Chathamization

That's the impression I have. I remember a little over a decade ago when the population at large was completely hyped about all of the world changing technology we were going to see coming from the moonshots at Google X. The excitement over Google Glass, the mystery over the Google barges. Eventually, people started wondering when these hyped up products in development were going to actually become products[1]. Not it seems people have forgotten about it in general, and the exciting stuff is likely to come from other companies.

I don't see people commenting on this a lot when they lament the former Google. There seems to be a lot of personal reasons why people prefer how the company used to be run - it was fun, we spent lots of time on side projects, the company had free stuff all over the place, it felt like a fun college and not a job, etc. But little reflection on how productive the company was being.

I do wonder sometimes if a Jobs (or maybe an Altman or Musk) is more valuable than people realize. People like to say, "But those people don't even create anything, they're just taking credit for other people's work!" But just letting smart people gather and work on pet projects doesn't seem to work particularly well either. Maybe having a headstrong product oriented person upstairs is useful/necessary.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/technology/they-promised-...

Whenever I see people jump to alignment they invariably have jumped over the _much_more questionable assumption that AGI’s will be godlike. This doesn’t even match what we observe in reality - drop a human into the middle of a jungle, and it doesn’t simply become a god just because it has an intelligence that’s orders of magnitude greater than the animals around it. In fact, most people wouldn’t even survive.

Further, our success as a species doesn’t come from lone geniuses, but from large organizations that are able to harness the capabilities of thousands/millions of individual intelligences. Assuming an AGI that’s better than an individual human is going to automatically be better than millions of humans - and so much better that it’s godlike - is disconnected from what we see in reality.

It actually seems to be a reflection of the LessWrong crowd, who (in my experience) greatly overemphasize the role of lone geniuses and end up struggling when it comes social aspects of our society.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that while, conspiracy theorist tend to both greatly exaggerate what actually happened, and use things that we have evidence of to push wild conspiracies we have no evidence of.

Let me give an example I just found. Because of this post, I looked at the Wikipedia page for MK Ultra and found this line:

> The people under this interrogation were CIA employees, U.S. military personnel, and agents suspected of working for the other side in the Cold War. Long-term debilitation and several deaths resulted from this.

Thought that was an interesting claim, so I checked the source - footnote 36 - which was Rappoport, J. (1995). "CIA Experiments With Mind Control on Children". Perceptions Magazine, p. 56. It took me a while to track that source down, but I found some pages that had it such as this one[1]:

It claims that there was a vast effort to create children sleeper CIA agents in the U.S. to control America. The evidence is based on “recovered memories,” which is a defunct technique that in the 80’s lead to conspiracies about a nationwide underground Satanic movement that was secretly controlling the U.S. Those theories, this Rappaport article, and even some comments here all lean heavily on Operation Paperclip, with the implication that the scientists the U.S. brought over post-WWII created a secret Nazi movement within our own government.

Looking at Rappaport’s website is interesting too. He believes the “Covid shots were kill shots” and that January 6 was a staged false flag event.

That’s enough time spent on crazy for me today. It takes a ton of time to track down each of these individual sources like this. Honestly, it’s exhausting, and too many people think that some evidence of wrong doing decades ago is an invitation to shut down critical thought and open the door for all sorts of craziness.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20070608225401/http://www.totse.c... [2] https://nomorefakenews.com/

Roughly the area of the Bronze Age Collapse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse#/medi...

Roughly the area of the Dark Ages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period#/media/File:I...

If anything, the area of the Dark Ages looks to be larger than that of the Bronze Age Collapse. But either way, they're both referring to events that happened within a specific geographic area.

You seem to be confused. The Bronze Age Collapse refers to events mostly centered in the Eastern Mediterranean, even though there were impacts elsewhere. The Dark Ages refers to events mostly centered in the Western Mediterranean as well as Western Europe, even though there were impacts elsewhere.

> It saddens me greatly if it's all been whitewashed down to "Dark Ages wrongspeak, Early Middle Ages rightspeak" and "Middle Ages backwards, Renaissance forwards" today because that is so grossly worthless.

It always is alarming how often you see people say "smart people don't say X anymore, smart people say Y now," and a large segment of people jumps on board without any critical thought. It's not that criticism of the term is entirely without merit, but such criticism could be applied to all simplistic labels for historical epochs. Yet you don't see people take such issue with terms like "Bronze Age Collapse," because these comments aren't coming from a consistent intellectual framework, but rather from people mindlessly repeating a shibboleth.

Exactly. Having general skepticism is admirable. Having selective skepticism isn't.

> In cities where space is at a premium, a bunch of people standing, or on a bicycle, will always beat out people sitting down with room for an engine and a trunk.

It depends. For example, you can theoretically fit more people into crowded bike lanes than you can into crowded streets. But around here at least, bike lanes don't get a lot of people. I lived by one for years that I don't think I ever saw a bicycle on once. But even when not in use, all of that space is still being set aside for cyclists.

Yeah, if a huge chunk of DARPA's budget was spent sending people to climb mountains "Because it's there," people wouldn't be happy. The NASA budget for aeronautics is 1/8th the budget devoted to sending people into space "because it's there." Yet the aeronautics research is much more likely to have an actual positive impact on people's lives.

r/AskHistorians has some very good posts, but it also has a good deal of misinformation, even coming from flaired users. The big problem with it is that the user base and the mods tend to believe that it's accuracy is better than it actually is (and comments from the mods seem to encourage this overestimation). I've seen many people who believe that if a flaired user on r/AskHistorians says something, then it's true (there seems to be a lot of people like that on the aptly named r/badhistory sub, for example).

In addition, their yearly April Fools' events (a bad idea in my view) as well the generally poor quality of posts during the first few years makes searching for past answers a pain. You get a ton of information that's flat out wrong, and in the case of April Fools' events the wrong information was actually encouraged (or written) by mods.

In my experience, professors will generally exaggerate the usefulness of the classes they teach. I'm curious as to what things from IR you found useful and what actions it lead you to? I've seen many IR grads who went into it hoping to do some sort of international work or business, only to find that businesses didn't find what they were taught particularly valuable (and the people I met who were sent overseas for business usually didn't have an IR background). Many who that I saw who went into the State Department ended up doing low-level grunt work that was completely detached from the kind of things IR focuses on (and the ambassadors are often wealthy donors with no IR experience who receive the position as a political favor).

Also, many of the things that were covered in IR classes weren't just useless, but more often than not turned out to be entirely detached from reality. For instance, focusing on things like Thomas Huntington vs. Thomas Friedman (neither of who seem to have had a great track record or understanding of the world).

> International relations is an actual subject area. It's true that we don't need that many diplomats

In my experience "International Relations" classes teach very little that's actually valuable. I think there's a common in mistake in thinking at because X is important, then university classes about X are useful. There are a lot of subjects that are important but where the study of it in academia (at least at the undergraduate level, but I suspect higher up as well) isn't handled well at all.

I think the mistake that a lot of people make, however, is thinking that this is merely a humanities vs. STEM issue. There also seems to be a lot (though perhaps not quite as much) useless classes in the STEM fields as well.

Worst of all, I've seen very little interest in academia (both STEM and the humanities) in whether or not their way of teaching is effective - its simply assumed to be, and that's the end of the discussion much of the time. It's claimed that academia fosters critical thinking, but there often seems to be a dearth of critical thinking from those who are within it.

This always seemed like an odd conspiracy theory to me. It supposes that the U.S. is one the one hand so cavalier about dropping atom bombs that they're willing to destroy Japanese cities merely as a show of force to a potential rival, but on the other hand that they're so reserved about using it that they wouldn't use it to gain victory against the country they're engaged in a destructive war with.

I'd say yes. Do you think the ideas that came from the Manhattan Project didn't exceed that of the best individual involved?

Or for a more extreme example - consider the totality of human civilization as an example of groups of humans working together. People like Einstein and Hawking wouldn't have been able to have had the ideas they did if they were dropped in 20,000 BC. The knowledge we have now isn't simply the work of individual animals with extraordinary thoughts, it's the result of large groups of these animals working together.

Now certainly the benefits in corporate R&D labs don't come anywhere close, but I find it hard to believe that they simply drop to zero.

> In the sense that a corporation's maximum intelligence is likely to be in the same ballpark as the smartest humans, it can't be seen as a true superintelligence.

In what sense? Certainly the ability of large groups of people to research and create new technology exceed the ability of a single individual. The R&D capabilities of a large corporation are going to vastly exceed that of a lone hermit in the woods.

> Does anyone look at the present moment and conclude that we have an over-abundance of humble, empathetic, well-trained and effectively communicating leaders?

Yet do we have a dearth of leaders with experience in the humanities? Just doing a quick look at the current politcal leadership, and Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi both have a degree in political science. Trump has a degree in economics, but Obama and George W. Bush both majored in the humanities. [Edit: I thought I'd take a look at the past three vice-presidents as well - Pence, Biden, and Cheney all majored in the humanities.]

Saying that these qualities are important is fine, but one has to consider whether or not the current way that academia teaches the humanities is a good way to instill them in people. If something doesn't achieve its goal, then it doesn't matter how lofty said goal is.

I'm constantly impressed by how articles like these claim that studying the humanities will give people a better way to question things and think critically about the world around them, but then fail to do so themselves.

One thing that people need to keep in mind as well is that people who are obsessively online are going to have a much greater presence than those who have a more balanced life, and people who are more judicious about there output are going to have much less of a presence than people who throw out content without any thought.

A lot of people assume that online content is representative of the majority of the community, when it's likely representative of a very small but very active minority that very well might be mentally unstable. The 1% rule of internet culture is well known, but there's evidence that things are even more skewed than that[1].

It's likely that the design of much of the current web ends up greatly amplifying the voices of some of the most unhealthy people in the community, to the point where they end up driving the discourse.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

This a good example of misleading data. For instance, the school district budget doesn't appear because it's part of the budget for LA County not LA City. But If you look at it[1] and adjust per capita, you actually get almost twice the budget as the police. It also leaves out that a very large part of these budgets are pensions.

But beyond that, I've always felt that the attitude of "this is a lot of money, therefore we should cut it" to be a poor way of approaching things. We should allocate funds based on whether or not the return we get is worth it, not based on whether or not the number we invest sounds big. Cutting specific things that are unnecessary or saving money by making things more efficient seem like a good idea, but cutting budgets just to say that you're cutting budgets doesn't.

[1] https://achieve.lausd.net/cms/lib/CA01000043/Centricity/Doma...

Well, that's a bit of a strawman. There are very few people who think we shouldn't spend any money on blue sky research. It's more of a question of how much we should spend, which blue sky research we should fund, and how those projects are set up. There are neuroscientists who are critical of the Human Brain Project, not because they're against funding of neuroscience in general, but because they don't think this particular project isn't well designed. There are people that are supportive of a lot of the work NASA does, but don't think human space flight specifically is a good use of their budget.

I've wondered that as well. I've always liked the smell of durian (as well as its taste), and have met others that do as well. Others seem to really hate it. I've always assumed that the vast majority of people hate the smell, but I'm actually not so sure now that I think about it. It might just be that the people who hate it are very vocal about it.

> University is a place where teachers and students who are interested in a field meet to learn and research together.

It would be nice to have places like this open to the general public and not gated off like universities are. There are a lot of people who become interested in these things after university, people who didn't attend university that are interested in them, who were interested and involved in these things while they were in university but then drifted away from them, etc.

It seems like we'd be better off trying to encourage the public at large to continually improve (and also connect more with their community and improve civil society) than acting like all of this should only exist in a 4 year window that many people aren't even a part of.

> Of course colleges do all these things already

That's an important thing to keep in mind. Particularly with the more elite schools, the goal isn't to educate as many people as possible, but to keep their inflated prestige through artificial scarcity. The Harvard Extension School is a great example of this - they have tens of thousands of students and advertise themselves as giving students a true Harvard education taught by Harvard educators, but the students aren't "official" Harvard graduates because the institution wants to keep that number artificially low and selective.

edX is another good example - sure, we'll give you the opportunity to learn these things, we'll even offer to assess you and give you a certificate, but we're not going to use technology to really open up the education system.

These institutions will pay lip service towards increasing underrepresented demographics (including racial and economic), but they're never going to embrace truly substantive solutions because they desperately want to keep the education credentials scarce.

Indeed, productivity growth is actually lower than in the past, so we're actually in a phase of slower automation. I think one thing that doesn't get considered enough is the viewpoint that we're currently in a post-automation revolution world. We generated a lot of excess capacity and weren't able to funnel it to productive uses, hence the rise of many things we see discussed here like "bullshit jobs," excessive administration, zero-sum industries, parasitic industries getting people to buy things they don't need, etc. My guess is that increases in automation won't eliminate jobs but will just further exacerbate these issues, unless there are some sort of societal changes.

We get a bit sidetracked by terminology here - if we suddenly called a college a technical school, would it suddenly be fine to remove the humanities from the curriculum? One of the big problems when we discuss these things is that there's so much inertia stemming from our preconceived notions of what a college is. It stops us from examining what are actual goals are, and if what we're doing is effective in achieving them.

I don't think the early comment that humanities is approached better as a hobby is necessarily wrong. It's quite possible that other approaches, like the Chautauqua movement, would be much more effective (my personal experience suggests it would).

> Even today, there is a place for learning things that don't have a direct economic impact, as part of becoming an educated person.

Sure, but we shouldn't assume that college is the appropriate place to do so or that the way colleges teach the humanities is effective. If your supermarket forced you to do aerobic exercises before entering, I'm not sure a good justification for it would be "well, aerobic exercise is good for you and not everything is about buying food."

Sure, as a society we do some things purely for emotional reasons. But we should be honest about that - we shouldn't pretend that the reason we're building the Washington monument is because of it's potential use as a grain silo.

There's a lot more to exploration than space exploration (I think exploring something like the human brain will end up having a greater emotional and practical impact myself). But even if we just look at space exploration, we don't really get a lot from human space flight. As I said, in situations where it's possible to use human astronauts, robots seem like they would be more effective. And for most of the places in our solar system, we simply won't be able to use humans at all anytime soon. The missions to, say, Europa are going to be done by robots.

Still, many people, including myself, enjoyed watching the launch. Maybe something like this is more analagous to a cathedral or memorial.

> A human astronaut could probably accomplish as much in a week as a Mars rover can in a year.

The estimates I've seen for a human mission to Mars are about 100-500 times the budget for Curiosity. So even if astronauts could accomplish things 52X faster (and I'm skeptical they would), it still wouldn't be as cost efficient. And that's even before you factor in the fact that the Mars Rover is going to be doing work on Mars much, much longer than a human mission would (Curiosity is going on 8 years).

Human space exploration is a solution in search of a problem. People don't seem to be rationally looking for the best way to get certain information from Mars or for the best sources of materials that could be obtained with future technology (there are many overlooked terrestrial ones) and soberly deciding that astronauts are the best answer. They seem to start out with the goal of defending human space exploration, and then searching for problems to try to justify it.

I agree. I think many people are thinking the main obstacle here is the mathematical mistake, when the main obstacle here seems to be explaining the mathematical mistake to 4th graders who are learning fractions for the first time. I'm also not sure what the best way to do that would be. If you start with one type of fraction (say, half circles), it's probably easier to intuit things like 5 halves and how much that is, but other things are probably going to be more difficult.

So yes, telling kids that there are more complications when approaching certain problems that you can explain later might be a good approach.

I agree. Forums and old school personal web sites were much better for quality content than blogs or social media. Things went in the direction of mental junk food, focusing on getting a lot of new content as quick as possible.

The publish or perish nature of blogs is one of the many reasons why I feel they're generally inferior to the personal web pages that were popular during the early web. It seems that there has been a general trend towards a constant churning of output in order to keep up the dopamine hits for users. The quality of a lot of online content reflects this.