. I don’t know that I can exactly explain why I find this so distasteful, but it’s a very instinctive recoil. And I’m not religious and do not believe in any afterlife. It’s sort of like being with a cannibal, even a respectful cannibal who would not think of harming anyone in order to eat them would not be a mate I would ever want. “You have to understand,” says Peggy, who at 54 is given to exasperation about her husband’s more exotic ideas. “I am a hospice social worker. I work with people who are dying all the time. I see people dying All. The. Time. And what’s so good about me that I’m going to live forever?” …Peggy finds the quest an act of cosmic selfishness. And within a particular American subculture, the pair are practically a cliché. Among cryonicists, Peggy’s reaction might be referred to as an instance of the “hostile-wife phenomenon,” as discussed in a 2008 paper by Aschwin de Wolf, Chana de Wolf and Mike Federowicz.“From its inception in 1964,” they write, “cryonics has been known to frequently produce intense hostility from spouses who are not cryonicists.” The opposition of romantic partners, Aschwin told me last year, is something that “everyone” involved in cryonics knows about but that he and Chana, his wife, find difficult to understand. To someone who believes that low-temperature preservation offers a legitimate chance at extending life, obstructionism can seem as willfully cruel as withholding medical treatment. Even if you don’t want to join your husband in storage, ask believers, what is to be lost by respecting a man’s wishes with regard to the treatment of his own remains? Would-be cryonicists forced to give it all up, the de Wolfs and Federowicz write, “face certain death.” …Cryonet, a mailing list on “cryonics-related issues,” takes as one of its issues the opposition of wives. (The ratio of men to women among living cyronicists is roughly three to one.) “She thinks the whole idea is sick, twisted and generally spooky,” wrote one man newly acquainted with the hostile-wife phenomenon. “She is more intelligent than me, insatiably curious and lovingly devoted to me and our 2-year-old daughter. So why is this happening?”…A small amount of time spent trying to avoid certain death would seem to be well within the capacity of a healthy marriage to absorb. The checkered marital history of cryonics suggests instead that a violation beyond nonconformity is at stake, that something intrinsic to the loner’s quest for a second life agitates against harmony in the first…But here he doesn’t expect to succeed, and as with most societal attitudes that contradict his intuitions, he’s got a theory as to why. “Cryonics,” Robin says, “has the problem of looking like you’re buying a one-way ticket to a foreign land.” To spend a family fortune in the quest to defeat cancer is not taken, in the American context, to be an act of selfishness. But to plan to be rocketed into the future - a future your family either has no interest in seeing, or believes we’ll never see anyway - is to begin to plot a life in which your current relationships have little meaning. Those who seek immortality are plotting an act of leaving, an act, as Robin puts it, “of betrayal and abandonment.” As the spouse of someone who is planning on undergoing cryogenic preservation, I found this article to be relevant to my interests! My first reactions when the topic of cryonics came up (early in our relationship) were shock, a bit of revulsion, and a lot of confusion. Like Peggy (I believe), I also felt a bit of disdain. The idea seemed icky, childish, outlandish, and self-aggrandizing. But I was deeply in love, and very interested in finding common ground with my then-boyfriend (now spouse). We talked, and talked, and argued, and talked some more, and then I went off and thought very hard about the whole thing…Ultimately, my struggle to come to terms with his decision has been more or less successful. Although I am not (and don’t presently plan to be) enrolled in a cryonics program myself, although I still find the idea somewhat unsettling, I support his decision without question. If he dies before I do, I will do everything in my power to see that his wishes are complied with, as I expect him to see that mine are. Anything less than this, and I honestly don’t think I could consider myself his partner. To add a data point, I found myself, to put it strongly, literally losing the will to live recently: I’m 20 and female and I’m kind of at the emotional maturity stage. I think my brain stopped saying “live! Stay alive!” and started saying “Make babies! Protect babies!”, because I started finding the idea of cryopreserving myself as less attractive and more repulsive (with no change in opinion for preserving my OH), and an increase in how often I thought about doing the right thing for my future kids. To the extent that I now get orders of magnitude more panicked about anything happening to my reproductive system than dying after future children reach adulthood. Quentin’s explanation is even more extreme: What follows below is the patchwork I have stitched together of the true female objections to a mate undergoing cryonic suspension. I believe many women have a constant low-level hatred of men at a conscious or subconscious level and their narcissistic quest for entitlement and [meaningfulness] begrudges him any pursuit that isn’t going to lead directly to producing, providing, protecting, and problem solving for her. It would evolutionarily be in her best interest to pull as many emotional and physical levers to bend as much of his energies toward her and their offspring as she can get away with and less away from himself. That would translate as a feeling of revulsion toward cryonics that is visceral but which she dares not state directly to avoid alerting her mate to her true nature. She doesn’t want him to live for decades, centuries, or millennia more in a possibly healthier and more youthful state where he might meet and fall in love with new mates. She doesn’t want her memory in his mind to fade into insignificance as the fraction of time she spent with him since she has died to be a smaller and smaller fraction of his total existence; reduced to the equivalent in his memory of an interesting conversation with a stranger on the sidewalk one summer afternoon. She doesn’t want him to live for something more important than HER. So why not just insist she join him in cryonic suspension? Many of these same wives and girlfriends hate their life even when they are succeeding. Everyone is familiar with the endless complaints, tears, and heartache that make up the vast majority of the female experience stemming from frustration of her hypergamous instinct to be the princess she had always hoped to be and from resentment of his male nature, hopes, dreams, and aspirations. She thinks: “He wasn’t sexually satisfying! He isn’t romantic enough! He never took me anywhere! He didn’t pay attention to me! Our kids aren’t successes! We live in a dump! His hobbies are a waste of time and money! My mother always told me I can do better, and his mother will never stop criticizing me! I am fat, ugly, unsuccessful, old, tired, and weary of my responsibilities, idiosyncrasies, insecurities, fears, and pain. My life sucked but at least it could MEAN something to those most important to me.” But if they are around for too long it shrinks in importance over time.She wants you to die forever because she hates what you are. She wants to die too, because she hates what she is. She wants us all to die because she hates what the world is and has meant to her. In the same vein: But why not go with him then [into cryonics]? Show me the examples of the men who asked, or even insisted that their wives go with them, and said “If you don’t go with me, I won’t go”. The fact that men generally don’t do this, is likely a big contributor to the female reaction. Imagine your husband or boyfriend telling you, “I just scheduled a 1 year vacation in Pattaya, and since I know you hate Thai food, I didn’t buy you tickets. I’ll remember you fondly.” That’s very different from the man who says, “I’ve always dreamed of living in Antarctica, but I won’t do it without you, so I’m prepared to spend the next 5 years convincing you that it’s a great idea”. Indeed, I buy the “one way ticket away from here” explanation. If I bought a one-way ticket to France, and was intent on going whether my wife wanted to come with me or not, then there would be reason for her to be miffed. If she didn’t want to go, the “correct” answer is “I won’t go without you”. But that is not the answer the cryonicist gives to his “hostile” wife. It’s like the opposite of “I would die for you” - he actually got a chance to take that test, and failed. Robin Hanson tries to explain it in terms of evolutionary incentives: Mating in mammals has a basic asymmetry - females must invest more in each child than males. This can lead to an equilibrium where males focus on impressing and having sex with as many females as possible, while females do most of the child-rearing and choose impressive males. …And because they are asymmetric, their betrayal is also asymmetric. Women betray bonds more by temporarily having fertile sex with other men, while men betray bonds more by directing resources more permanently to other women. So when farmer husbands and wives watch for signs of betrayal, they watch for different things. Husbands watch wives more for signs of a temporary inclination toward short-term mating with other men, while wives watch husbands more for signs of an inclination to shift toward a long-term resource-giving bond with other women. This asymmetric watching for signs of betrayal produces asymmetric pressures on appearances. While a man can be more straight-forward and honest with himself and others about his inclinations toward short-term sex, he should be more careful with the signs he shows about his inclinations toward long term attachments with women. Similarly, while a woman can be more straight-forward and honest with herself and others about her inclinations toward long-term attachments with men, she should be more careful with the signs she shows about her inclinations toward short term sex with men. …Standard crude stereotypes of gender differences roughly fit these predictions! That is, when the subject is one’s immediate lust and sexual attraction to others, by reputation men are more straight-forward and transparent, while women are more complex and opaque, even to themselves. But when the subject is one’s inclination toward and feelings about long-term attachments, by reputation women are more self-aware and men are more complex and opaque, even to themselves…if cryonics is framed as abandonment, women should be more sensitive to that signal. The “selfishness” of cryonics does seem to be an issue for women and many men; one might wonder, would other heroic medical procedures be more socially acceptable if they involved “other-directedness”? I suggest the answer is yes: cord blood banking costs thousands with a lower (<0.1%) success rate (usage of the cord blood) than many cryonicists expect of cryonics (the Fermi estimates tend to be <5%); sperm banking costs a similar amount, while egg/oocycte banking may cost something like half what cryonics does! In the media coverage I have read of those 3 practices, I have the impression that people see them as legitimate medical procedures albeit ones where the cost-benefit equation may not work out. (Cryonicists, on the other hand, are just nuts.) Perhaps this is because sperm and egg banking - while fundamentally selfish, since if you cannot use your egg or sperm later, why don’t you want to adopt? - involves the creation of another person as hallowed by society. Reductionism is the common thread? The previously listed ‘systems of thought’, as it were, all seem to share a common trait: they are made of millions or trillions of deterministic interacting pieces. Any higher-level entity is not an ontological atom, and those higher-level illusions can be manipulated in principle nigh-arbitrarily given sufficient information. That the higher-level entities really are nothing but the atomic units interacting is the fundamental pons asinorum of these ideologies, and the one that nonbelievers have not crossed. We can apply this to each system. Many doubters of cryonics doubt that a bunch of atoms vitrified in place is really ‘the self’.

Many users of computers anthropomorphize it and can’t accept that it is really just a bunch of bits (this is related to the thesis that the camel has two humps, the test being, basically, whether a sample program will be executed as-is by the (dumb) computer)

Many doubters of materialist philosophy of mind are not willing to say that an extremely large complex enough system can constitute a consciousness

Many doubters of utilitarianism doubt that there really is a best choice or good computable approximations to the ideal choice, and either claim utilitarianism fails basic ethical dilemmas by forcing the utilitarian to make the stupid choice or instead vaunt as the end-all be-all of ethics what can be easily be formulated as simply heuristics and approximation, like virtue ethics

Many doubters of libertarianism doubt that prices can coordinate multifarious activities, that the market really will find a level, etc. Out of the chaos of the atoms interacting is supposed to come all good things…? This seems arbitrary, unfair, and unreasonable.

The same could be said of evolution. Like the profit motive, how can mere survival generate “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved” ?

Finally, atheism. A faith of its own in the power of reductionist approaches across all fields. What is a God, but the ultimate complex high-level irreducible ontological entity? In all, there is incredulity at sheer numbers. An ordinary person can accept a few layers since that is what they are used to - a car is made of a few dozen systems with a few discrete thousand parts, a dinner is made of 3 or 4 dishes with no more than a dozen ingredients, etc. The ordinary mind quails at systems with millions of components (number of generations evolution can act on), much less billions (length of programs, number of processor cycles in a second) or trillions (number of cells in human body, number of bits on consumer hard drives). If one doesn’t deal first-hand with this, if one has never worked with them at any level, how does one know that semiconductor physics is the sublayer for circuits, the sublayer for logic gates; logic gates the sublayer for memory and digital operations, which then support the processor with its fancy instruction like add or mov , which enables machine code, which we prefer to write as assembler (to be compiled and the linked into machine code), which can be targeted by programming languages, at which point we have only begun to bring in the operating system, libraries, and small programs, which let us begin to think about how to write something like a browser, and a decade later, we have Firefox which will let Grandma go to AOL Mail. (To make a mapping, the utilitarian definition is like defining a logic gate; the ultimate decisions in a particular situation are like an instance of Firefox, depending on trillions of intermediate steps/computations/logic gates. Non-programmers can’t see how to work backwards from Firefox to individual logic gates, and their blindness is so profound that they can’t even see that there is a mapping. Compare all the predictions that ‘computers will never X’; people can’t see how trillions of steps or pieces of data could result in computers doing X, so - ‘argument from incredulity’ - they then believe there is no such way.) A programmer will have a hard time being knowledgeable about programming and debugging, and also not appreciative of reductionism in his bones. If you tell him that a given system is actually composed of millions of interacting dumb bits - he’ll believe you. Because that’s all his programs are. If you tell a layman that his mortgage rate is being set by millions of interacting dumb bits (or his mind…) - he’ll probably think you’re talking bullshit. Religious belief seems to correlate and causate with quick intuitive thinking (and deontological judgments as well), and what is more counterintuitive than reductionism? I don’t know if this paradigm is correct, but it does explain a lot of things. For example, it correctly predicts that evolutionism will be almost universally accepted among the specified groups, even though logically, there’s no reason cryonicists have to be evolutionists or libertarians, and vice-versa, no reason libertarians would have any meaningful correlation with utilitarianism. I would be deeply shocked & fascinated if there were data showing that they were uncorrelated or even inversely correlated; I could understand libertarianism correlating inversely with atheism, at least in the peculiar circumstances of the United States, but I would expect all of the others to be positively correlated. The only other potential counterexample I can think of would be engineers and terrorism, and that is a relatively small and rare correlation. Lighting I am well aware of the effects of lighting on my mind from reading up on the effects of light (and blue light in particular) on circadian rhythms & melatonin secretion, and have done a sleep self-experiment on red-tinting my laptop screen. (There seems to be a voluminous literature on bright lights being beneficial for alertness in the workplace, but I haven’t read much of it.) Despite this, my room is lit primarily by a lamp with 4 CFL light bulbs which I inherited, and not designed in any sense - I’ve focused on modifying myself more than my environment. The 4 bulbs are puny CFLs: 13 watts (52 total), with a light temperature of 2700k (yellowish). Particularly during winter, when darkness falls around 4PM sharp, I find the illumination inadequate. A LW discussion reminded me that I didn’t have to put up with perpetual gloom - I could buy much larger CFLs and replace the smaller ones. So after some Amazon browsing, and getting frustrated at how CFL listings equivocate on how many watts they draw vs how many watts-equivalent-incandescent-bulbs they are, I settled on “LimoStudio 2 x Photo Studio Photography 105 Watt 6500K Day Light Fluorescent Full Spectrum Bulb” for $22.15 & ordered 2014-12-06. They arrived on 2014-12-09 & I immediately installed them. Their temperature is much bluer and 2 105 watt bulbs would roughly quadruple light output (assuming equal efficiency) and since brightness is perceived logarithmically, make the room something like half again as bright. (They’re almost comically larger than the small 13 watt bulbs.) I had to move the lamp since the naked bulbs in corner of my eye were giving me a headache, but the lighting works well in that corner. It’s nice to have things brighter and it does indeed feel like it reduces sleep pressure in the evening; downsides: shows the walls dirtier, shadows much sharper, feels like it may be much harder to fall asleep even with melatonin if I leave the lights on past 11 PM. A small benefit is that I still have some incandescent light bulbs installed; with 2 CFLs bumped out of the lamp, I can take them and replace 2 incandescents, which should save some electricity. During the darkest winter days, just 2 of them now feels inadequate, so I ordered another pair on Amazon on 18 2014. One handy way to quantify the effect is via my laptop webcam. Since 2012 or so, I have run a script which periodically takes a snapshot through the laptop webcam and saves the photo. I haven’t gotten much use out of them, but changes in ambient lighting over time would seem to be a perfect use-case. I’ve written a script using Imagemagick which analyzes each webcam photo and calculates the average brightness (as a grayscale intensity) and the average LAB color triplet. (I originally used RGB but the 3 colors turned out to correlate so highly that the data was redundant and I was told LAB better matches human perception; in any case, the LAB values turn out to be less inter-correlated and so should be more useful.) The light intensity might affect sleep patterns (particularly sleep timing) and daily productivity. Possible Amazon Mechanical Turk surveys/experiments Sunk costs: see whether manipulation of learning affects willingness to endorse sunk costs

backfire effect idea: manipulation of argument selection affects backfire effect?

followup SDr’s lipreading survey, unexpected and contrary to my theory

can one manipulate the subadditivity effect in both directions for cryonics? In one version, enumerate all the ways things can go right and in another all the ways it can go wrong.

test my theory that Ken Li actually does suck: Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie” is the most critically acclaimed Fantasy short story in history, to judge by its simultaneously winning the short story category for the 2011 World Fantasy Award & Hugo Award & Nebula Awards (narrowly missing the Locus Award), a sweep which had never happened since the youngest award was started in 1975 - 35 years before. Presumably this means that the story is, if not the best fantasy story ever, at least an extremely good story and by far the best of 2011. So I read it eagerly with high expectations, which were immediately dash. The story is not that good. The prose is OK: not nearly as wooden as, say, Isaac Asimov, but not as spare & finely-honed as Ted Chiang’s, deliriously excessive as R.A. Lafferty, extraordinarily smooth and literary as Gene Wolfe, mannered as John Crowley, dream-like as Neil Gaiman… The plot itself is sentimental. In fact, as I read it, words kept rising to consciousness that should never be associated with a winner of any of those awards much less all three simultaneously, words like “trite” and “maudlin”. With a skeptical eye, the story crumbles even more into a pitiful sort of self-indulgent narcissism, in which a character angsts over small issues which seem large only because they live a life so blessed that they have never known real hardship; with even a little bit of perspective, their complaints become almost incomprehensible, and what was meant to be moving becomes absurd. Part of my objection is a lurking sense that Orientalism and/or “diversity” promotion lies behind the triple crown. One of the difficulties in attributing people’s evaluations of something to essentially tribal or ideological motives is that typically it is hard to rerun or vary the scenario to control for the key aspect; for example, if we wondered how much the Barack Obama’s presidential election owed to racial politics (rather than other factors that have been mentioned, such as John McCain’s uninspiring campaign or choice of Sarah Palin, Obama’s slick staff, the well-timed meltdown of the American economy etc), we are left to parse tea leaves and speculate because there is no way we can re-run the election using a Barack Obama who chose to identify as white rather than black, or an Obama who was simply white, and we cannot even run polls on a hypothetical alternative Obama with the same biography as a junior senator from Illinois with no signature accomplishments because the parallels would be obvious to too many Americans one might poll. If we were to hypothetically vary Liu’s story, we would want to replace the main character with an equivalent character whose non-Anglophone nationality was involved in WWII, resulted in many refugees and women from that country returning as wives to America, who might know a beautiful paper-working art suited for depicting tigers, and who was mocked on ethnic or racial grounds. Remarkably, this turns out to be easily doable on all points: Liu’s story could easily turned into a story about a half-German boy in America mocked for being a filthy Nazi whose mother came from the German post-WWII wasteland and who spoke mostly German while making Scherenschnitte for her son who later spurned the paper cutout animals and even later realizes the cutouts formed German words (in Fraktur, which is a pretty hard-to-read family of fonts) with the same ending. The question is, if we take Liu’s story, rename the author “Ken Schmitt” or “Ken Hess” or “Ken Brandt” or “Ken Schmidt” perhaps (making sure to pick a surname as clearly German as Liu is Asian, and ideally a single-syllable as well to control for issues related to memorability or length), make the minimal edits necessary to convert it to the above version - do you think this hypothetical “The Scherenschnitte Menagerie” would’ve won even 1 award, much less 3? It seems highly unlikely to me, but unlike with Obama, we can produce the variant version without trouble, and in any survey, we can count on very few SF/F reader-respondents having actually read “The Paper Menagerie” (short stories are generally published in specialty magazines, whose circulations have declined precipitously over the past decades, and rarely ever achieve the popularity of the top SF/F novels). If we surveyed a sample of SF/F readers and saw a preference for the original Liu version (especially if the preference were moderated by some measure of liberalism), then any non-ideological explanation must explain how the original version using Asia is so enormously esthetically superior to an isomorphic version using European-specific details. With all this in mind, it seems like it should be easy to design a survey. Take the two versions of the story with the two different author names, ask the respondent to rate their randomly-chosen story 1-5 (Likert scale), ask how much SF/F they consume, their general politics, a question asking whether they had heard of the short story before (this could be tricky), and some additional demographic information like age, ethnicity, and country. For extra points, one randomize whether a short biography of the author appears after each story, to see if there is “who? whom?” reasoning at work where knowing that Liu is from China increases the positiveness of ratings but knowing that “Schmitt” is from Germany does not affect or reduces ratings.

Leaf burgers One thing I was known for in Boy Scouts (or so I thought) was my trick of cooking hamburgers with leaves rather than racks or pans. I had learned it long ago at a campboree, and made a point of cooking my hamburger that way and not any other. The way it works is you take several large green leafs straight from the tree, and sandwich your burger. Ideally you only need 2, one leaf on top and the other on bottom. (I was originally taught using just one leaf, and carefully flipping the burger on top of its leaf, but that’s error prone - one bad flip and your burger is irretrievably dirty and burned.) Then you put your green sandwich on top of a nice patch of coals - no flames! - and flip it in 10 minutes or so. You’ll see it smoke, but not burn. The green leaves themselves don’t want to burn, and the hamburger inside is giving off lots of water, so you don’t need to worry unless you’re overcooking it. At about 20 minutes, the leaves should have browned and you can pull it out and enjoy. What’s the point of this? Well, it saves one dishes. Given how difficult it is to clean dishes out there where there are no dishwashers or sinks, this should not be lightly ignored. It cooks better: much more evenly and with less char or burning of the outside. Given many scouts’ cooking skills, this is no mean consideration either. It’s a much more interesting way to cook. And finally, the hamburger ends up with a light sort of ‘leafy’ taste on the outside, which is quite good and not obtainable any way else.

Night watch The gloom of dusk.

An ox from out in the fields

comes walking my way;

and along the hazy road

I encounter no one. Night watch is not devoid of intellectual interest. The night is quite beautiful in its own right, and during summer, I find it superior to the day. It is cooler, and often windier. Contrary to expectation, it is less buggy than the day. Fewer people are out, of course. My own paranoia surprises me. At least once a night, I hear noises or see light, and become convinced that someone is prowling or seeks to break in. Of course, there is no one there. This is true despite it being my 4th year. I reflect that if it is so for me, then what might it be like for a primitive heir to millennia of superstition? There is a theory that spirits and gods arise from overly active imaginations, or pattern-recognition as it is more charitably termed. My paranoia has made me more sympathetic to this theory. I am a staunch atheist, but even so! The tempo at night varies as well. It seems to me that the first 2 years, cars were coming and going every night. Cars would meet, one would stay and the other go; or a car would enter the lot and not leave for several days (with no one inside); or they would simply park for a while. School buses would congregate, as would police-cars, sometimes 4 or 5 of them. In the late morning around 5 AM, the tennis players would come. Sometimes when I left at 8 AM, all 4 or 5 courts would be busy - and some of the courts hosted 4 players. I would find 5 or 6 tennis balls inside the pool area, and would see how far I could drop-kick them. Now, I hardly ever find tennis balls, since I hardly ever see tennis players. A night in which some teenagers congregate around a car and smoke their cigarettes is a rarity. Few visit my lot. I wonder, does this have to do with the recession which began in 2008? Liminality Another year gone by

And still no spring warms my heart.

It’s nothing to me

But now I am accustomed

To stare at the sky at dawn. The night has, paradoxically, sights one cannot see during the day. What one can see takes on greater importance, becoming new and fresh. I recall one night long ago; on this cool dark night, the fogs lay heavy on the ground, light-grey and densely soupy. In the light, one could watch banks of fog swirl and mingle in myriads of meetings and mutations; it seemed a thing alive. I could not have seen this under the sun. It has no patience for such ethereal and undefinable things. It would have burned off the fog, driven it along, not permitted it to linger. And even had it existed and been visible, how could I have been struck by it if my field of view were not so confined? One feels an urge to do strange things. The night has qualities all its own, and they demand a reflection in the night watcher. It is strange to be awake and active in the wrong part of the day, and this strangeness demands strangeness on one’s own part. At night, one feels in another world, so changed is everything. To give an example: have you ever lain in the middle of a road? I don’t mean a road in the middle of nowhere like in a farmer’s fields in the Midwest where a car might pass once or twice a day; that is a cheat, and one feels nothing laying there. I mean an active road, a road one has watched thousands of cars pass through at unrelenting speed during the daylight hours, with fractions of seconds between them, a road warm with the friction and streaked black with the rubber. To go at 4AM and lie down precisely on the yellow double line and gaze at the stars is an experience worth having as one reflects that at another time, to do this would be certain death. It is forbidden, not by custom or law, but by unappealable facts: “you do not lie down in a busy road or you will die.” But at night, you lie and you do not die. You are the same body, the road is the same road, only a matter of timing is different. And this makes all the difference in the world. Often when doing my rounds I have started and found myself perched awkwardly on a bench or fence. I stay for a time, ruminating on nothing in particular. The night is indefinite, and my thoughts are content to be that way as well. And then something happens, and I hop down and continue my rounds. For I am the sole inhabitant of this small world. The pool is bounded by blackened fences, and as it lies prostrate under tall towers bearing yellowed flood-lights. The darkness swallows all that is not pool, and returns a feeling of isolation. As if nothing besides remains. I circumnambulate to recreate the park, to assure me it abides, that it is yet there to meet my eyes - a sop to conscience, a token of duty; an act of creation. I bring the morning.

Two cows: philosophy Philosophy two-cows jokes: Free will: you have 2 cows; in an event entirely independent of all previous events & predictions, they devour you alive; this makes no sense as cows are herbivores, but you are no longer around to notice this.

Fatalism: you have 2 cows; whether they survive or not is entirely up to the inexorable and deterministic course of the universe, and what you do or not likewise, so you don’t feed your cows and they starve to death; you reflect that the universe really has it in for you.

Compatibilism: you have 1 cow which is free and capable of making decisions, and 1 cow that is determined and bound to follow the laws of physics; they are the same cow. But you get 2 cows’ worth of milk anyway.

Existentialism: You have two cows; one is a metaphor for the human condition. You kill the other and in bad faith claim hunger made you do it.

Ethics: You have two cows, and as a Utilitarian, does it suit the best interests of yourself and both cows to milk them, or could it be said that the interests of yourself, as a human, come above those of the cows, who are, after all, inferior to the human race? Aristotle would claim that this is correct, although Peter Singer would disagree.

Sorites: you have 2 cows who produce a bunch of milk; but if you spill a drop, it’s still a bunch of milk; and so on until there’s no more milk left. Obviously it’s impossible to have a bunch of milk, and as you mope over how useless your cows are, you die of thirst.

Nagarjuna: You have 2 cows; they are ‘empty’, of course, since they are dependent on grass; you milk them and get empty-milk (dependent on the cow), which tastes empty; you sell them both and go get some real cows. Moo mani hum…

Descartes: You have 2 cows, therefore you are (since deceive me howbeit the demon may, he can never make it so that I have 2 cows yet am not as the predicate of ownership entails the predicate of existence); further, there are an infinite # of 2-cows jokes, and where could this conception of infinity have come from but God? Therefore he exists. You wish you had some chocolate milk.

Bentham: no one has a natural right to anything, since that would be ‘2 cows walking upon stilts’; everything must be decided by the greatest good for the greatest number; you get a lobotomy and spend the rest of your life happily grazing with your 2 cows.

Tocqueville: Cows are inevitable, so we must study the United Cows of America; firstly, we shall take 700 pages to see how this nation broke free of the English Mooarchy, and what factors contributes to their present demoocracy…

Gettier: You see 2 cows in your field - actually, what you see is 2 cow-colored mounds of dirt, but there really are 2 cows over there; when you figure this out, your mind is blown and >2000 years of epistocowlogy shatters.

Heidegger: dasein dasein apophantic being-in cow being-in-world milk questioning proximate science thusly Man synthesis time, thus, 2 cows.

Husserl: You have 2 cows, but do you really see them?

Venusian Revolution Greg Laughlin, interviewed in “Cosmic Commodities: How much is a new planet worth?”: Venus is a great example. It does pretty well in the equation, and actually gets a value of about one and a half quadrillion dollars if you tweak its reflectivity a bit to factor in its bright clouds. This echoes what unfolded for Venus in the first half of the 20th century, when astronomers saw these bright clouds and thought they were water clouds, and that it was really humid and warm on the surface. It gave rise to this idea in the 1930s that Venus was a jungle planet. So you put this in the formula, and it has an explosive valuation. Then you’d show up and face the reality of lead melting on the surface beneath sulfuric-acid clouds, and everyone would want their money back! If Venus is valued using its actual surface temperature, it’s like 10-12 of a single cent. @home.com was valued on the order of a billion dollars for its market cap, and the stock is now literally worth zero. Venus is unfortunately the @home.com of planets. It’s tragic, amazing, and extraordinary, to think that there was a small window, in 1956, 1957, when it wasn’t clear yet that Venus was a strong microwave emitter and thus was inhospitably hot. The scientific opinion was already going against Venus having a clement surface, but in those years you could still credibly imagine that Venus was a habitable environment, and you had authors like Ray Bradbury writing great stories about it. At the same time, the ability to travel to Venus was completely within our grasp in a way that, shockingly, it may not be now. Think what would have happened, how history would’ve changed, if Venus had been a quadrillion-dollar world, we’d have had a virgin planet sitting right next door. Things would have unfolded in an extremely different way. we’d be living in a very different time. Sounds like a good alternate history novel. The space race heats up in the 1950s, with a new planet at stake. Of course, along the lines of Peter Thiel’s reasoning about France & John Law & the Louisiana Territory, the ‘winner’ of such a race would probably suffer the winner’s curse. (Don’t go mine for gold yourself; sell pick-axes to the miners instead.)

Hard problems in utilitarianism The Nazis believed many sane things, like exercise and the value of nature and animal welfare and the harmful nature of smoking. Possible rationalist exercise: Read The Nazi War on Cancer Assemble modern demographic & mortality data on cancer & obesity. Consider this hypothetical: ‘If the Nazis had not attacked Russia and negotiated a peace with Britain, and remained in control of their territories, would the lives saved by the health benefits of their policies outweigh the genocides they were committing?’ Did you answer yes, or no? Why? As you pondered these questions, was there ever genuine doubt in your mind? Why was there or not?

Who lives longer, men or women? Do men or women live longer? Everyone knows women live a few years longer; if we look at America and Japan (from the 2011 CIA World Factbook): 75.92 vs 80.93 78.96 vs 85.72 5-7 years additional bulk longevity is definitely in favor of women. But maybe what we are really interested in is whether women have longer effective lives: the amount of time which they have available to pursue those goals, whatever they may be, from raising children to pursuing a career. To take the Japanese numbers, women may live 8.6% longer, but if those same women had to spend 2 hours a day (or 1⁄12th a life, or 8.3%) doing something utterly useless or distasteful, then maybe one would rather trade off that last 0.3%. But notice how much we had to assume to bring the female numbers down to male: 2 hours a day! That’s a lot. I had not realized how much of a lifetime those extra years represented: it was a larger percentage than I had assumed. The obvious criticism is that social expectations that women appear as attractive as possible will use up a lot of women time. It’s hard to estimate this, but men have to maintain their appearance as well; a random guess would be that men spend half an hour and women spend an hour on average, but that only accounts for a fourth of the extra women time. Let’s say that this extra half hour covers make-up, menstruation, waiting in female bathroom lines, and so on. (This random guess may understate the impact; the pill aside, menstruation reportedly can be pretty awful.) Sleep patterns don’t entirely account for the extra time either; one guide says “duration of sleep appears to be slightly longer in females”, and Zeo, Inc.’s sleep dataset indicates a difference of women sleeping 19 minutes more on average. If we round to 20 minutes and add to the half hour for cosmetics, we’re still not even half the way. And then there’s considerations like men becoming disabled at a higher rate than women (from the dangerous jobs or manual labor, if for no other reason). Unfortunately, the data doesn’t seem to support this; while women have longer lifespans, they also seem to have more illnesses than men . Pregnancy and raising children is a possible way to even things out. The US census reports a 2000 figure that 19% of women 40-44 did not have children. So the overwhelming majority of women will at some point bear the burden of at least 1 pregnancy. So that’s 9 months there, and then…? That’s not even 1 year, so a quarter of the time is left over if we assume the pregnancy is a total time-sink but the women involved do not spend any further time on it (but also that the average male expenditure is zero time, which was never true and is increasingly less true as time passes). That leaves a decent advantage for women of ~2 years. If you wanted to erase the female longevity advantage, you could argue that between many women having multiple children, and many raising kids full-time at the expense of their careers or non-family goals, that represents a good decade of lost productivity, and averaging it out (81% of 10 years) reduces their effective lives by 8.1 years, and then taking into account the sleep and toiletry issues reduces the number by another 2 years, and now women lifetimes are shorter than men lifetime. So at least as far as this goes, your treatment of childbearing will determine whether the longevity advantage is simply a fair repayment, as it were, for childbearing and rearing, or whether it really is a gift to the distaff side.

Politicians are not unethical “Toward the end of my two-week [testosterone injection] cycle, I can almost feel my spirits dragging. In the event of a just-lost battle, as Matt Ridley points out in his book The Red Queen, there’s a good reason for this to occur. If you lose a contest with prey or a rival, it makes sense not to pick another fight immediately. So your body wisely prompts you to withdraw, filling your brain with depression and self-doubt. But if you have made a successful kill or defeated a treacherous enemy, your hormones goad you into further conquest. And people wonder why professional football players get into postgame sexual escapades and violence. Or why successful businessmen and politicians often push their sexual luck.” Andrew Sullivan, “The He Hormone” Dominique Strauss-Khan, while freed of the charge of rape, stands convicted in the court of public opinion as an immoral philanderer; after all, even by his account he cheated on his wife with the hotel maid, and he has been accused in France by a writer of raping her; where there is smoke there is fire, so Khan has probably slept with quite a few women . This is as people expect - politicians sleep around and are immoral. Power corrupts. To be a top politician, one must be an risk-taking alpha male reeking of testosterone, to fuel status-seeking behavior. And then it’s an easy step to say that the testosterone causes this classically hubristic behavior of ultimately self-destructive streaks of abuse: Power corrupts, unconsciously, leading to abuse of power and an inevitable fall - the paradox of power. Such conventional wisdom almost dares examination. Politicians being immoral and sleeping around is a truism - people in general are immoral and sleep around. What’s really being said is that politicians do more immorality and sleeping-around than another group, presumably upper-class but still non-politician white men . Revealed moralities But is this true? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone actually ask this question, much less offer any evidence. It’s a simple question: do white male politicians (and national politicians in particular) sleep around more than upper-class white males in general? It’s easy to come up with examples of politicians who stray paying prostitutes, having a ‘wide stance’ sending photographs online, possibly to young pages, or impregnating mistresses, but those are anecdotes, not statistics. Consider how many ‘national-level’ politicians there are that could earn coverage with their infidelities: Congress alone, between the House and the Senate, has 535 members; then one could add in 9 Justices, the President & Vice-president and Cabinet make 17, and then there are the governors of each of the 50 states, for a total of 611 people. A priori rates If those 611 were merely ordinary, what would we expect? Lifetime estimates of adultery seem to center around 20% although Kinsey put it at 50% for men. So we might expect 122-305 of the current set of national politicians to be unfaithful eventually! That’s 4-10 sex scandals a year on average (assuming a 30-year career), each of which might be covered for weeks on national TV. I do not know about you, but either end of that range seems high, if anything; it’s not every other month that a politician goes down in flames. (Who went down as scheduled in September or August 2011? No one?) Why does it feel the opposite way, though? We might chalk it up to the base rate fallacy - saying ‘that’s a lot’ while forgetting what we are comparing to. And 611 is very low an estimate. After all, everyone lives somewhere. The 8 million inhabitants of New York City will read about and be disgusted by the assistant New York Governor, the Mayor of New York City and his flunkies, the New York State legislature (212 members); and then there are the nearby counties like Nassau or Suffolk which are covered by newspapers in circulation in NYC like Newsday. We could plausibly double or triple this figure. (I had not heard of many politicians involved in sex scandals - like Khan, come to think of it - so they do not even need to be famous.) So we have noticed that there are ‘too few’ sex scandals in politics; the same reasoning seems to work for ordinary crimes like murder - there are too few! In fact, besides Congressmen rarely committing suicide (despite the considerable stresses), it seems that politicians in general are uncannily honest; the only category I can think of where politicians are normally unethical would be finance (bribes, conflicts of interest, insider trading by Representatives & Senators, etc). Why is this? Why? Self-discipline seems like an obvious key. A reputation is built over decades, and can be destroyed in one instant. But that seems a little too friendly - we’re praising our politicians for morality and we’re also going to claim it’s because they are more disciplined (with all the positive moral connotations)? Maybe the truth is more sinister: they whore around as much as the rest of us, they’re just covering it up better. And we need a cover-up which actually reduces the number of scandals going public to make this all go away and leave our prejudices alone. Investigating If all the media was doing was delaying reporting on said scandals, we’d still see the same total number of scandals - just shifted around in time. To some extent, we see delays. For example, we seem to now know a lot about John F. Kennedy’s womanizing, but his contemporaries ignored even a determined attempt to spread the word; similar stories seem true of other Presidents & presidential candidates (FDR & Wendell Wilkie & John Edwards ). This suggests a way to distinguish the permanent cover-up from the delayed cover-up theory: hit the history books and see how many politicians in a political cohort turn out to have mistresses and credible rumors of affairs. Take every major politician from, say 1930, and check into their affairs; how many were then known to have affairs? How many were revealed to have affairs decades later? This will give us the delay figure and let us calculate the ‘shadow scandals’, how many sex scandals the