0thgen

I'm curious if those pushing the "it's the bad guys keeping everything bad!" model actually believe it, or if it's just a narrative that helps people vent about their political frustrations.

And who knows, their model could be correct. But the unwillingness to consider "tradeoffs" makes me think it's just political angst and not a serious take

none of what you just said would be a plausible explanation for the persistence of poverty, economic instability, environmental degradation, drug addiction, chronic disease, etc etc

I'd bet even the authors of the 2 books you've hinted at wouldn't even make that claim. I'm sure they would see many of the problems listed as systems-level issues

"There are big players that deliberately created many of those problems"

Could you specify which ones? I'm curious who's profiting from hunger, poverty, economic instability, and unemployment -- and thereby perpetuating it (sounds like major speculation).

Maybe war gets propagated by nations military industries (though that's probably only sometimes true). The remaining problems listed (environmental damage, drug addiction, chronic disease) seems like second order consequences of other pursuits, not problems perpetuated for their own sake.

Whether they're first or second order consequences might seem like a semantics debate, but it's what distinguishes your model (problems are deliberate) from Donella Meadows model (externalities, collective action, structural issues, etc). And both models suggest very different solutions (police bad actors versus change structures/incentives)

though I heard the data on this is starting to shift

Interestingly though, he seems to use AI and LLMs interchangeably.

AI risk != LLMs; the latter just happened to be so impressive that they shocked us into worrying more about the former.

Which is arguably a good thing: humanity beginning preparations for a dangerous tool before the actual dangerous part has even happened

a gun is a glorified slingshot. that makes them _not dangerous_ I guess

it feels like jupyter without all the extra baggage

Ive found polars quite intuitive, though for python, I lean more towards [ibis](https://ibis-project.org/). The interface is nearly identical, but ibis has the benefit if building sql queries before pulling any actual data (like dbplyr) — whereas polars requires the data to be in-memory (at least for rdb’s, though correct me if Im wrong)

this to me seems like a good argument for only using ibis, but Im happy to be convinced otherwise

Well said. "The picture is more complex than this strawman" is being framed as "we need a new paradigm!".

I'm curious what motivates this. It's not like progress in genetic research and technology has stalled (see: crispr, IVF screening, GMOs, etc).

And I don't see how moving from "genetic determinism" to "environmental determinism" is any less depressing / defeatist. World politics suggests we have about as little control over our environment than our genetics

I think Scott Alexander's [recent post on genetic causes of schizophrenia](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/its-fair-to-describe-schizo...) is an important piece here.

Basic summary is: just because there are environmental / other factors doesn't mean it's incorrect to say that gene's cause schizophrenia. In other worse, finding additional causal variables doesn't negate the causal impact of existing causal variables.

It seems people think that, if we just focus more on Kuhn's "revolutionary science" instead of incremental, "normal science", we'll get more paradigm-shifting theories.

It could just be that paradigm-shifting breakthroughs are exponentially harder to find, and that it's not just a matter of "we just didn't look hard enough"

This is a crucial point to make. Even if every natural phenomenon can be reduced to very early-level processes (e.g., physics), earlier levels of analysis have little predictive value at later levels of analysis.

Does anyone have a term for this from philosophy of science literature?

Very well said. And this is partly why psychology researchers have to be so careful in (1) the claims they make, and (2) deciding what counts as a scientific contribution or career point.

But to be fair, multiple studies have suggested (for benchmark psychology experiments) a replication rate of less that 50% (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.231240).

I think the quality of psychology research is actually a bimodal distribution. In one mode, you have solid, replicable, serious science. In the other mode (like the priming studies), 90% trash might actually be a generous estimate

I think it would be nicer if the tool worked in reverse; that is, rather than making a markdown string inside a python script, just run the python from markdown (similar to the approach r-markdown takes).

Then, the part where you do "Gui(page=my_page).run()" just becomes a build script that happens in the background, rather than requiring the coder to have a bunch of isolated markdown snippets throughout their code

I honestly found it pretty intuitive. Every module uses the same basic action-flow, which was super clever UI design on the creator's part

Well written, interesting article overall, but saying "Reveals True Origins" isn't the best way to communicate scientific research (too strong)

well I think there's a natural hierarchy that emerges from the examples given in the periodic table link.

Spatial: line graphs, scatterplots, and even barplots and pie charts(1-dimensional space). Id throw spectogram and anything with time in there as well.

Geographic: maps (this could be a subset of spatial)

Graphical: graphs, mind-maps, flow charts, all the other graphs-like charts from the examples

Visual Metaphors: those weird examples of they give of steps and a bridge, a slide, etc

Those 4 categories alone capture all the examples from the webpage, and there are plenty of subcategories within them.

So to me a hierarchy / tree seems like a good choice, which is essentially a directed graph (like you suggested)

I wonder if a "tree" would be a better visualization methods for visualization methods

Sure, but that would still make it bad, right? I may be a hypocrite (for argument's sake), but that doesn't change whether being steeped in ideology is a bad thing.

Would you agree? Or do you think being steeped in ideology leads to more rational decision making? (independent of whether ideology is needed for social mobilization)

Id agree with you here. I didn't offer any substantial criticism or engage with the articles points. I'm just throwing shade at articles with intense ideology-jargon, which isn't the best thing to do.

However, do you think ideological language is a predictor of a valid, fact-based take on an issue, or the opposite? I'd be hard pressed to say "more ideology -> more empirical validity", but maybe they're orthogonal

Makes sense. And the extent to which human communication is embedded with latent assertions of power is an empirical question, which seems more a question for science than philosophy

agreed

I think the iffy reasoning your committing here is the anthropomorphization of complex systems. Similar to the error of describing darwinian evolution as having a "goal"

We should probably describe economic systems as massively complex distributed interactions rather than thinking of them as organisms with monolithic intentions and goals

It's probably good for a lot of things, but clearly has drawbacks everyone intuitively agrees on (no one would want medical doctors to democratically seek advice from their patients, at least not on complex decisions like which medication to take)

The "10% less democracy" concept (https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=28088) is interesting here, and frames the question as "when and how much" as opposed to "democracy or no-democracy"

In a college poetry class, I learned that literary analysis isn't about being "right" (what did the author actually intend to say?), but instead, being "interesting" (what's a cool way of framing this?). Any subjective interpretation is valid if it's thought-provoking.

I think that is the mental framework with ideology-saturated economic opinion pieces like this one. I don't think they care about being right. Instead, the goal is to make cool, edgy, story-book-good-vs-evil narratives independent of empirical validity ("any subjective interpretation is valid if it's thought-provoking")

That's a good argument. I'd concede this is a potential risk / concern that we'd want to mitigate in the long term

On top of that, the "average" payout to artists feels less important to me than the "median" artist payout.

In other words, are there now more artists making money than before, even if the big hitters are making less off album sales? That matters a lot

That's an empirical question: do small independent artists make more or less via the streaming model than they do via "buy CDs in shops" model?

I don't know the answer, but I'm a bit skeptical of the idea that small artists were making a better living via local CD shops (with limited inventory and zero economic incentive to push smaller, unknown artists).

This is a great point. In addition, Spotify creates a much more distributed market for artists. I've found literally thousands of small independent artists that I would have never found through the filter of CD shops and record labels. Their service is curation, and it helps everyone (consumers and artists) -- except the record labels who lose market control.

I eyeroll every time I see someone here say "all the consumers are stupid because they don't behave exactly like I want them to behave, and I must be the right one"