Is there a valid reason to ban a book? On one hand, I agree there are books which are dangerous. But usually the most dangerous ones are one’s that are more innocuous. I think Catcher in the Rye is dangerous as I have seen grown men misread Holden as a hero to look up to rather than as a flawed mis-socialized man child. On the other hand, I have seen people go too far the other way and say that this book proves that everyone who rejects authority is just a bitter, poorly-socialized man baby. How painfully common these two misreadings provide me reason to ban my children from reading this book outside of my supervision.
However, Catcher in the Rye is banned not primarily for these nuanced misreadings, but instead primarily for its profanity. Meaning if we stripped the profanity out, this dangerous book would likely never have been banned in the first place. When you allow these bureaucratic institutions to ban books, they are not going to Socraticly reason through what should and should not be banned in a rigorous manner. They are going to ban books that vibe against their “sensibilities”.
Given that we do not have philosopher kings making these ban decisions, the least bad option is to not have any ban. Encourage kids to read broadly and get many different perspectives. More importantly, teach them to act as a scouts who should be proud/excited when they find a new opinion other than their own — and even more excited to find an opinion better than their own to adopt — rather than a warrior who is proud that their previous opinion was “right the whole time”. Sometimes your old opinion was proven right by new information, but that should not make you excited/proud. I’m confident that if all children are taught this scout-mindset that solving the intractable problem of banning books “correctly” would be completely unnecessary. Matter of fact, having children build immunity to bad ideas through learning how to be a “good scout” would be strictly better than making little bubble-boys who are safe from bad ideas only because the thin bubble the “philosopher kings” set up for them. The latter bubble makes children’s immune system unprepared for the real world while the scout mindset helps build hyper-capable, curious, and civically engaged adults.
Do you track your daily macros/calories and have you done progressive overload strength training continuously for 5+ years, logging your workouts?
I find most people will usually hyper optimize things like buying supplements and wrist trackers that have little p-size effects before optimizing things like muscle mass and macros/calories that the scientific literature actually says have sizable effect sizes.
You are playing the doors/wheels game naively because you have already overly qualified your definition of what is a door and what is a wheel without realizing it.
Have you considered for example if ball bearings wheels? Are gears and sprockets just notched wheels? Do cabinet doors count as doors? Do windows count as doors? Do microchip logic gates count as doors? What about pet flaps? Heart valves? Etc etc.. One’s definition of wheel/door can not account for these and countless other grey areas while still being useful.
Maybe one can strain oneself to find a definition that works like how people strain themselves to find a definition of sandwich that includes hoagies but disclude hotdogs, or one can just work backwards from one’s crude definitions and misclassify many objects.
Regardless, there is no right answer if there are more doors or more wheels. The question is too vague. Something that may be possible to answer is a more qualified question like “are there more human-sized doors or wheels for human transportation.” But again now the question is not our original question. And even if we were satisfied with just answering this more qualified question, we would have trouble answering it without a lot of money or making bad assumptions like the distributions of doors/wheels in a given house is uniform across all cities/towns/suburbs/houses etc..
Determining whether Europe or the US is more diverse is like asking the question: “are there more doors or wheels in the world?” To answer such a question, you need to over qualify your definition to the point where the final answer is meaningless and thus doesn’t act as a useful premise for any argument. Maybe there exists a perfect definition of diversity that would be useful, but still in this unlikely case, the question would require so much non-existent data that answering it would be exorbitantly expensive.
Respectively, anyone who claims to know if the US or Europe is more diverse is making as fallacious of an argument as someone saying that they know if there exists more doors or wheels in the world. In both examples, they likely over-qualify their definitions. If they somehow aren’t overqualifying their definitions, they certainly do not have the necessary data to back up their claims.
Europeans (and oftentimes Americans themselves) tend to underestimate American diversity.
Even on this AC issue where I would admit that there is less national variance compared to the EU. Yet still, about 90% of the US has AC but there are places like San Francisco where only 50% of buildings have AC. In Berkeley California only 20% of buildings have AC.
Again, on this AC issue I admit has less variance than Europe has, but that builds my point if anything. On other issues Americans can have much more variance than your premise implies. Have you considered the life of an Utah Mormon (who may use food rations in lieu of kitchen furniture) is drastically different than a kid growing up in the Bronx (who may have grew up playing on public outdoor courts and have radical independence since middle school because of the MTA)? Have you compared a rural Appalachian’s lifestyle and culture to that of a SF big tech worker? North New Jersey full of suburban white-collar workers who would have trouble understanding southern New Jersey full of farms who have annual festivities where they compare tractors and catch greased-pigs. I find that even “coastal elites” from SF and NYC — people groups who should be most ideologically/socially aligned due to their shared economic statuses, ability to travel, and many points of cross contamination/communication — don’t fully understand eachother’s drastic ideological and lifestyle philosophical differences very well. Moreover, within just one borough of one city there can be drastic diversity in between its townships: NYC Queens having much more diverse townships than any particular borough in Europe.
Europeans who rely of the premise that America is not diverse I find to be just as dumb as the average American.
From this limited sample, I’d imagine there was a groups of advocates arguing for anti-AC policies, but that this is now shifting with as climate change develops.
Questionable (albeit maybe defensible) degrowth policies are not unheard of in the EU. Most famously is Germany’s move away from nuclear which forced their dependence on Russian natural gas. So there is probably truth that people used to be somewhat anti-AC. But, I’d share your skepticism if there are large groups of people who still believe in anti-AC policies. The article I share would suggest many of these people have updated their priors.
Maybe we can each get assigned an AI government goon to look over our shoulders 24/7. Maybe each neuron in my brain will have their own subagent goon. Each mitochondria gets their own subagent government goon. The government will perfectly model my every move. They will perfectly model the smell of my asparagus piss aroma.
VC companies do not dig into the numbers as you suggest. FTX was able to get away with their fraud for a long time for that very reason. VC companies don’t care if some of their investments are fraudulent as they spread their eggs so thin that it doesn’t matter if any given basket blows up. VC firms stated this to the press outright when FTX blew up.
Also most crypto companies are not good for laundering since the blockchains record that fraud forever and publicly. I could see some specific protocols where that may not be true — like monero or tornado cash — but these projects are not really startups. Most crypto startups pitch their products for enterprise customers and thus would be horrible for laundering money.
Reasonable people could interpret the original comment in many other ways than was probably intended.
I like when people are open minded to people who are closed minded/attacking them. It’s an admirable and difficult trait to attain. But to expect that from others is foolish. Most people can’t stay objective/curious after being punched in the face.
When attacking archetypes of people, there is some responsibility to make clear who you’re attacking and why, even to someone who’s not being hyper-open-minded. At least if you want them to learn from you: which may or may not be your goal. When you attack/signal you’re on the offensive, it is foolish to believe that they won’t knee-jerk attack back and become closed minded at least a little.
Regardless, the “misinterpretation” of the parent comment is actually a plausible interpretation. I suspend my judgement on what the actual “correct” interpretation of the original comment is: there are too many plausible interpretations to deductively decide. But I do know that since they first comment brought up a contentious issue, they should have put more work into crafting their message so there aren’t so many plausible interpretations that are contradictory. Or alternatively, they should have specified more precisely who they were talking about without a shadow of a doubt. That is if the commenter cared to be properly interpreted, but that may not be their goal. There are many reasonable reasons why that wouldn’t be their goal.
I thought I needed something like this a couple months ago, but I instead now use the liminal time to self-reflect or think deeper about my work. I have always valued reflection and encourage others to try it while waiting for your agents.
Imagine if the US’s left argued for no air conditioning: they would be called Stalinists communists and be excommunicated from polite society. Yet the policy is not completely unreasonable (albeit one I wouldn’t want personally, especially since I am skeptical to even the best degrowth policies). It is certainly an opinion which should be allowed within a country’s Overton window.
To make the point further, the article states France’s right wing party advocated for installing air conditioning in schools and hospitals. Again, if a US politician did such a thing, they would be considered a Stalinist communist.
The article shows how US’s Overton window is completely disjoint from France’s. I don’t want to make a false equivalence between these two countries as I think France’s two extremes in this article both seem reasonable and the US’s right wing extreme of “we are going to cancel wind mill construction because they’re ugly” is not.
Some lawyers MSG banned from the stadium tried to sue the venue. these lawyers argued that because MSG was not fully “open to the public” as their liquor licensed required, their liquor licensed should be revoked.
The appellate court ultimately decided that a ticket is a “revocable license” and that while MSG needs to be “open to the public,” they don’t need to provide unrestricted access. Essentially, since night clubs can disallow/allow entrance based on arbitrary (non-protected) reasons — such as dress code, status, celebrity etc — yet night clubs have precedent of being allowed to keep their liquor licenses, using similar reasoning MSG’s bans are permissible. This decision seems reasonable to me; however, I hope the NYC political apparatus does political maneuvering to make MSG implement less Orwellian policies. I do not hold my breath but have residues of hope.
Hard pivot and a hot take in the US of A, but since MSG is arguably a natural monopoly, it would be reasonable for NYC to “nationalize” MSG. NYC already has the expertise managing large and multifaceted infrastructure. The operation’s surplus value going back to NYC residents rather than unlikeable (and rent-seeking) James Dolan seems a politically defensible and attention-grabby position: the latter of which is increasingly important in our low-attention-span world. Lastly, James Dolan could be portrayed as a security threat to NYC constituents due to this facial recognition software: Americans and American economists tend to be more willing to nationalize things for the sake of national security.
I look forward to seeing myself on MSG’s next leaked ministry of truth list (;
Options (a) and (b) add more bloat to the model’s context window and option (c) seem to reduce to having similar functions that already existed. There is also the option to trick the LLM that it’s using the old function exactly as-is, while the harness abstracts away a completely different methodology. Cursor often does exactly this: they use an internally built vectorized search when the model calls the default “find” bash command. The LLM is none the wiser that the function’s implementation is completely different.
Regardless, in any of these cases, the implementation for any of these above options may be vastly superior to the “naive” implementation for agents — but then the parent comment here is right that an engineer would need to justify their implementation to users, not just make a loud conjecture. It’s a non-trivial claim to say that a bespoke solution not present in tool-use training and accounting for context-rot would result in a better performing model. Moreover, justifying an agent-specific efficiency gain that humans wouldn’t benefit from makes the claim even more non-trivial. Using Sagan’s razor, it’s then reasonable for people to ask for a comparably non-trivial amount of evidence.
Conjecturing standards of living is going up is overly reductive. Essential costs — housing, groceries, education, etc — have been going up for most people and hit everyday people the hardest.
There are many more economic distortions that happen from having massive wealth inequality — too many to list in one comment — but the biggest one is that democracy isn’t possible with a certain level of wealth inequality.
In such models where individuals in a market system can influence public/private institutions for their own interest (news organizations, private think tanks, lobbyists, public/private colleges, corporations, charities, nonprofits etc etc) will be able to reroute those institutional resources to gaming elections — which is unavoidable result over the market’s long run, similar to it being impossible to defend one’s currency against speculators over the long run — thus selection pressures force politicians and political institutions to either cater to these wealthy people’s whims and the institutions they control, or to somehow (and very unlikely) bare the selection pressures that are pushing them out of office.
Given the law of large numbers, you’d presume at any point the average legislator would be captured more by these maladaptive selection pressures rather than somehow existing in spite of them.
As democracy is eaten away, we will maintain a slow decay to a Russia-like sultan oligarchic system and the comforts the majority currently maintain will slowly go with them.
However, Catcher in the Rye is banned not primarily for these nuanced misreadings, but instead primarily for its profanity. Meaning if we stripped the profanity out, this dangerous book would likely never have been banned in the first place. When you allow these bureaucratic institutions to ban books, they are not going to Socraticly reason through what should and should not be banned in a rigorous manner. They are going to ban books that vibe against their “sensibilities”.
Given that we do not have philosopher kings making these ban decisions, the least bad option is to not have any ban. Encourage kids to read broadly and get many different perspectives. More importantly, teach them to act as a scouts who should be proud/excited when they find a new opinion other than their own — and even more excited to find an opinion better than their own to adopt — rather than a warrior who is proud that their previous opinion was “right the whole time”. Sometimes your old opinion was proven right by new information, but that should not make you excited/proud. I’m confident that if all children are taught this scout-mindset that solving the intractable problem of banning books “correctly” would be completely unnecessary. Matter of fact, having children build immunity to bad ideas through learning how to be a “good scout” would be strictly better than making little bubble-boys who are safe from bad ideas only because the thin bubble the “philosopher kings” set up for them. The latter bubble makes children’s immune system unprepared for the real world while the scout mindset helps build hyper-capable, curious, and civically engaged adults.