A collection of interesting things- Dec 2023
Media, Harari, Pinker, Summers, Sagan, Vonnegut, Lessing, COP 28, The 10 Commandments, child brides, fairies, Conan Doyle, collective unconscious, Jung, UFOs
WEF no elections
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/noel-mcelwee-33368912b_democracy-activity-
Yuri
https://x.com/therealZNO/status/1739366652704157996?s=20
https://www.theknowledge.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brides_of_the_Islamic_State
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments
Rape in France - pragmatic? jurisprudence?
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/11/16/france-opposes-draft-eu-wide-definition-of-rape_6261066_4.html
Blake Lemoine, google, AI, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/google-engineer-claims-ai-chatbot-is-sentient-why-that-matters/
“The founder of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, pleaded guilty on Tuesday, November 21, to a felony charge that he failed to take steps to prevent money laundering as the company agreed to pay more than $4 billion following an investigation by the U.S. government.
CEO Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to one count of failure to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program in federal court in Seattle. Binance is a Cayman Islands limited liability company.” from Le Monde
“Changpeng Zhao, founder of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, agreed to resign from the company and plead guilty to money laundering on Tuesday.
As part of a guilty plea, Zhao agreed to pay a $50m fine and would be barred from any involvement in the business. Binance too agreed to plead guilty, accept the appointment of a monitor and pay a criminal fine of nearly $1.81bn as well as a $2.51bn order of forfeiture to settle three criminal charges. The US Justice Department had charged the company with conducting an unlicensed money transmitting business, a conspiracy charge and violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.”
from the guardian
Jung collective unconscious
Collective unconscious (German: kollektives Unbewusstes) refers to the unconscious mind and shared mental concepts. It is generally associated with idealism and was coined by Carl Jung. According to Jung, the human collective unconscious is populated by instincts, as well as by archetypes: ancient primal symbols such as The Great Mother, the Wise Old Man, the Shadow, the Tower, Water, and the Tree of Life.[1] Jung considered the collective unconscious to underpin and surround the unconscious mind, distinguishing it from the personal unconscious of Freudian psychoanalysis. He believed that the concept of the collective unconscious helps to explain why similar themes occur in mythologies around the world. He argued that the collective unconscious had a profound influence on the lives of individuals, who lived out its symbols and clothed them in meaning through their experiences. The psychotherapeutic practice of analytical psychology revolves around examining the patient's relationship to the collective unconscious.
Elements from the collective unconscious can manifest among groups of people, who by definition all share a connection to these elements. Groups of people can become especially receptive to specific symbols due to the historical situation they find themselves in.[54] The common importance of the collective unconscious makes people ripe for political manipulation, especially in the era of mass politics.[55] Jung compared mass movements to mass psychoses, comparable to demonic possession in which people uncritically channel unconscious symbolism through the social dynamic of the mob and the leader.[56]
Although civilization leads people to disavow their links with the mythological world of uncivilized societies, Jung argued that aspects of the primitive unconscious would nevertheless reassert themselves in the form of superstitions, everyday practices, and unquestioned traditions such as the Christmas tree.[57]
Jung called the UFO phenomenon a "living myth", a legend in the process of consolidation.[60] Belief in a messianic encounter with UFOs demonstrated the point, Jung argued, that even if a rationalistic modern ideology repressed the images of the collective unconscious, its fundamental aspects would inevitably resurface. The circular shape of the flying saucer confirms its symbolic connection to repressed but psychically necessary ideas of divinity
**
see also George Carlin on joining groups
I love individuals, I hate people with a common purpose, little hats, armbands, fight songs, list of people to visit at 3am
*****
I gave up on the human race
wonder and pity
people one by one, groups, 5? 10 for the sake of the group
*****
“There is no such thing as a chain of events” see Taleb below
Yuval Noah Harari
***
There is no such thing as… just people inside system
https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1601557525186633728?s=20&t=tP6Pn_WCrflgvpUkoc6_zA
66 good news stories
https://x.com/sapinker/status/1739408504803180595?s=20
**
Best youtube science channels
https://www.oxfordcollege.ac/news/eight-youtube-science-channels-will-revolutionise-learning/
science
Christopher S Baird
https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/category/chemistry/
***
Taleb
https://x.com/BrianFeroldi/status/1739289561291718789?s=20
Carl Sagan
https://x.com/ValaAfshar/status/1737148650805952800?s=20
Best books- sapiens
https://x.com/InvestmentBook1/status/1737673391115772411?s=20
David Allan gtd
https://x.com/InvestmentBook1/status/1737673595206451349?s=20
Antifragile
https://x.com/InvestmentBook1/status/1737673663833682276?s=20
India Alaska straight line
https://x.com/waitbutwhy/status/1737510943326642274?s=20
moral progress?
https://x.com/michaelshermer/status/1737260958270296148?s=20
cause of death
https://x.com/salonium/status/1739388670837240008?s=20
bias blind spot
https://x.com/DegenRolf/status/1737145449922904141?s=20
Psychology with Charlie Munger
https://x.com/_alexbrogan/status/1737114504025219415?s=20
Lammy for sec
https://x.com/Lowkey0nline/status/1713503670493413410?s=20
Kurt Vonnegut the shape of the story
https://x.com/nathanbaugh27/status/1737120339358789986?s=20
“The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language. The desire is to have the idea clearly communicated to the other person. It is only necessary to be precise when there is some doubt as to the meaning of a phrase, and then the precision should be put in the place where the doubt exists. It is really quite impossible to say anything with absolute precision, unless that thing is so abstracted from the real world as to not represent any real thing.” Richard Feynman
left or right- which people? Like who?
Gimme the page! Which page?
https://x.com/RealActionBill/status/1737260226640785529?s=20
Parenting
https://x.com/sapinker/status/1737143644665045493?s=20
Husam Zomlot
https://twitter.com/hzomlot/status/1711387200804315348
Do not underestimate people’s desire for justice freedom
The Male Gaze https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/the-invention-of-the-male-gaze
“The term was popularized, fifty years ago, by the British film theorist Laura Mulvey, who wrote, in a 1973 essay called “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” of how the “male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.”
“One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear.”
New Yorker Favorites
The killer who got into Harvard.
Why 1956 was a radical year in hair dye.
The skyscraper that could have toppled over in a windstorm.
The day the dinosaurs died.
Fiction by Amy Tan: “Immortal Heart”
Chicken deaths
https://x.com/mealreplacer/status/1725487214153351498?s=20
Badenoch
Lies
https://x.com/addicted2newz/status/1734994943133819158?s=20
https://x.com/simonjedge/status/1735058960544158072?s=20
Blind orchestra auditions
https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1737194396951474216?s=20
More munger
https://x.com/chitchatmoney/status/1735039153501561264?s=20
Quit drinking
https://x.com/WilliamJRipple/status/1735121841721905553?s=20
Zero waste sex
https://trashisfortossers.com/guide-to-zero-waste-sex
“I don’t usually talk about sex because it’s one of those subjects that people get all weird about which is funny because “how do you have Zero Waste sex?” is a very common question that I get asked.
It’s a question that I have shamefully, but successfully, ignored for a while now because I didn’t want to divulge my entire sex life on the internet, but whatever, I talk about everything else, why not sex?
Let’s be real, I have sex. There I said it! But…I do not have Zero Waste sex. When I sleep with someone, it produces waste.”
Palestine
https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1736103408099000363?s=20
Solar system
https://x.com/gunsnrosesgirl3/status/1734990293538066571?s=20
https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1734995131776762109?s=20
More Ackman
https://x.com/BillAckman/status/1735133245807726894?s=20
Aggression
Harvard
https://x.com/EquityTerminal/status/1732368245674446872?s=20
Fish japan
French
Roland Fryer
Freakonomics
Douglas Murray
https://x.com/addicted2newz/status/1734458388652667241?s=20
Shocker Musk Claudine Gay
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1734063915632414862?s=20
Buffett
https://x.com/investmattallen/status/1733969323566219569?s=20
Stripe
https://x.com/stripepress/status/1732070163774681507?s=20
Kendri
https://x.com/EdwardGLuce/status/1732014451916701875?s=20
3 pdfs
https://x.com/MnkeDaniel/status/1734131577603412336?s=20
James yoo
Explosion
https://x.com/4freedom1USA/status/1731891137554563134?s=20
Charlie Munger
Rap poet
Prince EA
HAMAS tunnels
https://x.com/EylonALevy/status/1730259650669318208?s=20
Too white BBC
https://x.com/GSpellchecker/status/1730475795766780329?s=20
Trump and the fly
Moseley
Chemist killed
https://x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1727589486828102099?s=20
The UN can do the job
Spoof?
Biden
On phone
Tom peters scumbag
Mistake
Spoof bbc
Biden in the senate
https://x.com/ASE/status/1725238352083894591?s=20
No dig
https://www.charlesdowding.co.uk/get-started
Not a target
https://x.com/wil_da_beast630/status/1724225650653884878?s=20
Meme
https://x.com/buddy0142/status/1724284779800248799?s=20
Linus swedish finnish
Un no problem israel
https://x.com/realjonlovitz/status/1724172656596144278?s=20
Dr strangelove
https://x.com/AugustW39561002/status/1724231666896654682?s=20
Lhoussaine
Robots to do
Learning to walk
No 2
Rameses
https://x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1724374112297009454?s=20
Football
https://x.com/BDStanley/status/1724372092018217061?s=20
gas
https://x.com/CrisisReports/status/1719473999757905998?s=20
Ray Ison how lang frames reality
Netanyahu at UN richard medhurst
Gas https://x.com/goscribeflow/status/1719568437155176796?s=20
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_gas_field
https://x.com/goscribeflow/status/1719568437155176796?s=20
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019-global-thinkers/
Hard talk storing weapons waste of resources
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001s98w/hardtalk-carlo-rovelli-theoretical-physicist
https://worldbiomarketinsights.com/a-liquid-tree-scientists-in-serbia-make-incredible-innovation/
Vigitilantism
https://x.com/SteveStuWill/status/1721414610837016904?s=20
Jancovici
Bc env corporate shit https://www.linkedin.com/posts/british-council_climatechange-climateaction-sustainability-activity-7125368391539810304-1lTf?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
No jacket press
Eng https://x.com/mqudsi/status/1720472539980329323?s=20
https://x.com/majedbamya/status/1720189130280239564?s=20
Terrorist
Netanyahu
https://x.com/scottlong1980/status/1721115869164540157?s=20
Top 100 women
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-29758792
Billion trillion
https://hackaday.com/2019/08/05/a-trillion-trees-how-hard-can-it-be/
9 11 Saudi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_28_pages
Moore then discusses the complex relationships between the U.S. government and the Bush family; and between the bin Laden family, the Saudi Arabian government, and the Taliban, which span over three decades. Moore then states that the United States government evacuated 24 members of the bin Laden family on a secret flight shortly after the attacks, without subjecting them to any form of interrogation.
National Review went full-on woke: “‘Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence’ is an oft-repeated phrase by proponents of cancel culture. Though sometimes misapplied, the statement is obviously, on its face, true.” I.e. when people we don’t agree with are speaking.
Supporting terrorism is the exception to the cancellation rule, we’re told. But “supporting terrorism” is a mighty nebulous concept. Countless political arguments about armed struggles around the world — South African apartheid, for example, or the Irish question — have involved rival, disputed claims of “supporting terrorism.” Should those debates never have happened? At least one right-winger was honest: “They canceled conservative speakers
If the stunt broke college rules, discipline the kids for that. But not for their views, however foul. If we are to insist that words are not violence, and we should, we cannot suddenly change our tune when the words are coming from the “decolonizing” left.
And this new burst of cancel culture from the Israel lobby is, of course, far from new. In some ways, Israel’s defenders were the original pioneers of cancel culture, and they are a kind of proof of its dangers. Deploying the smear of anti-Semitism against anyone critical of Israel’s policies has long been a time-honored tactic in the arsenal of the ADL, AIPAC, and much of the pro-Israel media. And it meant that a healthy, open debate about Israel was kept at bay.
Freedom
https://x.com/Semisan9/status/1718958669604249732?s=20
Truth
https://x.com/mariannaspring/status/1717431319209074714?s=20
Liquid tree photosynthesis
Marine a
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AbbJXcD9R0Fdt7FemustQsGRmdMNKkwENZITF7SQA_U/edit
Lammy cash
Malaria
https://x.com/devisridhar/status/1717785371113660667?s=20
Mandela
Among some young populists in South Africa today, Winnie (who died in 2018, almost five years after Mandela) is admired because of her perceived ruthlessness. She was willing to threaten and use violence long after her husband had turned against those methods. A woman who talked of the power that comes from being feared, she called for revolution into old age. As Mr Steinberg writes, she has become a “sentinel” for the idea that somehow the transition is incomplete. The likes of Julius Malema and his party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, often laud Winnie and call for the revolution to be completed.
Yet Winnie was never really in a position to influence the transition. As Mr Steinberg shows, she barely survived decades of abuse and repression at the hands of apartheid security agents. (She was exiled within the country, kept under house arrest and tortured.) For many, her reputation was shattered after a trial in 1991, when she was convicted of kidnapping and being an accessory to the assault of a 14-year-old boy, Stompie Moeketsi, who was murdered by a close associate.
In fact, as Mr Steinberg sets out in his study of the Mandelas’ marriage, she was badly broken long before that. He takes care to avoid assessing her as simply a monster—instead he describes her remarkable strength in the “norms she transgressed” and says that she was “the most singular, the most astonishing woman”. He draws on letters between jailed husband and wife, diaries, contemporary interviews and long, revealing transcripts and notes made for years by informants and spies who had bugged both their prison cells and homes.
The picture that he sketches is a damning one. Yes, early on she was brave, flamboyant, wonderfully theatrical and able to deploy her beauty to generate global attention for the ANC’s cause. But as the years passed, and the police detained or killed those whom she relied on, she grew pitiless, depressed and dependent on alcohol.
Nor was she trusted by her own side. Security police were able to introduce informants into her household, in some cases as lovers, for many years. So isolated was she that she persisted with at least one affair even after the man was exposed as a police agent. By the 1980s, in Soweto, she in effect presided over a gang, the Mandela United Football Club, that deployed rape, beatings and murder to assert its power.
Winnie was ultimately a tragic and undisciplined figure. Mr Steinberg’s book includes many details about her private life not widely published before. Despite his repeated efforts to show sympathy for a person who was cruelly victimised, the main impression of his book is that South African democracy was lucky that she was marginalised. Thank goodness that she, and thuggish people around her, were unable to influence the transition more. As imperfect as the results in South Africa may be, they are much better than any likely alternative. For that, it is Mandela—and the wise and humane people round him—the world still has to thank. ■
Ai toefl
Take a complex issue and pretend it’s simple
Simplistic
Blah blah blah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franska_Skolan
Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malena_Ernman
2009 eurovision
Grandfather
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olof_Thunberg
Volcanoes? Lightning? geothermal?
Nuclear
What can politicians do?
What are the real problems?
Palestinian ambassador
https://twitter.com/hzomlot/status/1711387200804315348
My Lai
Abu Ghraib
https://stuartwiffin.substack.com/p/seymour-hersh-and-the-pipeline
Bbc hijackers 9 11
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1559151.stm
Diaries primary sources
Orwell
Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
Rules of war
tedtalk
Nuclear https://stuartwiffin.substack.com/p/nuclear-power
Biden jackie
https://twitter.com/charliespiering/status/1575136322389409792?s=20&t=quihb6CXSHgnUXJZLF0ODQ
Zen and the art of archery decision and action simultaneous shoot and aim, all one action,
Tennis
Practise- you find you can’t do it, swim, stop trying, just do it, your decision, your will is not part of the process
Sachs oil nordstream
https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1577012718783016960?s=20&t=quihb6CXSHgnUXJZLF0ODQ
Paintings
https://twitter.com/culturaltutor/status/1577745696933003284?s=20&t=quihb6CXSHgnUXJZLF0ODQ
“The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable"...In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.”
― George Orwell, Essays
“...men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.”
― George Orwell, A Collection of Essays
“To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.”
― George Orwell, Essays
“If you hate violence and don't believe in politics, the only major remedy remaining is education.”
― George Orwell, A Collection of Essays
Climate change
https://twitter.com/JunkScience/status/1587426231934386176?s=20&t=quihb6CXSHgnUXJZLF0ODQ
Feynman definitions
https://twitter.com/ProfFeynman/status/1575330760617492480?s=20&t=quihb6CXSHgnUXJZLF0ODQ
Greta nuclear
https://x.com/GretaThunberg/status/1544380486654590983?s=20
See netflix slideshow
How do we show those values?
Oded Galor, Professor of Economics at Brown University, discussed his latest book, “The Journey of Humanity, The Origins of Wealth and Inequality”. The author gave a video interview in which he revealed having tried to resolve two of the most fundamental human mysteries : the mystery of growth, with the uncanny rise of our living standards, and the mystery of inequality, mostly between nations. The latter will only be resolved if policy makers invest their efforts in “flexible education, gender equality, diversity, tolerance, and a future oriented mindset”, values strongly shared by Sciences Po.
Never been cold
Heating central air people 5 4?
https://twitter.com/lastcontrarian/status/1607051448831062019?s=20&t=El4oLR1FXwTTQbiSarzKEg
Warm mugs
https://twitter.com/taylor_jrj2012/status/1607064280696000512?s=20&t=El4oLR1FXwTTQbiSarzKEg
Carbon trading
https://stuartwiffin.substack.com/p/carbon-trading?s=r
1 m destitute
https://x.com/ProfTimBale/status/1716691216262164798?s=20
Power grid gates etc Lomborg
Ex
Kerry money
https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/status/1615696510326284288?s=20&t=3q4s6s82sn4xC2qXQyjCYA
WEF
https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1615698122453438468?s=20&t=3q4s6s82sn4xC2qXQyjCYA
Maggots john forney zacharias civil war
https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0dm7mrn/why-maggots-are-a-medical-marvel
Leeches
https://www.theleechclinic.com/faqs/
Population decline
https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1615739979400970240?s=20&t=3q4s6s82sn4xC2qXQyjCYA
Bostrom
On 9th January 2023, Nick Bostrom posted this apology for an email he sent on the Extropians listserv in the 90s. On 11th January 2023, Anders Sandberg linked to it on Bostrom's behalf in this twitter thread.
I recommend you read those first as I don't summarise or explain the contents below.
Speed is of the essence- panic
To limit the freedom of the individual in the name of the wellbeing of the collective.
Martin Luther King Jr said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Rebecca Solnit
In 2014, Haymarket Books published Men Explain Things to Me, a collection of short essays on feminism, including one on the phenomenon of "mansplaining." Men Explain Things to Me has been translated into many languages,
Responsibility and obligation are dismal words in mainstream culture, so perhaps there will be other stories that recognise this process as reciprocity and relationship, in which we give back, in gratitude and respect for all the Earth does for us. Even short of that, we can recognise our self-interest in maintaining the system on which life depends.
Fortunately, as the climate movement has diversified, one new organisation, Clean Creatives, focuses specifically on pressuring advertising and PR agencies to stop doing the industry’s dirty work. Likewise, climate journalists are exposing how fossil fuel money is funding pseudo-environmental opposition to offshore wind turbines.
As the climate activist and oil policy analyst Antonia Juhasz recently told me, the climate movement is now going after every aspect of the fossil fuel industry, including funding by banks and, via the divestment movement, shares held by investors; donations to politicians; insurers; permits for extraction; transport; refinement; emissions, notably through lawsuits concerning their impact; shutting coal-fired power plants; and pushing for a rapid transition to electrification
For example, I see people excoriate the mining, principally for lithium and cobalt, that will be an inevitable part of building renewables – turbines, batteries, solar panels, electric machinery – apparently oblivious to the far vaster scale and impact of fossil fuel mining. If you’re concerned about mining on indigenous land, about local impacts or labour conditions, I give you the biggest mining operations ever undertaken: for oil, gas, and coal, and the hungry machines that must constantly consume them.
Extracting material that will be burned up creates the incessant cycle of consumption on which the fossil fuel industry has grown fabulously rich. It creates climate chaos as well as destruction and contamination at every stage of the process. Globally, burning fossil fuels kills almost 9 million people annually, a death toll larger than any recent war. But that death toll is largely invisible for lack of compelling stories about it.
We have the solutions we need in solar and wind; we just need to build them out and make the transition, fast. Looking to wildly ineffectual carbon sequestration and other undeveloped technologies as a relevant solution is like ignoring the lifeboats at hand in the hope that fancy new ones are coming when the ship is sinking and speed is of the essence.
if we can’t win everything, then we lose everything. There are so many doom-soaked stories out there – about how civilisation, humanity, even life itself, are scheduled to die out. This apocalyptic thinking is due to another narrative failure: the inability to imagine a world different than the one we currently inhabit.
While I often hear people casually assert that our world is doomed, no reputable scientist makes such claims.
A climate story we urgently need is one that exposes who is actually responsible for climate chaos. It’s been popular to say that we are all responsible, but Oxfam reports that over the past 25 years, the carbon impact of the top 1% of the wealthiest human beings was twice that of the bottom 50%, so responsibility for the impact and the capacity to make change is currently distributed very unevenly.
By saying “we are all responsible”, we avoid the fact that the global majority of us don’t need to change much, but a minority needs to change a lot.
Last year, the veteran environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote a brilliant analysis pointing out that if you have money in one of the banks funding fossil fuels – especially, in the US, Wells Fargo, Chase, Citi, and Bank of America – your retirement funds or savings account may have a much larger climate footprint than you do. The impact of your diet and how you get to work may pale in comparison to the impact of your money in the bank. The vegan on the bicycle may still be contributing to climate chaos if her life savings are in a bank lending her money to the fossil fuel industry.
Individual impact, leaving the ultra-wealthy aside, matters mostly in the aggregate. And in aggregate we can change that. On 21 March, McKibben, via his new climate group Third Act (on whose advisory board I sit), and dozens of other climate groups will be organising actions by people with money in, or credit cards from, the key US banks, to try to force those institutions to stop funding fossil fuels. Our greatest power lies in our roles as citizens, not consumers, when we can band together to collectively change how our world works.
You ban the insecticide DDT, and a lot of bird species stop dying out. You ban chlorofluorocarbons, and the hole in the ozone layer stops growing.
Who is the world's richest woman? After the death of reigning richest woman on earth L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt last week, the answer wasn't immediately clear.
But Bloomberg has declared that Bettencourt's only daughter, Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, is now officially the world's richest woman, ahead of Alice Walton, the Walmart heiress. Bloomberg puts Bettencourt Meyers' net worth at $42 billion, compared to $37.7 billion for Walton.
TorontoLLB writes:
The most straightforward counterexample I can think of is the NBC manipulation of the George Zimmerman 911 call.
For example this:
"The 9-1-1 operator then asked: "OK, and this guy, is he black, white or Hispanic?", and Zimmerman answered, "He looks black."
was changed to: ""This guy looks like he's up to no good. He looks black."
In another segment they combined completely separate parts of the call to create an audio clip that presents him as saying ""This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something. He's got his hand in his waistband, and he's a black male."
There was other bits of reporting from the major networks that appear to be closer to fraud than selective amplification or choosing what not to report. Enough so that in Twitter threads asking people how they got "red-pilled" person after person refers to the media response to the incident.
I haven’t looked into this and I can’t confirm or deny that this is true.
I hope everyone finds at least one of these comments obviously fair, and at least another obviously unfair, in a way that encourages you to think more about these issues.
too.
— John Buridan writes:
I used to have very low priors against conspiracy theories and so was willing to hear out the arguments at length and go back and forth for many weeks and months on a single theory. I would say my conspiracy theory expertise is in creationism and government conspiracies, especially ones involving either Catholicism or Judaism. And I'm okay on one's involving fluoridation, chemtrails, and GMOs etc.
One of my housemates was a senior when I was a freshman in college gave me the Adobe illustrator birth certificate shtick, and we went through it together. We downloaded the birth certificate, uploaded it to Adobe illustrator, and saw the weird things.
Then I went back to my day job where I was learning Adobe Illustrator. This is maybe 2 weeks later. And what do I find but that when I do this with any PDF, Illustrator renders it in the same janky way? Conspiracy dissolved.
I grew up surrounded by people who believed conspiracy theories, although none of those people were my parents. And I have to say that the fact that so few people know other people who believe conspiracy theories kind of bothers me. It's like their epistemic immune system has never really been at risk of infection. If your mind hasn't been very sick at least sometimes, how can you be sure you've developed decent priors this time?
Of course, this just all goes back to the dark matter beliefs of people in our outgroup. And the eternal question of where do good priors come from? How do some people's beliefs get so messed up?
Thanks for this. I agree that a little bit of experience personally believing conspiracy theories, or knowing people who do, goes a long way. When I was a teenager, I flirted with a lot of pseudoarchaeology theories - think Graham Hancock, underwater pyramids, that kind of thing. I got better, but it left me with a visceral understanding of how people can genuinely believe weird things - not be lying about it, not be secretly making some kind of emotional point about how they hate the system, not be deliberately trying to be as sloppy as possible because you’re a bad person - just genuinely believe it because you tried to reason about it and failed. I think if you haven’t had that experience, then it’s really hard to understand people who have.
all of these are different things:
Reasoning well, and getting things right
Reasoning well, but getting things wrong because the world is complicated and you got unlucky.
Reasoning badly, because you are dumb.
Reasoning badly, because you are biased, and on some more-or-less subconscious level not even trying to reason well.
Reasoning well, having a clear model of the world in your mind, but more-or-less subconsciously and unthinkingly presenting technically true facts in a deceptive way that leaves other people confused, without ever technically lying.
Reasoning well, having a clear model of the world in your mind, but very consciously, and with full knowledge of what you’re doing, presenting technically true facts in a deceptive way intended to make other people confused, without ever technically lying.
Reasoning well, having a clear model of the world in your mind, and literally lying and making up false facts to deceive other people.
In a perfect world, we would have separate words for all of these. In our own world, to save time and energy we usually apply a few pre-existing words to all of them.
I prefer to reserve lying for 7 and the most egregious cases of 6, and to have a pretty high standard for accusing people of this rather than 2/3/4/5. I explain why I don’t want to call 4/5 lying here. I prefer a high rather than a low bar for accusing people of 6/7 as an empirical matter - I almost always see people erring in the direction of accusing people too quickly, rather than too slowly. This is my experience as a writer who personally gets accused of this a lot, but also of watching other people debate - see some of the examples above; hopefully you find at least a few of them unfair. I don’t think it’s especially dangerous or burdensome to make people say “that reporter was inexcusably stupid and misleading when he got those inflation statistics wrong” rather than “that reporter lied by presenting the inflation statistics the wrong way” if you don’t have that strong an argument that it was intentional.
Regardless of any of this, the point I’m trying to make with these posts is that the media, while doing all of 1 through 6 pretty often, very rarely does 7.
alexander
Conspiracies There’s a list of scientific mavericks who were ridiculed by hidebound reactionaries but later vindicated that’s been going viral. I examined the first ten mavericks on the list to see if its claims held up. Overall I wasn’t too impressed. Let me go over them in more detail.
SVANTE ARRHENIUS: continues
Nutrition I previously focused on defend the good parts, but
Yes, Cordelia Fine is still around and is still writing books arguing against gender differences. But she’s starting to sound really defensive, basically the literary equivalent of “I know I’m going to be downvoted to hell for this, but…”. Meanwhile, other scientists are doing a good job pointing out the flaws in her books and conducting studies like this biggest-ever look at male vs. female brain differences, this magisterial look at personality differences, et cetera – not to mention great and widely-accepted work on how intersex people take on more characteristics of their hormonal than their social gender (honestly, we should probably thank transgender people for making this field socially acceptable again). People talk a lot about how Larry Summers was fired from Harvard for talking about male vs. female differences, but Steven Pinker did a whole debate on this and remains a Harvard professor.
genetic psychological differences between population groups are less bold and maverick-y than their proponents like to think. The relevant surveys I know trying to elicit scientific consensus (1, 2, 3) all find that, when asked anonymously, most scientists think these differences explain about 25% – 50% of variance.
The prologue of the first edition of The Nurture Assumption is Judith Rich Harris telling her “maverick genius kept down by hidebound reactionaries” story. But the prologue of the second edition is her being much more hopeful:
This kind of thing naturally made me assume that nobody had any idea what was actually in IQ tests and scientists were idiots.
But more recently I’ve been reading actual surveys, which find that about 97% of expert psychologists and 85% of applied psychologists agree that IQ tests measure cognitive ability “reasonably well”. And 77% of expert psychologists and 63% of applied psychologists agree IQ tests are culture-fair (with slightly different numbers depending on how you ask the question, but always about 50% of both groups).
I can still flatter myself by saying that it’s no small achievement to recognize a new paradigm early and bet on the winning horse.
My history of trying to fight scientific consensus has been a Man Who Was Thursday-esque series of embarassments as I find again and again that my supposed enemy agrees with me and is even better at what I am trying to do than I am.
Comments For example, internet access. As late as 2014, 1 in 5 American households did not have regular internet access. So if you want to stick to the assertion that “shared environment has no significant effects on personality or life outcomes” you would have to conclude that the internet has no significant effects on personality or life outcomes. This in spite of all of the social changes in the past few decades that sure looked like they were caused by the internet.
Equity equality
https://twitter.com/sullydish/status/1626005543532781568?s=20
Apology
https://twitter.com/steevqj/status/1626008027164811265?s=20
Musk
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1626097497109311495?s=20
Corporate media ???
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1625951319755460608?s=20
Blooms taxonomy
https://twitter.com/LearningToan/status/1625940644186161152?s=20
Age of congress
https://twitter.com/WaltHickey/status/1569827673760845826?s=20&t=quihb6CXSHgnUXJZLF0ODQ
Hitchens quote
https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/1602332450478333952?s=20&t=quihb6CXSHgnUXJZLF0ODQ
What makes a good fair country
Wealth
Many of the world’s most lucrative businesses fall into one of three categories: 1) market speculation, which is how the likes of Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway make their money; 2) attention-mining and advertising like Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook); and making premium goods as LVMH, Tesla, and the world’s biggest company, Apple do.
Luxury companies might be noticing a spending slowdown among the 80% of their customers who are “nearly affluent,” said [Milton] Pedraza of the Luxury Institute. But he said those consumers typically account for about 30% of sales.
Instead, he said luxury brands often count on just 20% of its clientele − the ultra-wealthy and very wealthy — for the majority of their sales. And since that cadre is far more inflation and recession-resistant, luxury companies tend to experience a slowdown last, he said.
Since 1976, the top 10% of Americans have increased their income by 163%, adjusted for inflation, compared to 61% for the middle class.
A classic example of this is Henry Ford’s Model T. Ford kept his car simple, and it was the first automobile that was affordable for the middle class — it cost $260 in 1924, about $4,500 in today’s money. Ford paid his workers an unprecedented $5 a day so that they could afford a Model T, too. Much of the growth of the golden age of the American economy, between World War II and the 1970s, came from companies following the Ford model — they paid their workers well to produce goods that those workers could afford to buy.
It’s not just that an economy increasingly based on catering to the wealthy is economically bad; it’s morally wrong, too. It’s just gross for companies to be laser-focused on making the affluent a little more comfortable while people all over the country — and the world — are struggling. It gives off real fall-of-Rome vibes, with the wealthy cosseted in luxury, ignoring the plight of the masses who serve their every need. And it’s worth mentioning that economic inequality is a pretty reliable driver of social upheaval and revolution.
Back in the Sixties and Seventies, French philosophers such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault were fond of saying that an understanding of an author’s biography or intentions are largely irrelevant to artistic appreciation. This may be patent nonsense when it comes to novels, but it surely works for pop songs — probably because they aren’t art at all and were never supposed to be.
Apparently not satisfied with the daily grind of making apocalyptically tasteless outfits look superhot for Instagram, she has also been commissioning articles for her newsletter on the Russian kleptocracy, compiling lists of which art museums to visit in Japan, enthusing about her favourite novels, and learning Spanish so she can discuss the symbolism in Almodóvar films with the director himself. Other podcast guests have included Nobel Peace prize winner Nadia Murad on sexual slavery, Monica Lewinsky on social media influence, Russell Brand on himself, and film-maker Greta Gerwig, who at one point in her interview reads out a lengthy quotation from Joan Didion. In short, Dua Lipa is a very dark horse.
er family are from Kosovo, and originally Muslim. One of her grandfathers was the Head of the Kosovo Institute of History (improbably pictured here having lunch in the Sixties with the future grandfather of another dazzling British-Albanian pop sensation, Rita Ora). Lipa herself was born in London in 1995 after her parents moved there fleeing the war, but by 2008 and following Kosovan independence they moved back to Albania.
Women football
ACL
rational!
(https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/)
What other bubbles do I live in? A quick look over my Facebook and some SSC survey results finds that my friends are about twenty times more likely to be transgender than the general population. There are about twice as many Asians but less than half as many African-Americans. Rates of depression, OCD, and autism are sky-high; rates of drug addiction and alcoholism are very low. Programmers are overrepresented at about ten times the Bay Area average. I didn’t intend any of these bubbles. For example, I’ve never done any programming myself, I’m not interested in it, and I try my best to avoid programmer-heavy places where I know all the conversations are going to be programming-related. Hasn’t helped. And I’m about as cisgender as can be, I have several Problematic opinions, and I still can’t keep track of which gender all of my various friends are on a month-to-month basis. Part of it is probably class-, race-, and location-based
In my life, I have never been catcalled, inappropriately hit on, body-shamed, unwantedly touched in a sexual way, discouraged from a male-dominated field, told I couldn’t do something because it was a boy thing, or suffered from many other experiences that have traditionally served as examples as ways that women are less privileged. I have also never been shamed for not following gender norms (e.g. doing a bunch of math/science/CS stuff); instead I get encouraged and told that I’m a role model. I’ve never had problems going around wearing no make-up, a t-shirt, and cargo pants; but on the rare occasion that I do wear make-up / wear a dress, that’s completely socially acceptable
To here
These people don’t just show up in my inbox. Some of them write articles on Slate, Medium, even The New Yorker, discussing not just how they’ve never experienced discrimination, but how much anger and backlash they’ve received when they try to explain this to everyone else. And all of them acknowledge that they know other people whose experiences seem to be the direct opposite.
I used to think this was pretty much just luck of the draw – some people will end up with nice people at great companies, other people will end up with bigots at terrible companies. I no longer think this explains everybody. Take that New Yorker article, by a black person who grew up in the South and says she was never discriminated against even once. I assume in her childhood she met thousands of different white Southerners; that’s a pretty big lucky streak for none of them at all to be racists, especially when you consider all the people who report daily or near-daily harassment. Likewise, when you study computer science in college and then work in half a dozen tech companies over the space of decades and never encounter one sexist, that’s quite the record. Surely something else must be going on here.
To return to a common theme: nothing makes sense except in light of inter-individual variation. Variation in people’s internal experience. Variation in people’s basic beliefs and assumptions. Variation in level of abstract thought. And to all of this I would add a variation in our experience of other people. Some of us are convinced, with reason, that humankind is basically good. Others start the day the same way Marcus Aurelius did:
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they cannot tell good from evil.
Notice this distinction, this way in which geographic neighbors can live in different worlds, and other people’s thoughts and behaviors get a little more comprehensible.
Pelosi chip
https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1549620175795679232?s=20&t=FXpLpFWRjssMzi1HpnbG8g
Cfc
https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1549713211188027394?s=20&t=FXpLpFWRjssMzi1HpnbG8g
Jane goodall over pop
https://twitter.com/TheRealKeean/status/1549855822578159617?s=20&t=FXpLpFWRjssMzi1HpnbG8g
Romer and and world bank
Migration
https://twitter.com/Larryferlazzo/status/1551055928232816640?s=20&t=FXpLpFWRjssMzi1HpnbG8g
Unherd To carry on in the same stereotyped vein, if you are a woman, you are even less likely to be murdered. Of the 695 people murdered in England and Wales in the year to March 2020, 506 of them were men. And for the specific issue of murders on the street, by strangers — the fear we’re dealing with — the disparity is greater still: 154 men were murdered by strangers, and just 23 women.
All this is true. But that doesn’t mean that the streets feel safe for women.
The first trouble is that we bump up against the law of large numbers. Imagine that the average woman walks past 200 men in a day. I expect working women in large cities see much more than that, in non-pandemic times, but others who are at home or who live in small communities see far fewer, so perhaps that number’s about right. In a year, that’s 73,000 encounters; in a decade, 730,000. Even if only a tiny fraction of men are dangerous or threatening, women will occasionally encounter them.
Heuristics
http://paulgraham.com/say.html
The type of number that often surfaces in discussions about gender equality:
77%–the overall ratio at the Bank of women’s wages to men’s
The surprising number from a new working paper by Jishnu Das, Clement Jobert, (both from DECRG) and Sander Florian Tordoir (from HR):
96%–the ratio of women’s wages to men’s among staff who entered the Bank at grade GF and have worked here for 15 years
http://wb-ce.org/
Moderates
http://paulgraham.com/mod.html
http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html
Boom forest
https://twitter.com/C_Najdovski/status/1488948140728369153?s=20&t=El4oLR1FXwTTQbiSarzKEg
Miyawaki
https://twitter.com/chelseagreen/status/1525498672120668162?s=20&t=El4oLR1FXwTTQbiSarzKEg
https://twitter.com/shubzsharma/status/1531209145461768192?s=20&t=El4oLR1FXwTTQbiSarzKEg
https://twitter.com/afforestt/status/1466404657526280193?s=20&t=El4oLR1FXwTTQbiSarzKEg
Carbon
https://twitter.com/TheophanesRex/status/1533825490494099457?s=20&t=El4oLR1FXwTTQbiSarzKEg
Afforesti
https://twitter.com/SonyBBCEarth/status/1526540536240218113?s=20&t=El4oLR1FXwTTQbiSarzKEg
On Tue, Mar 16, 2021 athttps://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/04/seth_roberts_is.html
On Feynman
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001559
Nearby
Stanford: Wednesday, December 8
Edward Tufte on Beautiful Evidence (and more Stanford: December 8)
Stanford: Thursday, December 9
Home: Life and Love
New York City: Winter Vacation
Stanford: Fuzzier Heads Prevail
Oh dear
https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2013/may/21/classroom-disruption-top-tips
Yara Eid have died have been killed
https://x.com/ShaykhSulaiman/status/1715871994460156401?s=20
Greta on Avengers
https://x.com/GretaThunberg/status/1393974674867036164?s=20
Greta school
Ted
00 to 2.17
Almost everything is on a spectrum, almost nothing is binary
Lessing good bad
https://x.com/TEDTalks/status/1423735628827566081?s=20
Greta Thurnberg: the climate crisis has already been solved. We already have the facts and solutions. All we have to do is wake up and change
Nor that air pollution is hiding a warming so that when we stop burning fossil fuels, we already have an extra level of warming perhaps as high as 0.5 to 1.1 degrees Celsius. Furthermore does hardly anyone speak about the fact that we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, with up to 200 species going extinct every single day, that the extinction rate today is between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than what is seen as normal. Nor does hardly anyone ever speak about the aspect of equity or climate justice, clearly stated everywhere in the Paris Agreement, which is absolutely necessary to make it work on a global scale. That means that rich countries need to get down to zero emissions within 6 to 12 years, with today's emission speed. And that is so that people in poorer countries can have a chance to heighten their standard of living by building some of the infrastructure that we have already built, such as roads, schools, hospitals, clean drinking water, electricity, and so on.
Today, we use 100 million barrels of oil every single day. There are no politics to change that. There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground. So we can't save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
10:44
Everything needs to change -- and it has to start today.
Chair
Greta v regulators
https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1587576705165586432?s=20
Belling cat
https://x.com/bellingcat/status/1716379273357877489?s=20
Chronic pain
https://x.com/TheEconomist/status/1716386643769197033?s=20
Sc po post photo
False videos
https://x.com/Never_Again2020/status/1715302038366474264?s=20
Amera
20/10
Voltaire
Speaker: Voltaire
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Voltaire never actually said or wrote this. It comes from a 1906 biography, The Friends of Voltaire, that was written by an English writer named Beatrice Evelyn Hall.
“in this country it is considered useful now and again to shoot an admiral, to encourage the others” (dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres).
“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
― Mark Twain
Feynman in hell
https://x.com/CMbrengkun39367/status/1715255246824620538?s=20
Quantum
https://www.nobelprize.org/educational-nobel-prize-lessons-physics-2022/
The mood here is one of political shock and disorientation after a referendum on whether to create a group representing Aboriginals was rejected by 61 per cent of voters. The Yes campaign outspent No by five to one. It had sports stars, companies and the whole establishment on its side, yet still lost every Australian state. Stunned, it blames its defeat on racism, ignorance, misinformation and general black magic. How, otherwise, could No have prevailed?
Normally, the machinations of Australian politics would not have much read-across to Britain but, on this issue, politics down under is moving ahead of ours. Australia has just had the world’s first referendum on identity politics, a creed so established among its elites that Anthony Albanese, the prime minister, wanted it embedded in the constitution. Rather than all voters being equal, Aboriginals would be given a special (but undefined) “Voice” heard by parliament. It was pitched as a battle between compassion and cruelty.
It was an Aboriginal politician, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who led the No campaign. No one, she said, could explain how “the Voice” would actually work – or help. Australia is not racist, it’s the greatest country in the world and made so by belief in equality, she said. Aboriginals differ, speak 300 languages and middle-class ones are doing very well. Why treat them all as one? Surely that’s the real racism. The true divide in Australia, she said, is between the wealthy and the marginalised – of all colours.
To watch Price speak is a masterclass in how to respond to identity politics. Her tone is not an angry “war on
woke” but humorous and optimistic, emphasising social cohesion.
When challenged about the “intergenerational trauma” of the Aboriginals, she responded that, being of mixed race, she suffers double trauma: her white ancestors had been deported in chains from Wales and dumped in a penal colony on the other side of the world. So it all evens out.
In fact, she said, colonisation has benefited Aboriginals.
The reaction to her final point was almost as furious as that when Kemi Badenoch said Britain was the best country in the world to be black.
Michael Moore
Hitchens on Israel
https://x.com/michaelshermer/status/1713715212518588594?s=20
8.30
Tone covert Jewish hand
Egg surgery
https://x.com/gunsnrosesgirl3/status/1714239740390605114?s=20
Refugee camps
https://x.com/tomaspueyo/status/1714228591129456787?s=20
Stupid americans?
https://x.com/robbystarbuck/status/1713720108961415522?s=20
No one on duty
https://x.com/wideawake_media/status/1710974236423037197?s=20
Rockets no response
https://x.com/manifestdreamin/status/1711081789781897516?s=20
Gaza
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/04/09/473514419/the-view-of-gaza-on-24-7-video
Apple spoof
Magic spoon ad
To 1.15
Magic spoon info
https://magicspoon.com/
Aaron ? to 2.10
aaron first 2 minutes
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/spurious-correlations
https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/staff_statements/staff_statement_1.pdf
Four of the hijackers’ passports have survived in whole or in part. Two were recovered from the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. One belonged to a hijacker on American Airlines Flight 11. A passerby picked it up and gave it to an NYPD detective shortly before the World Trade Center towers collapsed. A fourth Staff Statement No. 1 2 passport was recovered from luggage that did not make it from a Portland flight to Boston onto the connecting flight, which was American Airlines Flight 11. In addition to these four, some digital copies of the hijackers’ passports were recovered in post-9/11 operations. Two of the passports that have survived, those of Satam al Suqami and Abdul Aziz al Omari, were clearly doctored.
https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/staff_statements/staff_statement_1.pdf
The plume spread evidence across blocks-wide areas of the plaza and surrounding area. It included building, plane, and even human debris from the plane striking the WTC at high elevation. This is all clearly reported and accounted for, and if you look at the clear videos of the impact of the second plane, you can see how this would have happened.
The error is not that it happened (as one answer doubts, when he might have just looked it up), but in thinking there is anything unusual about it.
As late as 2013, debris from one of the planes was found three blocks from the WTC.
It was wedged in a narrow, inaccessible space between two buildings, about three blocks from the World Trade Center site. And there it remained, hidden from view, for more than 11 years. Ground zero slowly gave way to a new tower. Protesters gathered nearby, angry over a planned Islamic center.
But this week, land surveyors happened upon it — a piece of a plane’s landing gear, apparently belonging to one of the two jets that slammed into the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, the police said.
11 Years Later, Debris From Plane Is Found Near Ground Zero (Published 2013)