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"A slow sort of country!" said the [Red] Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" -- Alice through the Looking-Glass
THANK YOU! In personal development circles, I hear a lot about the benefits of spirituality, with vague assurances that you don't have to be a theist to be spiritual, but with no pointers in non-woo directions, except possibly meditation. You have unblurred a large area of my mental map.
(Upvoted!)
downvoted for the "affiliate link" rickroll.
(Epistemic status: shitpost)
You know the rules, and so do I
4I am confused. None of these are particularly social-status-improving, or, for that matter, social-status-worsening, because none of them are conspicuous. If you buy a tailored suit or an expensive car or an expensive house, people can see that you own it, and the extravagance signals wealth (or can be interpreted as materialism or lack of prudence); none of the things on the list seem to qualify. What am I missing?
Hm. Now I thought I’d heard of gender dysphoria/transgender/etc showing up in brain imaging (eg. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26766406/) and while “develop like female brains” would be bounding happily ahead of the evidence, that seems at least like sporadic snorting noises from the garage in the night time
(Epistemic status: shitpost)
Plan to uplift Royal Corgi may cause constitutional crisis
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1If Epstein’s thesis is, broadly, “cheap energy from fossil fuels is awesome and climate change isn’t that bad”, weaknesses would be likely to fall somewhere under these, classified in increasing controversy:
- Climate change might be worse than he’s positing. Particularly, climate is a global system we only partly understand, and our error bars for the effects of inadvertently perturbing it may be quite large
- Cheap energy may be obtainable from non-fossil sources. Epstein is keen on nuclear energy (why?), but, as AnthonyC points out, solar & wind are getting surprisingly cheap (for example https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-23/building-new-renewables-cheaper-than-running-fossil-fuel-plants). Obviously that only gives you a bonanza of cheap energy when the wind blows and the sun shines, but “the sometimes-free-energy bonanza will destabilise the grid!” feels a long way from common-sense
- GDP may be possible to decouple from energy use by purely technical means: compare the computation-per-watt-hour of a Pentium with that of an iPad. Compare a Passive-House-standard building with an average building. How far are we from the optimal frontier? There will be, at some point, a limit, because we’re operating with optimal designs and can’t get any better, but we might be quite far from that point - countries with more energy-tight housing often have codes that require that, rather than the market doing it spontaneously? Why is that? Principal-agent problems? “Market for lemons” informational issues?
- GDP may be possible to decouple even further from emissions use via selective lifestyle changes (higher-density cities, more bicycles, fewer automobiles)
- GDP may be argued to be decouple-able from human welfare. Broadly, this is the “degrowth” argument. Critique here, for example (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/people-are-realizing-that-degrowth)
The more dramatic “talk about getting old to people and they’ll walk slower” examples were debunked. The more pedestrian examples, as with word-association, “appear to be well-established” (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.345.6196.523-b), judging by a few minutes’ examination of Wikipedia (which common-sense supports: trying to NON-word-associate, as with certain panel & improv comedy games, is strikingly difficult)
In the meantime, large language models were created by mass-producing epicycles and training them (What if intelligence is an emergent property of large numbers of epicycles in an evolutionary context?). What happens when macroeconomists mass-produce epicycles? You get DGSE models which would take thousands of years of data to train (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.16224.pdf). In the meantime, you can accommodate as many elephants as you wish, and they can wiggle their trunks and flap their ears!
TL;DR: economist erects glasshouse, installs trebuchet