Not quite the same thing, but related: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gNodQGNoPDjztasbh/lies-damn-lies-and-fabricated-options
jaspax
Karma: 1,030
Additionally: separate mens’ fashion from womens’ fashion if possible.
One strong comment on the app, the app should present you with a new pair of items rather than keeping the one that you preferred. When I played, after only a handful of selections I got into a local maximum where I liked almost nothing more than the one I had already selected, so I was just pressing the same key over and over through dozens of pictures. This is both less informative and less fun than getting to make a new choice every time.
I think my strongest disagreement here is that the category of “disagreeable” does not cleave reality at the joints, and that the category “non-routine cognitive” contains a lot of work which is not, in fact, intellectually or spiritually fulfilling in the way implied.
TL;DR: the section on vocation makes a lot of unsupported assertions and “it seems obvious that” applied to things which are not at all obvious.
[T]o think that we suffered a net loss of vocation and purpose, is either historical ignorance or blindness induced by romanticization of the past.
You need to put a number on this before I’m willing to accept that this is true. Two particular points you raise are definitely not changed from pre-industrial times: intellectual jobs are still rare and only available to a privileged few, scientists are still reliant on patronage (now routed through state bureaucracies rather than individual nobles, but still the same thing), and actual professional artists were and are such a small portion of the population that I don’t think you can generalize much from them.
Meanwhile, count up all of the jobs that today are in manufacturing, resource extraction, shipping, construction, retail, and childcare. To this number we should add the majority of white-collar email jobs, which I argue are not particularly fulfilling—people may not hate working in HR or as an administrative assistant, but I doubt that most of these people feel that it’s a positive vocation. Is the number very different from the number of people who were peasants beforehand? Are we sure that this represents progress rather than lateral movement?
More to the point, there are some unexamined assumptions made here about what counts as “vocation”, and what kinds of occupations are likely to supply it.
Anecdotally, the farmers and ranchers I know have a very strong sense of vocation, and high job satisfaction all around (modulo the fact that they are often financially pressed). The article, however, seems to treat agriculture as automatically non-vocational.
As alluded to above, white-collar work often seems to lack the sense of vocation and pride of work. The article above wants to lump them in with “intellectual jobs” and assumes that they are automatically preferable to alternatives.
A notable exception to the previous is IT, but we note that programmers are best considered a modern example of skilled craftsmen.
Generally, the article wants to conflate vocation with choice, which I believe is false.
A better way of drawing the distinction is between “bullshit” and “non-bullshit” jobs, and one might then observe that modernity has a much higher proportion of bullshit jobs than pre-modernity. But expounding that requires a full post of its own.
“I want gas stoves to be restricted so that gross people who live in suburbs can’t have them.”
This might be the single worst take I’ve ever seen on LW. I’m sorry I can’t be more constructive here, but this is the kind of garbage comment I expect from the dregs of Twitter, not this site.
I understand OP to be including “misleading implications” as part of the thing to be counted. An additional complication is that the degree of misinformation in media varies widely by subject matter and relevance; everyday articles about things with minimal Narrative impact are usually more reliable. For that reason a random sample of articles probably looks better than a sample of the most impactful and prominent articles.
The per-person numbers are almost certainly due to women entering the workforce and thus getting counted in the numbers for the first time. Decline in fertility also has some effect (though probably smaller), as there are now fewer non-working children per adult.
As a literal answer to your question: the stats do account for the working poor, but the working poor are a pretty small part of population as a whole and so don’t skew the statistics as much as you apparently think.
I oversold my original statement due to having remembered a slightly more sensational version of events. Nonetheless I stand by my interpretation of the tweets; others can read them for themselves and make up their own minde.
(1) he is not a government official, (2) he was not in a position to delay the vaccine (though it’s possible he influenced people who were), and (3) he doesn’t say anything about doing it in order to avoid giving Trump the credit.
You are right about (1), (2) strikes me as an irrelevant distinction once we’ve granted (1), and I flat disagree about (3).
Where he describes his motivation, he explicitly describes the need to frustrate Trump’s plans. He does this repeatedly. He focuses on this much more than he focuses on safety. The overwhelmingly likely interpretation, IMO, is that safety was a pretext and opposing Trump was the goal, and this interpretation is favored by Topol himself when he describes his actions as “opposing Trump” more often than “protecting Americans”.
I find it surprising that answers to the question about making your parents proud are so low in so many northern European countries. I would obviously answer the question “yes”. Important to note that they’re not asking if it’s your primary goal or your only goal, only if it’s one of your major goals, and that seems like a much lower bar. In particular, that goal seems entirely synergistic with other widespread goals such as having a good marriage and career.
I would expect that this only gets answered “no” if (a) you have a very bad relationship with your parents, with a very significant clash of values, or (b) if the target for “pleasing parents” is excessively narrow, e.g. they will only accept you going into one particular occupation that you don’t like. And these are both things that do happen, but they can’t be that common, can they?
Found it (scroll down to “Eric Topol is the worst”).
Related news article that goes over the key points
I had misremembered a few details, namely that Topol is an influential physician, not a government official. The gist remains.
There exists a less-malign interpretation here, which is that Topol might have had sincere concerns about the safety of the Pfizer vaccine. But I am not inclined to extend much charity. Topol explicitly states, repeatedly, that his goal was to “disrupt Trump’s plan” and prevent Trump from “getting a vaccine approved” before Nov 3. (Read Topol’s tweets quoted in the article, and click through to see the surrounding threads for more evidence.)
Who knows how decisive his influence was. Overall, I agree with your point that slowness is the default setting for the FDA, and that most people in the agency were slowing things down out of bureaucratic habit rather than explicit political motives, but there definitiely exist malign political actors like Topol.
Do you remember the nice feeling when you go to your dentist for a cleanup and you leave with that smooth, polished feeling on your teeth that sometimes last you days
Um, my problem is that I loathe this feeling, and pretty much every other tactile sensation associated with teeth cleaning, so this is something of an anti-recommendation.
ChatGPT also doesn’t try to convince you of anything. If you explicitly ask it why it should do X, it will tell you, much like it will tell you anything else you ask it for, but it doesn’t provide this information unprompted, nor does it weave it into unrelated queries.
Regulators did, in fact, end up slowing the process: In the first week of September, the FDA told vaccine makers to extend their clinical trials by several weeks beyond what they’d planned, in order to gather more safety data. That effectively postponed Pfizer’s request for an emergency use authorization of the mRNA vaccine it had developed with BioNTech until after the election.
There exist screenshots of a government official actually bragging on Twitter about having delayed the vaccine in order to avoid giving Trump the credit. I seem to recall Zvi posting these screenshots at some point, though it might have been someone else. In any case, you can find many, many articles dating from late 2020 and early 2021 conveying dueling narratives about whether the vaccine was in danger of being “rushed” (Dem talking point) or whether the FDA sandbagged the process for political reasons (Trump talking point). In any case, the basic facts seem undisputed:
The vaccine approval process could have been further expedited, and if it had proceeded at maximum speed it would have been completed in September or October 2020.
The Trump administration did in fact pressure the FDA to approve the vaccine in October.
The FDA did not approve the vaccine until after the election.
Which is an interesting thing to observe, because the narrative has since switched and “the vaccine was a rush job and is dangerous” is now a right-wing talking point while “the vaccine is perfectly safe” is now the mainstream position.
Edit to add: On close read I realize that I was conflating the successful end of the clinical trials and their public announcement with actual shots-in-arms readiness. Shots-in-arms readiness would probably not have been accomplished in October in any case, given the production pipeline and distribution problems, but the announcement of the successful trials, according to multiple sources, could plausibly have been as early as September.
One note he makes is that most excess deaths post-vaccine were in red states, and he estimates that Trump ‘embracing scientific reality and strongly urging people to get vaccinated’ could have saved 400k lives
This is not a counterfactual. This is what Trump actually did! He himself is vaccinated, and he encouraged vaccination publicly, including continuing to do so after he lost the presidency. The only real complaint to make here is that he maybe didn’t do it enough, because he has the political sense not to continually advocate for something that his supporters hate. So your statement that it wouldn’t have moved the needle is obviously correct, not because we need to reason about what would have happened but because we can observe what actually did happen.
I do agree that the one counterfactual that would have mattered would have been releasing the vaccine in September or October and allowing Trump to take credit for it. But Public Health decided that opposing Trump was more important than getting the vaccine out a few months early.
The important thing to notice is that all existing AIs are completely devoid of agency. And this is very good! Even if continued development of LLMs and image networks surpasses human performance pretty quickly, the current models are fundamentally incapable of doing anything dangerous of their own accord. They might be dangerous, but they’re dangerous the way a nuclear reactor is dangerous: a bad operator could cause damage, but it’s not going to go rogue on its own.
Very good, and strongly interacts with a recent interest of mine, namely symbology. Your discussion of the fact that a ritual must be in some way counter-intuitive reminds me of a quote from Fr. Alexander Schmemann. (I have searched and failed to find the exact text of the quote online, though were I at home I could find the book on my bookshelf.) Paraphrased: “Modern readers assume that a symbolic action must relate in some obviously analogical or didactic way to the thing being represented. But when one examines religious custom in any religious tradition, one finds that the older and more organic the symbol, the less it corresponds in any visible way with the thing that it represents.”
Unless I have completely misremembered, this is from For the Life of the World, which would be an excellent source to add to your readings of Purvamimamsa for an eastern (as in “Eastern Orthodox”), modern-but-traditionalist treatment of similar subjects.
There could be an argument that hosting it behind a proxy counts as modification.