The usual formulation has “irresistible” rather than “unstoppable”
You forgot the citation!
satt
Karma: 4,126
Is that true? How do we know?
Um, no. The US was actually extremely soft in Vietnam.
Um, no. The US actually dropped “one million tons of ordnance” on North Vietnam (where US air strikes killed “approximately 52,000 civilians”) and “some four million tons of bombs” on South Vietnam (“the most bombed country in the history of aerial warfare—a dubious distinction for an ally”). The US actually supplemented those bombs by dropping about 70 million litres of herbicides on Vietnam, including over 40 million litres of Agent Orange and Agent Orange II, such that “millions of Vietnamese were likely to have been sprayed upon directly” and over 2 million hectares of Vietnam were sprayed repeatedly. (This excludes the anti-personnel gases and tens of thousands of tons of napalm the US employed during the 1960s alone.) And a working group in the US Department of Defense actually reckoned it could substantiate hundreds of reports of US war crimes.
My point is that using the exchange rate to compute how many dollars a day someone makes in a country in which the exchange rate is only used to price things that the locals don’t buy is very misleading.
I believe the World Bank defines poverty in terms of PPP-adjusted incomes for that reason.
Fair enough, haha. I figured there was a non-trivial chance you were right and I was wrong, because it’s been years since I studied this stuff systematically and my memory of it isn’t great.
the great tragedy of Science–the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact
— T. H. Huxley, “Biogenesis and Abiogenesis”
(I thought someone might’ve posted this under Rationality Quotes before, but Google just finds paraphrases in other threads.)
Thanks!
It’s seems like the kind of abstraction that is impossible from object level analysis of others’ questions or one’s received answers.
Putting myself in the mind of an answerer confronted with someone’s specific question, I can easily imagine myself hitting on the general/abstract problem through sheer exasperation: “AAAARGHHHH. IF YOU’D JUST SAID WHAT YOU REALLY WANTED TO DO IN THE FIRST PLACE, WE WOULDN’T HAVE HAD TO WASTE TIME ON SOMETHING BASICALLY IRRELEVANT”.
Of course, this does not help very much with the question of how to identify Q&A failure modes. “Study specific cases of bad Q&A sessions until I’m so annoyed that my mind spontaneously summarizes them together” is probably an unreliable method.
microbiases
What are these?
If you transfer the heat to the atmosphere, it won’t leave the Earth+atmosphere system, so the net effect will be zero. To actually cool the earth, you’d need to heat the atmosphere enough to make parts of it escape Earth’s gravity.
Depends how high you send the heat, I would’ve thought...? If you ferry the heat above the current effective emission-to-space height (the mesosphere should suffice), you warm that high-up air and raise the effective emission-to-space height. Assuming a fixed lapse rate, a cooler surface temperature follows.
But not all people in the audience would react like that to michaelkeenan’s example warning. Some people would presumably value being informed of authoritative sources contradicting a claim that vaccines cause autism.
(And if your objection went through for fact checking framed as contradiction reporting, why wouldn’t it go through for fact checking framed as fact checking? My mental model of an anti-vaxxer has them responding as negatively to being baldly contradicted as to being informed, “The Lancet says this is wrong”.)
I don’t know that anybody gets better over time in literature, at least technically.
Dubliners → Portrait of the Artist → Ulysses → Finnegans Wake?
Edit: haha, and only now do I see Douglas_Knight had the same thought.
I doubt that. Comparing how often Thomas Carlyle’s mentioned in English books relative to Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, and John Ruskin — contemporary celebrity writers & critics mentioned in Carlyle’s Wikipedia article by their full names — suggests Carlyle’s maintained a respectable level of fame, even as his star’s dimmed since his 1880s peak. (While the heavyweights, Dickens & Mill, consistently beat Carlyle, Carlyle roughly matches Ruskin, and in British books Carlyle soundly beats Emerson, who seems more of an American taste.)
Come to think of it, I remember a paper — “The evolution of popular music: USA 1960–2010” — which has some relevance. The punchline?
We show that, although pop music has evolved continuously, it did so with particular rapidity during three stylistic ‘revolutions’ around 1964, 1983 and 1991.
1964 and 1991, ehh?
Re. originality in popular music, see this video. Don’t miss the section starting at 2:39. This video by the Axis of Awesome is fun, too.
I’d thought the first video was going to be this one!
I’m sympathetic to the idea that pop music is decreasingly original & novel, but these videos are pretty slender evidence for it. The problem with invoking these videos is that they’re sampling on the dependent variable: they pick out small subsets of recent country songs or recent pop songs which go together attention-grabbingly well. But precisely because they go together attention-grabbingly well, they’re very likely unrepresentative of country/pop music as a whole.
(Also, even ignoring the unrepresentative sampling, these videos mainly just mean that particular chord progressions are popular. Comments on the Axis of Awesome video mention how the sketch plays on the fact that I-V-vi-IV is a popular chord progression, which it is. But that speaks only to harmony, not melody or arrangement.)
A lot of pop music today is difficult to distinguish from music made in the 1990s. The difference between pop music in 1960 and 1964 was much larger than the difference between 1990 and 2015.
Those claims sound likely on first hearing, but I doubt them more as I think about them. It’s easy to have the wrong idea about what charting pop music sounded like in a certain year.
One can think of 1964 and imagine the charts were being revolutionized by a deluge of songs as memorable & novel as “You Really Got Me”, but looking at Billboard’s top 10 singles for 1964, I have a hard time picking out even half a dozen which stand out to me like that. (Admittedly, that’s more than I can pick out from the 1960 chart.)
As for 1990, I surprised myself twice over! After I started thinking to myself along the lines of, “new wave and hip hop were well established by then, and I guess it wasn’t long before grunge became a big deal, so maybe there was a lot from those genres?”, I checkity-checked myself by pulling up Billboard’s 1990 list. When I saw New Kids on the Block, Michael Bolton, Rod Stewart, Tom Petty, Aerosmith, I thought, “oh, wow, yeah, right, guess I was wrong”.
But then I looked again and saw more. Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” (Wikipedia: “incorporat[ing] dance-pop and industrial music, also using elements of hip-hop and funk rock”); Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend”; Madonna’s “Vogue” (Wikipedia: “a dance-pop and house song with notable disco influence” and “a spoken rap section”); Bell Biv DeVoe’s “Poison” (Wikipedia: “in the style of new jack swing, a late-80s hybrid of R&B and hip hop”); Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is in the Heart”; UB40′s reggae-fication of The Temptations’ “The Way You Do the Things You Do”; and Prince’s “Thieves in the Temple” (Wikipedia: “a unique sound, starting quietly with echoed keyboards and vocals before the main section of the song booms in with a pulsating synth bass, syncopated drum machines, Middle Eastern melodies and opera-like layered vocals”). That last one’s not on YouTube ’cause Prince and his record company are like super picky about people uploading his studio recordings.
It follows that my idea of the music crashing into the US charts in 1990 was patchy & incomplete. So who knows; maybe it is more different to today’s US pop than 1960′s was from 1964′s? The test that’d answer that question would be taking a representative sample of charting songs from 1960 onwards and analyzing them systematically for diversity.
Operant conditioning...? Like exposing yourself to some stereotypically anti-sexy stimulus when you notice a nasal voice. (Not that I expect this to have much effect, but who knows?)
For convenience, here’s a link to the individual briefs as separate PDF files, for anyone else who doesn’t want to download all 34MB at once. (I thought the Flickr page might have a few convenient, face-on snapshots of pages from the briefs, but the CIA reckoned it was more important to take 5 photos of a woman wheeling a trolley of briefs through the CIA lobby. #thanksguys)
I suspect daily presidential briefings from the CIA are finely (as in carefully & deliberately) calibrated but not that well calibrated (as in being accurate, representative and not tendentious). The CIA doubtless has incentives to misrepresent some things to the president — and indeed a president probably has some incentives to allow/encourage being misled about certain things!
I guess I ruled out the possibility that the status-quo intersection was on the slopey bit because then everyone would be going hungry (from the assumptions that everyone were spending $200/month on food and that everyone shared the same subsistence level). However, I don’t have an argument for why the status quo would be on the cusp rather than below it; I just had a hunch which I should (with hindsight) probably have ignored.
karma isn’t ahhh...can’t remember the economic term...replaceable by another unit of karma
Fungible?
I know I could check; I was more wondering whether you, or someone you knew, had checked yourself/themselves.
I think it’s quite possible that Discussion has had a higher maths density over the last two or three months, mainly because of Stuart Armstrong posting his run of ideas from his AI risk retreat. Aside from that, though, I’m doubtful that LW’s had a strong rise in maths density over the last few years. To me it feels like an idea that’s probably more truthy than true.
It’s possible the LW diaspora has concrete evidence on this and I haven’t encountered it. I look at rationalist Tumblr only intermittently and I don’t have Facebook, so I would likely have missed it.