I hardly (essentially never) listen to radio or podcasts because 1) I can "listen" at least twice as fast as they talk. (I tend to watch some stuff on Youtube at 2x speed.), and 2) it takes them forever to reach a point. I understand 'teasing' the topic, but I find it incredibly frustrating to isten to the equivalent of a half-hour shaggy dog story.
Now I understand that they tend to have sponsors who want my ears and attention, and paying subscribers who evidently like that format, but I'm not one of them. It's like being force to watch/listen to one of those peurile Vox 'Splainers on a subject you know well, but want to hear what someone else thinks.
So why don't you just listen to podcasts @ 2x speed? Personally, I prefer 1.25x for languages I know well, 1x for languages I know poorly, but I tend to listen while walking or while strength training, not as a standalone activity.
On dowsing, I remember the man who drilled a water well for my parents dowsed to find out where to drill. Of course, he was paid by the foot of well depth, so there may have been some perverse incentives at work!
(I don't know whether, and how much, he would have been paid had he drilled as far as his rig could go and not hit water.)
Ha! Many years ago, my small (350) hometown put in a municipal water system. The well drilling company asked if they wanted to hire their dowser to 'find' a good source of water. My father, who was on the Town Board at the time said, "The town owns a vacant lot. Drill there. We're only 3 miles for the Illinois River where it's about a half-mile wide. Water drains from under several million tons of limestone. You'll hit good water anywhere you dig."
He was right. 39 feet to an underground river. Still using it today.
I had a well drilled. The guy asked if I minded if he dowsed. I said it couldn't be any worse than me throwing a rock in the air, and who knows, maybe his instincts were informed by the vegetation, topography, or he really had ESP, so go ahead. He found water, but that's just an anecdote, not evidence.
If he knew he could dowse correctly and used that to drill as deeply as possible, I suspect he'd also have more failures, since he was acting against his dowsing skills.
“If exercise and healthy diet actually worked, insurance companies would use them. But they don’t! This proves that exercise and healthy diet don’t lower healthcare costs.”
If insurance companies could hypnotize their clients into a good diet, they would. All the examples provided have some actionable pathways for the company. They could hire astrologists for business decisions, you cant hire an nutritionist and make your client eat healthily.
And there are various insurance companies that do things like give their clients discounted gym memberships or pay them to attend healthy-lifestyle seminars.
They only have actionable pathways if you assume certain parameters. Take remote prayer: suppose it actually works if you have enough people doing it and they actually mean it, ie care about the person they are praying for. Would we have sufficient evidence that this were true?
Placebo works 30% of the time, so it doesn’t seem unlikely to me that telling people they are being prayed for just triggers the placebo effect. It seems unreasonable to assert otherwise.
So why don’t they just mail people “custom medicine” and claim it works? I suspect an answer is that these fields are highly regulated.
Or, Consider hexes. Suppose they actually did work. Would the military intelligence tell us this? Or would they keep it secret because of the danger of letting that get out? If hexes really did work I’d expect elites to consistently downplay it and any evidence that they did work to get suppressed on grounds of national security.
Well, it kind of depends on knowing what a healthy diet is. If there's a single most effed up "science" it's probably "nutrition science."
My grandfather pretty much ate bacon and eggs (all from his own or his family farm) for breakfast every day that he could. It finally killed him at age 89.
If we’re having a serious conversation here, insurance companies are highly regulated as to which things they can and can not discriminate on for the basis of determining a price for their service. THAT is the main reason more of these “sensible” things don’t occur.
As a non- trivial example, Obamacare made it illegal to discriminate against charging less to biological males for pregnancy coverage…
It is possible and done many times I am sure to start watching a football game on Tivo about 40 minutes after its actual start and skip over all the adds until the last 5 minutes or so at which time you watch it in real time. This gets rid of ads and and allows the watcher to see the game without being spoiled by knowing the score. Peace Peter
I have seen lotions that are supposed to reduce sensitivity in the male. Not sure if they work, and how they avoid doing the same to the female via rub off transference, but it's a thing. Then again, people buy a lot of sex related nonsense.
I'm not sure about play of online games, but there are people who play tabletop roleplaying games, either face to face or via videoconferencing, and record the sessions for other people to watch online. Some of these involve play by trained professional actors, but apparently not all. I've watched a session of such a game, and the appeal escapes me, but it seems to be real. I don't think those are a case of "must be watched in real time," but I'm not sure I'm right about that.
I've listened to a few of those "liveplay" roleplaying recordings. The appeal is that there's a certain unique entertainment to seeing improv humour and genuine randomness in the plot. In most stories, you can be pretty confident the good guys will win, or if it's a more tragic story, even that will be foreshadowed. In liveplay roleplaying, the DM may bend things to be a better narrative, but there's enough randomness there are no guarantees. Making things more exciting.
I like DSL, but it’s not at all what I expected.DSL is nice, but it kind of requires being an insider in its own way—everyone seems to know each other and you need a lot of rationalist related knowledge to figure out what people are talking about. .
I only started reading ACX when a software engineer friend, after listening to me talk, asked, 'Have you ever heard of Slate Star Codex?'
So I came to your blog from Astral Codex ten. The first thing I read was your theory on global warming making more land available. Most recently I read the parts in between the poems in the machinery of freedom. Next we should get the one about legal systems very different from ours that you suggested.
The subreddit is well-moderated, especially compared to the rest of Reddit, which is more of a cesspool. It’s not perfect, but then again, neither is life. Less Wrong, on the other hand, isn’t designed for newcomers and tends to have an 'insiders-only' feel.
Jesus Christ was put it much more charitably. Where he you said "credulity" he said "rich in faith". That was one of Christ's talents, transforming insults into compliments.
One answer is that it was a community, disrupted by the period between the end of SSC and the start of its repllacement. A lot of the value was the other commenters.
Another answer might be that Scott had fewer interesting things to say than in the past.
But the real answer, for me, is empirical. I am active on DSL, occasionally on ACX, don't find either as good as SSC was.
I remember hearing a Freakonomics podcast where some economists claimed that advertising is a lemon market, that ads are almost always useless, but that the marketing departments are good at making them seem effective to executives because their job depends on it
I was pretty convinced overall, partly because it reminds me of Hugo Mercier's arguments on the ineffectiveness of propaganda
But I don't fully trust this podcast and I'm not sure what most economically literate people think about this
Does anyone have more information or arguments on this subject?
Oil companies have in fact hired dowsers. Famous psychic Yuri Geller partially supported himself by hiring himself out to oil companies.
As for the medical examples, ignoring the perverse incentives that make it not actually in the interests of drug companies to reduce healthcare costs, alternative medicine is a thriving industry in its own right.
Also the argument for relativity from GPS devices is weak. Yes, according to relativity GPS needs to take it into account. However, in practice the correction factors aren't derived from theory, rather the correction factors for relativity is bundled up with a bunch of other correction factors and the combined correction factor is empirically determined for each satellite.
"Oil companies have in fact hired dowsers. Famous psychic Yuri Geller partially supported himself by hiring himself out to oil companies."
One would suppose that those oil companies were not familiar with the debunking of Yuri Geller done by the Amazing Randi. Their ignorance cost them money but I suppose it was not a whole lot relative to their revenues.
I wonder whether switching to Substack ruined SSC or whether just the change in social climate would’ve ruined it anyway without even if the New York Times had never done anything terrible
Moving to Substack gave him an income stream so he could quit his job, try to start his own practice without depending on it giving him an adequate income.
I sort of remember that Scott (maybe rightfully) freaked out about the privacy of some of his clients and didn't want to involve his employer or something, so he downsized his therapy practice
Substack helped him secure another source of income (with subscriptions and also some kind of grant if I remember right?)
"If so, greater sensitivity means that you reach the same maximum sooner, reducing the area under the pleasure curve." Not necessarily. Anyone with some experience can space out their pleasure. Reaching orgasm is under your control (unless you lack self-control). Greater sensitivity might be more of an issue for young people who may reach orgasm too easily. For older people, it is not a problem at all; the opposite.
Greater sensitivity also makes "edging" more feasible. If you are not very responsive, you have to work more to get into the edging zone. Again, this makes more difference for older people.
"There are no large organisms that support themselves primarily by preying on humans;" Governments? :-)
Lol, and maybe soon AI
I hardly (essentially never) listen to radio or podcasts because 1) I can "listen" at least twice as fast as they talk. (I tend to watch some stuff on Youtube at 2x speed.), and 2) it takes them forever to reach a point. I understand 'teasing' the topic, but I find it incredibly frustrating to isten to the equivalent of a half-hour shaggy dog story.
Now I understand that they tend to have sponsors who want my ears and attention, and paying subscribers who evidently like that format, but I'm not one of them. It's like being force to watch/listen to one of those peurile Vox 'Splainers on a subject you know well, but want to hear what someone else thinks.
So I'll pass.
I can also read and skim and search a whole lot faster than listen.
So why don't you just listen to podcasts @ 2x speed? Personally, I prefer 1.25x for languages I know well, 1x for languages I know poorly, but I tend to listen while walking or while strength training, not as a standalone activity.
On dowsing, I remember the man who drilled a water well for my parents dowsed to find out where to drill. Of course, he was paid by the foot of well depth, so there may have been some perverse incentives at work!
(I don't know whether, and how much, he would have been paid had he drilled as far as his rig could go and not hit water.)
Ha! Many years ago, my small (350) hometown put in a municipal water system. The well drilling company asked if they wanted to hire their dowser to 'find' a good source of water. My father, who was on the Town Board at the time said, "The town owns a vacant lot. Drill there. We're only 3 miles for the Illinois River where it's about a half-mile wide. Water drains from under several million tons of limestone. You'll hit good water anywhere you dig."
He was right. 39 feet to an underground river. Still using it today.
I had a well drilled. The guy asked if I minded if he dowsed. I said it couldn't be any worse than me throwing a rock in the air, and who knows, maybe his instincts were informed by the vegetation, topography, or he really had ESP, so go ahead. He found water, but that's just an anecdote, not evidence.
If he knew he could dowse correctly and used that to drill as deeply as possible, I suspect he'd also have more failures, since he was acting against his dowsing skills.
On the XKCD comic:
“If exercise and healthy diet actually worked, insurance companies would use them. But they don’t! This proves that exercise and healthy diet don’t lower healthcare costs.”
If insurance companies could hypnotize their clients into a good diet, they would. All the examples provided have some actionable pathways for the company. They could hire astrologists for business decisions, you cant hire an nutritionist and make your client eat healthily.
And there are various insurance companies that do things like give their clients discounted gym memberships or pay them to attend healthy-lifestyle seminars.
They only have actionable pathways if you assume certain parameters. Take remote prayer: suppose it actually works if you have enough people doing it and they actually mean it, ie care about the person they are praying for. Would we have sufficient evidence that this were true?
Placebo works 30% of the time, so it doesn’t seem unlikely to me that telling people they are being prayed for just triggers the placebo effect. It seems unreasonable to assert otherwise.
So why don’t they just mail people “custom medicine” and claim it works? I suspect an answer is that these fields are highly regulated.
Or, Consider hexes. Suppose they actually did work. Would the military intelligence tell us this? Or would they keep it secret because of the danger of letting that get out? If hexes really did work I’d expect elites to consistently downplay it and any evidence that they did work to get suppressed on grounds of national security.
The military used to actually have a psychic division.
https://www.amazon.com/Men-Who-Stare-Goats/dp/0743270606
https://www.amazon.com/Phenomena-Governments-Investigations-Extrasensory-Psychokinesis/dp/0316349364
Well, it kind of depends on knowing what a healthy diet is. If there's a single most effed up "science" it's probably "nutrition science."
My grandfather pretty much ate bacon and eggs (all from his own or his family farm) for breakfast every day that he could. It finally killed him at age 89.
If we’re having a serious conversation here, insurance companies are highly regulated as to which things they can and can not discriminate on for the basis of determining a price for their service. THAT is the main reason more of these “sensible” things don’t occur.
As a non- trivial example, Obamacare made it illegal to discriminate against charging less to biological males for pregnancy coverage…
Insurance companies do give discounts for exercise.
It is possible and done many times I am sure to start watching a football game on Tivo about 40 minutes after its actual start and skip over all the adds until the last 5 minutes or so at which time you watch it in real time. This gets rid of ads and and allows the watcher to see the game without being spoiled by knowing the score. Peace Peter
If reducing sensitivity increased pleasure, you could make the same argument for condoms, but that's obviously not how they're seen.
I have seen lotions that are supposed to reduce sensitivity in the male. Not sure if they work, and how they avoid doing the same to the female via rub off transference, but it's a thing. Then again, people buy a lot of sex related nonsense.
"Extra thick for reduced sensitivity" is indeed not how condoms are marketed where intact genitals are the norm – rather the opposite.
I'm not sure about play of online games, but there are people who play tabletop roleplaying games, either face to face or via videoconferencing, and record the sessions for other people to watch online. Some of these involve play by trained professional actors, but apparently not all. I've watched a session of such a game, and the appeal escapes me, but it seems to be real. I don't think those are a case of "must be watched in real time," but I'm not sure I'm right about that.
I've listened to a few of those "liveplay" roleplaying recordings. The appeal is that there's a certain unique entertainment to seeing improv humour and genuine randomness in the plot. In most stories, you can be pretty confident the good guys will win, or if it's a more tragic story, even that will be foreshadowed. In liveplay roleplaying, the DM may bend things to be a better narrative, but there's enough randomness there are no guarantees. Making things more exciting.
I like DSL, but it’s not at all what I expected.DSL is nice, but it kind of requires being an insider in its own way—everyone seems to know each other and you need a lot of rationalist related knowledge to figure out what people are talking about. .
I only started reading ACX when a software engineer friend, after listening to me talk, asked, 'Have you ever heard of Slate Star Codex?'
So I came to your blog from Astral Codex ten. The first thing I read was your theory on global warming making more land available. Most recently I read the parts in between the poems in the machinery of freedom. Next we should get the one about legal systems very different from ours that you suggested.
The subreddit is well-moderated, especially compared to the rest of Reddit, which is more of a cesspool. It’s not perfect, but then again, neither is life. Less Wrong, on the other hand, isn’t designed for newcomers and tends to have an 'insiders-only' feel.
Have you tried the astral codex discord? It's more mellow than the motte or dsl as far as spin off communities are concerned.
I have not. Perhaps I should.
Jesus Christ was put it much more charitably. Where he you said "credulity" he said "rich in faith". That was one of Christ's talents, transforming insults into compliments.
I don’t quite understand how Scott’s blogs are supposed to be different. What would be different if the old blog had continued?
One answer is that it was a community, disrupted by the period between the end of SSC and the start of its repllacement. A lot of the value was the other commenters.
Another answer might be that Scott had fewer interesting things to say than in the past.
But the real answer, for me, is empirical. I am active on DSL, occasionally on ACX, don't find either as good as SSC was.
And that aside I’m never shy about promoting my podcast but this one about Sulla and Caesar I was particularly pleased with.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/15469551
Well I thought the Nietzsche piece well up to his old standards. But I think overall I agree. Perhaps other things in his life became more important.
I remember hearing a Freakonomics podcast where some economists claimed that advertising is a lemon market, that ads are almost always useless, but that the marketing departments are good at making them seem effective to executives because their job depends on it
I was pretty convinced overall, partly because it reminds me of Hugo Mercier's arguments on the ineffectiveness of propaganda
But I don't fully trust this podcast and I'm not sure what most economically literate people think about this
Does anyone have more information or arguments on this subject?
The xkcd comic is wrong.
Oil companies have in fact hired dowsers. Famous psychic Yuri Geller partially supported himself by hiring himself out to oil companies.
As for the medical examples, ignoring the perverse incentives that make it not actually in the interests of drug companies to reduce healthcare costs, alternative medicine is a thriving industry in its own right.
Also the argument for relativity from GPS devices is weak. Yes, according to relativity GPS needs to take it into account. However, in practice the correction factors aren't derived from theory, rather the correction factors for relativity is bundled up with a bunch of other correction factors and the combined correction factor is empirically determined for each satellite.
"Oil companies have in fact hired dowsers. Famous psychic Yuri Geller partially supported himself by hiring himself out to oil companies."
One would suppose that those oil companies were not familiar with the debunking of Yuri Geller done by the Amazing Randi. Their ignorance cost them money but I suppose it was not a whole lot relative to their revenues.
Maybe, or maybe they know something you don't.
In any case, my point is that the argument the XKCD comic makes doesn't work.
I wonder whether switching to Substack ruined SSC or whether just the change in social climate would’ve ruined it anyway without even if the New York Times had never done anything terrible
I never understood the logic of the SSC move. It's not like moving to substack in any way protects Scott from doxing.
Moving to Substack gave him an income stream so he could quit his job, try to start his own practice without depending on it giving him an adequate income.
I sort of remember that Scott (maybe rightfully) freaked out about the privacy of some of his clients and didn't want to involve his employer or something, so he downsized his therapy practice
Substack helped him secure another source of income (with subscriptions and also some kind of grant if I remember right?)
"If so, greater sensitivity means that you reach the same maximum sooner, reducing the area under the pleasure curve." Not necessarily. Anyone with some experience can space out their pleasure. Reaching orgasm is under your control (unless you lack self-control). Greater sensitivity might be more of an issue for young people who may reach orgasm too easily. For older people, it is not a problem at all; the opposite.
Greater sensitivity also makes "edging" more feasible. If you are not very responsive, you have to work more to get into the edging zone. Again, this makes more difference for older people.
I miss Slate Star Codex, but don't find either of the replacements worth my time.