31. I just learned from 24 why "uranium enrichment" is made of "centrifuges", a fact that I had previously accepted with the placid incomprehension I reserve for facts that were poorly explained to me in early childhood
If we communicated via "3-D spatiotemporal fragrance patterns", why couldn't we write them down? In this scenario (or whatever other communication means you could imagine) I feel like we'd come up with some system to record space and different smells over time the same way we did for sounds
13. That all large institutions everywhere anecdotally seem to be filled with the most grotesque waste and inefficiency, which is bad, sure, but given that our quality of life is as it is, it suggests that if we could find an even-moderately-efficient way to organize human activity, we might flourish even harder than we do now.
It’s cool experiments are being done to help caesarian babies (#18) but it’s also alarming that US has higher rates of caesarian births—due to higher hospital profitability and predictable delivery times. Doctors don’t like delivering babies at 3 am. Much better to schedule C-section at 3:30pm and then enjoy the evening out
Great post. I recall from my childhood (early 2000s) that Brussel sprouts were seen as this not-tasty vegetable. Was this a remnant of a time where they actually were disgusting? As a child a large part of my self-image was based on the fact that I liked Brussel sprouts.
Thanks, I'll check it out! I enjoyed Blindsight and Echopraxia, and based on those he seems very plausible to be the one to write this kind of story...
RE 22: The death penalty is mostly used nowadays as a deterrent for bringing cases to trial. State issues notice of seeking death penalty. Now defense counsel has a reason to plea the case out for life in prison with no possibility of parole instead of just taking the case to trial where life in prison is the worst outcome anyway. If the death penalty isn't a criminal deterrent that means life prison sentences aren't a deterrent either and so on and so on for lesser sentences. More punishment inherently has to be a larger deterrent because it is used as a prosecutorial bargaining chip.
Is it fair to say that your argument is that even if the death penalty is rarely applied, it still serves as a deterrent by making other punishments larger or more certain? E.g. if I murdered someone and the max punishment was life in prison, I'd never accept a plea of life in prison since I might as well take my chances in court.
That seems plausible, and I could easily be convinced that in this way, having the death penalty on the books increases the mean punishment. But would that prove that the death penalty reduces crime? Maybe people just aren't rational enough about crimes for that shift in incentives to change their behavior? If the effect was real, shouldn't it show up on the analyses people do of the effect of death penalty statutes on crime rates. (Again, my impression from the current literature is just that it's unclear if the death penalty reduces crime, not that it doesn't.)
Yes, you stated my argument exactly. What I believe flows from my position is that removing the death penalty also reduces the occurrence of life imprisonment sentences (or requires the state to hire a lot more highly-skilled prosecutors). Therefore if the death penalty has no deterrent effect then the amount of extra life imprisonment sentences the death penalty creates must also have no deterrent effect. And I don't think it's a reasonable position that life imprisonment sentences don't have a deterrent effect.
I don't too much about the statistical analyses people have done on the death penalty. I don't think much of it either. I've read some and they always seem to come from groups that have a clearly stated moral preference against the death penalty. It seems like a case where there's just too many confounding factors to make a good determination. Whether or not a state has the death penalty is a product of how left-leaning the legislature is, which is strongly affected by the urban<->rural distribution of people, which strongly affects crime rate. Plus a ton of other factors. It's also pretty pointless to look at crime rates pre and post death penalty abolishment because in the states where the death penalty is being abolished, it was rarely if at all used for years before hand.
Which is what you said before: the statistical analysis that has been done isn't clear on whether the death penalty deters criminal behavior. But I don't think we need to do statistical analysis to determine if something has an effect for everything. If I have a bucket of water with a bunch of red food coloring in it and I put another drop in, I probably can't take samples from the bucket and determine if their redness has increased before and after the drop to see if there's more food coloring in it. There's an uneven distribution, there's swirling caused by the drop, there's sample variance, etc. But I can definitely be sure that there's more food coloring in the bucket after the drop than before because of course! I think the death penalty is similar to the drop of red food coloring.
Prosecutorial bargaining chips are not inherently good though. The availability of severe sentences has incontrovertibly led to many innocent people pleading down to lesser charges because of the risk of severe sentences in imperfect justice systems.
Dynomite's post already addressed deterrence, namely that there is not a clear indication that presence of a death penalty deters crime. I didn't see a need to address it since you didn't bring up anything new that people researching this topic are not yet aware of. I simply brought up one known downside to setting extreme punishments as a "prosecutorial bargaining chip".
But since you want a discussion on this topic I'll bite. You disagreed with Dynomite's statement and said that since the death penalty can be used as a "prosecutorial bargaining chip" it has a deterrent effect, based on the assertion that "More punishment inherently has to be a larger deterrent". That assertion sounds reasonable, but is based on the flawed assumption that criminals are all rational actors and choose actions with optimal outcomes. I think it has been well shown in economics research that most people act irrationally. And the average violent criminal probably acts more irrationally than the average person. There is a large body of research on the topic of capital punishment and presence or lack of deterrence and I don't think the field has a conclusive answer. But one thing which we can say with confidence is that crimes are often irrational acts that are committed without carefully weighing the consequences.
re: #7, it's not all grungy issues! There's a lot of beauty to be had by mixing the purity of just intonation's low-prime ratios, and the angularities of equal temperament's symmetrical properties!
Collectively, we make life more difficult than is required, and maybe we got some benefits and achievements that would otherwise not manifested had we not done the things we did. And maybe we will find that the benefits came at too high a cost. Modernity is going through some stuff. A thanks today can become a regret tomorrow. And the reverse is also true.
Humans are weird, life is weird, and we have no idea where it’s all going. So, yeah, thank the fruits and the happy coincidences. Taste them all. Living and reality are an amazing journey.
A friend of mine grew up in South Africa for the first few years of her life where shoes were unconventional, and she didn't wear them either. The result was that her feet became naturally callused and now she doesn't need shoes to go outside.
I don't think human feet are genetically weak (which would be unlike every other animal), I just think we stifle the natural hormesis by wearing shoes (if at least from an early age) in wealthy countries nowadays.
So.... "Thanks that shoes exist… because our feet are weak… because of shoes"?
I love shoes because 95% of the surfaces I am expected to walk on outside are made of concrete, which is hard and hurts my feet (and in my experience going on a long urban walk with a dog, the dog's unclad feet got tired long before my shod ones).
I tend to look at shoes as little foot prisons and I've even experimented with going totally shoe-less (and I agree this is way more viable than people think). But I still maintain that footwear is a huge positive on net!
I made a blog post about point #30 a few months ago and got a direct message from Andrew Snyder-Beattie (head of biosecurity at OpenPhil) who freaked out and asked me to delete it, which I did.
EDIT: to anyone wondering, I previously suggested redacting it but I now think it's not necessary, given that the information is already pretty widely known. It would be different if there were more details about actual implementation.
Just realized this was you.
31. I just learned from 24 why "uranium enrichment" is made of "centrifuges", a fact that I had previously accepted with the placid incomprehension I reserve for facts that were poorly explained to me in early childhood
If we communicated via "3-D spatiotemporal fragrance patterns", why couldn't we write them down? In this scenario (or whatever other communication means you could imagine) I feel like we'd come up with some system to record space and different smells over time the same way we did for sounds
I’ve been expressing this sentiment for decades…
13. That all large institutions everywhere anecdotally seem to be filled with the most grotesque waste and inefficiency, which is bad, sure, but given that our quality of life is as it is, it suggests that if we could find an even-moderately-efficient way to organize human activity, we might flourish even harder than we do now.
It’s cool experiments are being done to help caesarian babies (#18) but it’s also alarming that US has higher rates of caesarian births—due to higher hospital profitability and predictable delivery times. Doctors don’t like delivering babies at 3 am. Much better to schedule C-section at 3:30pm and then enjoy the evening out
Great post. I recall from my childhood (early 2000s) that Brussel sprouts were seen as this not-tasty vegetable. Was this a remnant of a time where they actually were disgusting? As a child a large part of my self-image was based on the fact that I liked Brussel sprouts.
Loved this! ✨
Peter Watts, Rifter series. Not exact, but close enough.
Thanks, I'll check it out! I enjoyed Blindsight and Echopraxia, and based on those he seems very plausible to be the one to write this kind of story...
I did not finish the entire series once the scale was big, I found the story less engaging.
I was about to see if anyone had already commented!
RE 22: The death penalty is mostly used nowadays as a deterrent for bringing cases to trial. State issues notice of seeking death penalty. Now defense counsel has a reason to plea the case out for life in prison with no possibility of parole instead of just taking the case to trial where life in prison is the worst outcome anyway. If the death penalty isn't a criminal deterrent that means life prison sentences aren't a deterrent either and so on and so on for lesser sentences. More punishment inherently has to be a larger deterrent because it is used as a prosecutorial bargaining chip.
Is it fair to say that your argument is that even if the death penalty is rarely applied, it still serves as a deterrent by making other punishments larger or more certain? E.g. if I murdered someone and the max punishment was life in prison, I'd never accept a plea of life in prison since I might as well take my chances in court.
That seems plausible, and I could easily be convinced that in this way, having the death penalty on the books increases the mean punishment. But would that prove that the death penalty reduces crime? Maybe people just aren't rational enough about crimes for that shift in incentives to change their behavior? If the effect was real, shouldn't it show up on the analyses people do of the effect of death penalty statutes on crime rates. (Again, my impression from the current literature is just that it's unclear if the death penalty reduces crime, not that it doesn't.)
Yes, you stated my argument exactly. What I believe flows from my position is that removing the death penalty also reduces the occurrence of life imprisonment sentences (or requires the state to hire a lot more highly-skilled prosecutors). Therefore if the death penalty has no deterrent effect then the amount of extra life imprisonment sentences the death penalty creates must also have no deterrent effect. And I don't think it's a reasonable position that life imprisonment sentences don't have a deterrent effect.
I don't too much about the statistical analyses people have done on the death penalty. I don't think much of it either. I've read some and they always seem to come from groups that have a clearly stated moral preference against the death penalty. It seems like a case where there's just too many confounding factors to make a good determination. Whether or not a state has the death penalty is a product of how left-leaning the legislature is, which is strongly affected by the urban<->rural distribution of people, which strongly affects crime rate. Plus a ton of other factors. It's also pretty pointless to look at crime rates pre and post death penalty abolishment because in the states where the death penalty is being abolished, it was rarely if at all used for years before hand.
Which is what you said before: the statistical analysis that has been done isn't clear on whether the death penalty deters criminal behavior. But I don't think we need to do statistical analysis to determine if something has an effect for everything. If I have a bucket of water with a bunch of red food coloring in it and I put another drop in, I probably can't take samples from the bucket and determine if their redness has increased before and after the drop to see if there's more food coloring in it. There's an uneven distribution, there's swirling caused by the drop, there's sample variance, etc. But I can definitely be sure that there's more food coloring in the bucket after the drop than before because of course! I think the death penalty is similar to the drop of red food coloring.
Prosecutorial bargaining chips are not inherently good though. The availability of severe sentences has incontrovertibly led to many innocent people pleading down to lesser charges because of the risk of severe sentences in imperfect justice systems.
I don't think this comment touches on deterrence.
Dynomite's post already addressed deterrence, namely that there is not a clear indication that presence of a death penalty deters crime. I didn't see a need to address it since you didn't bring up anything new that people researching this topic are not yet aware of. I simply brought up one known downside to setting extreme punishments as a "prosecutorial bargaining chip".
But since you want a discussion on this topic I'll bite. You disagreed with Dynomite's statement and said that since the death penalty can be used as a "prosecutorial bargaining chip" it has a deterrent effect, based on the assertion that "More punishment inherently has to be a larger deterrent". That assertion sounds reasonable, but is based on the flawed assumption that criminals are all rational actors and choose actions with optimal outcomes. I think it has been well shown in economics research that most people act irrationally. And the average violent criminal probably acts more irrationally than the average person. There is a large body of research on the topic of capital punishment and presence or lack of deterrence and I don't think the field has a conclusive answer. But one thing which we can say with confidence is that crimes are often irrational acts that are committed without carefully weighing the consequences.
I understand you need a break, but I am not sure about 12...
Loved the post btw
re: #7, it's not all grungy issues! There's a lot of beauty to be had by mixing the purity of just intonation's low-prime ratios, and the angularities of equal temperament's symmetrical properties!
See this thread (https://twitter.com/itsjaneflowers/status/1591117570828296192) for an overview, which is based on this book (https://www.amazon.com/Harmonic-Experience-Harmony-Natural-Expression/dp/0892815604)
Collectively, we make life more difficult than is required, and maybe we got some benefits and achievements that would otherwise not manifested had we not done the things we did. And maybe we will find that the benefits came at too high a cost. Modernity is going through some stuff. A thanks today can become a regret tomorrow. And the reverse is also true.
Humans are weird, life is weird, and we have no idea where it’s all going. So, yeah, thank the fruits and the happy coincidences. Taste them all. Living and reality are an amazing journey.
Melpomene and Thalia all the way down.
This was absolutely incredible, thanks so much for the read
What, shoes haha? That shoes exist?
A friend of mine grew up in South Africa for the first few years of her life where shoes were unconventional, and she didn't wear them either. The result was that her feet became naturally callused and now she doesn't need shoes to go outside.
I don't think human feet are genetically weak (which would be unlike every other animal), I just think we stifle the natural hormesis by wearing shoes (if at least from an early age) in wealthy countries nowadays.
So.... "Thanks that shoes exist… because our feet are weak… because of shoes"?
I love shoes because 95% of the surfaces I am expected to walk on outside are made of concrete, which is hard and hurts my feet (and in my experience going on a long urban walk with a dog, the dog's unclad feet got tired long before my shod ones).
I think that concrete just sucks to walk on - you can develop callouses so it doesn't scratch up your feet, but it's too hard.
I tend to look at shoes as little foot prisons and I've even experimented with going totally shoe-less (and I agree this is way more viable than people think). But I still maintain that footwear is a huge positive on net!
I wonder when shoes became mainstream. (rand- Might it have just been because of public restrooms?)
I will add all of these facts to my utility function to increase my utility in every moment. Thanks!
I made a blog post about point #30 a few months ago and got a direct message from Andrew Snyder-Beattie (head of biosecurity at OpenPhil) who freaked out and asked me to delete it, which I did.
EDIT: to anyone wondering, I previously suggested redacting it but I now think it's not necessary, given that the information is already pretty widely known. It would be different if there were more details about actual implementation.
did you ... include a method for synthesizing mirror-life?
No
Can you contact me privately? My email is here: https://dynomight.net/about/
OK, I emailed you at the address you indicated.
Don't know why but I find this exchange oddly worrying