Emma_Goldman

Career thieves wouldn't scour a park for wallets, no, but many people are opportunistic thieves. If they happen upon money with no one in sight, they'll just take it, without thinking it's a big deal.

The case in the article matches the second model, not the first. Hundreds of people realised they were in a library with no staff. Two-hundred books were taken out, presumably without anyone having to log their names. That would have made it extremely easy for them to just keep the books. But they were returned.

Having few opportunistic thieves is, one would think, a good sign of societal trust and well-being.

I'll just mention that security at UK university libraries is fairly tight, I know people who have accidently taken out books without logging them, and just kept them, and there have been cases at Cambridge where quite high-value books have gone missing.

I don't think that's true at all, most people I've come across use it in an off-handed way to express solidarity with victims of police violence, or their general distaste for racialised and/or militarised policing. Full-fledged abolitionism is rare.

I've always hated the phrase 'ACAB', and I say this as someone whose username is Emma Goldman.

It's the institution, and its functional role in society, that's the structural problem. There are many well-intentioned, conscientious individuals in the police force. It is somewhat similar to the question of the attribution of moral blame for unjust wars. It is almost universally recognized that unjust wars are the fault of the aggressor country's leadership, and not the fault of the soldiers who fight them. Those soldiers tend to be poor, subject to indoctrination, and are often simply trying to dutifully help their country. In the same way that I don't think we should try and prosecute every Russian soldier fighting in Ukraine, or every American soldier to fight in Iraq, as war criminals - except for where they violate jus in bello - I don't think we should charge all police with responsibility for the injustices of the institution for which they work. Going back to where I began, Emma Goldman, one of the things I always found most powerful in the anarchist tradition is their belief in the basic goodness of most ordinary people - even when they are caught up in a fundamentally obscene system. I think I find the phrase ACAB grating for precisely that reason.

Click through onto specific posts, and it reads: "Get the app to like, reply and post."

I suppose this is so it can, like Twitter, be shared and embedded elsewhere for reference.

There is no general landing page if you go to threads.net.

I still can't believe it's app-only, that there's no desktop version. I refuse to wall off parts of the internet into silos that I have to enter through downloadable portals.

I have little faith. FB degenerated year after year, in a blazing arc of self-destruction that almost everyone understood was going to kill the app. Yet these user-hostile changes were continually justified internally as 'increasing views and clicks', which must have required an unbelievable degree of institutional obtuseness.

I can already see similarities in Threads, and it's only just begun:

1. Threads is app-only, there is no desktop version.

2. Your feed is populated by algorithmically sourced content, not just the posts of the accounts you follow.

3. You can't delete threads without deleting the Instagram account it's coupled with.

I would also argue:

4. You can't make a threads account without signing up to Instagram.

All four are attempts to increase company metrics, but which are clearly user-hostile, and will ultimately backfire. I actually find (1) to be inexplicably stupid.

I am not confident in this study.

Anyone who has studied in the area knows that there's self-sorting by field, which runs, from most to least conservative: Ethics < political philosophy < political theory. Most 'activist' philosophers are in politics and sociology departments, not philosophy departments. In both cases the tendency runs from the most abstract and rationalist, to the most concrete and political.

The study also begs the question about what is and is not moral. It finds that professional ethicists judge that not keeping in contact with one's mother is less morally reprehensible than do other academics. And, on the strength of this and other, similar judgements, conclude that non-ethicist academics have more stringent moral beliefs. Well - maybe the ethicists are right? Whether greater 'leniency' or 'stringency' is appropriate in any given case is relative to one's ethical beliefs, not a scientific given to be assumed at the outset of the study.

I couldn't agree more. The idea that AI will mean that 'creative people' suffer from a 'total decline in cultural relevancy' is extreme philistinism. Culture is meaning and meaning is human; AI predicts from a training sample, and cannot genuinely create, by its nature.

>"Second, sure the US doesn’t want to lose control of the mostly peaceful, prosperous, and free rules-based order it created after the disastrous first half of the 20th century. And rightly so."

Which has been the justification every hegemonic power has offered when working to undermine a rising power.

Whose rules are they, and who do they benefit? Who has most egregiously exempted themselves from the rules without consequence?

I agree that 'a world dominated by Xi Xinping' would be worse - though it's not clear they have any aspiration to global primacy, like the US did post-WW2 - but that's no reason to peddle myths about American exceptionalism.

I know. I said that in the comments below.

What a bizarre and pointless contortion - this is exactly why I now avoid commenting on the internet.

I said the aeropress combined immersion and high pressure. What is 'high' is obviously relative, as I just qualified.

I did not say the higher the pressure the better, which is obvious enough from the fact I prefer using an aeropress to an espresso machine.

There is. What effect that has is an interesting question.

Aeropress FAQ:

"The AeroPress filter is 2.5 inches in diameter so the area of the filter is 4.9 square inches. If you press down firmly on a scale, it is relatively easy to get the scale up to 25 pounds and then if you press hard on the scale, you can certainly get it up to 50 pounds. Therefore if you press similarly hard on your AeroPress while brewing coffee, the firm pressing will be at 5.1 psi (25 lbs/4.9 sq in) and the harder pressing will be at 10.2 psi (50 lbs/4.9 sq in). Since a bar of pressure is 14.7 psi, the former is .35 bar and the latter is .70 bar."

https://www.aeropress.co.uk/pages/faqs

See also James Hoffman's experiment:

https://youtu.be/jBXm8fCWdo8?t=976

I did think of writing 'relatively high pressure' to pre-empt this pedantry. Higher pressure than just immersion, much lower than espresso. How hard you push modulates the pressure, but any added pressure is more than in a French press or pour over.

I don't see how it's any bother. You have to put the grains and water in with it upside down anyway, so whether you put it onto the mug during or after immersion involves equal effort. In my experience there's some leakage if you just leave it standing for minutes upright.

This is exactly my set up! Although I adopted it as a PhD student precisely to avoid those expensive options in the first place. I've just never found any cause to change since.

Aeropress allows you to combine immersion and high pressure with a £25 device that largely self-cleans, and is small enough to travel with. It makes a smooth, rich-tasting coffee.

With electric grinders you pay for the burr, which is what really matters, and then an electric motor. But if you buy a fairly decent hand grinder like the C2 chestnut, you get a far better burr for the same price, and because of that hand grinding is really easy-going and quick. I enjoy doing it every morning.

There are some coffee enthusiasts that create over-complicated aeropress recipes, but the truth is that it was designed for simplicity. What I've found matters is:

1. Small-to-medium grind size

2. Stand upside down to immerse for longer

3. Use 80-85c water

4. Stir

5. Press gently

Obviously the quality and freshness of the coffee beans matters too, and you can vary the immersion time for the strength of the coffee you want.

In my experience, the time taken to read a book increases super-linearly with its difficulty. A brilliant work of philosophy can take weeks of dedicated study to understand, and in the most extreme cases, entire careers. Mastering a truly difficult book can be very intellectually satisfying, and that is often part of the 'value' you get from the process. The problem is when an increase in difficulty is not matched by a commensurate increase in value, when a text is both difficult and unrewarding, and rather than being satisfied by the labour of understanding, you are repelled by the fact that it came to nil.

I don't really understand what the point of reading a novel slowly is. Some poetry is difficult and rewarding, though I can't say I've ever found any great virtue in purposefully enigmatic prose. In fact, I tend to like novels most when they are graceful, and my eyes can slide across the page with ease. Tolstoy comes to mind.

I am not a fast reader though, so maybe all of my reading is unavoidably 'slow'.

I didn't say nothing would compare for thousands of years. I said it wouldn't be a mere 'footnote'.

WW2 was the deadliest conflict in human history, and involved both the Holocaust and the first - and so far only - military use of nuclear weapons. To say nothing of the fact that it completely reshaped the international order and led directly to the Cold War.

Even if you zoom out and view it, like Eric Hobsbawm, as belonging to a century of warring ideologies much like the wars of religion, it will remain one of the foremost events in world history for a long time. It would take many thousands of years for it to become a 'footnote', assuming the species even lasts that long.

Why are you holding forth on something which you clearly know absolutely nothing about? I say this as someone who thinks that effective altruism is broken.

I think the OP is being unfair to Will and EA, but your statement is pretty outrageous. No one's ever come up with a moral or political philosophy other than utilitarianism - are you serious?

I have followed EA for ten years and there is absolutely no doubt that its most prominent voices - Will MacAskill, Nick Bostrom, Rob Wiblin, Eliezer Yudkowsky, not to mention Sam Bankman-Fried - ascribe enormous significance to AI. I myself have yet to see a compelling argument as to how AGI is possible, let alone dangerous.

If you look at 80,000 hours' list of 'most pressing problems', AI safety is first:

https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/

Open Phil has donated $250m to AI safety according to its website:

https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/potential-risks-advan...

Wow... that is a shocking level of philistinism given his parentage.

His own mum wrote a seemingly well-received book, and Will MacAskill, who he claims is his moral hero, has written three books.

I don't think this means anything. They might just not want any publicity, or to be harassed by malcontented FTX depositors. In the context of the FTX implosion, their LinkedIn profiles are far from harmless.

This is my sense of what happened.

Alameda's bets went bad in the crypto crash earlier in the year. FTX loaned it up to $10bn in customer deposits against trumped-up collateral (its own token). Somehow, Alameda must have lost most of that money, either by using it to cover its liabilities from the crash, or making more bad bets. When it was leaked to Coin Desk that Alameda's balance sheet was padded with FTX tokens, confidence in the token rapidly collapsed. That obliterated the collateral protecting FTX's loans, ripping open a ~$10bn hole in its finances.

Thanks - this is the most succinct summary of the financial nexus leading to FTX's spiral into insolvency that I've seen, and squares with my own understanding. What we don't know is how the chain of cause and effect played out over a timeline. How did Alameda lose $10bn? How long has FTX been insolvent? Surely they have been staring down the end of a barrel for a good while?

I really disagree. I work in academia in Europe, where we are in the ludicrous position of writing articles and books with public funding, which are gifted to publishing companies who then sell it back to the public at extortionate prices. Articles are just pdfs, and copyrighting them and charging subscriptions only big-budget libraries can afford, is as inane as it is anti-democratic.

Exactly. The idea that there is a zero-sum trade-off between pirated books and for-profit books is nonsense. I look through hundreds of books every year - often just skimming the introduction, or most relevant chapter - and if I like them enough, I'll take them out from the library or buy them. I buy more books because of libgen and z-lib, not less.

> His intelligence and breath was clear.

That bad huh? Hehe.

I emailed Chomsky some horribly pompous 'intellectual' questions when I was eighteen. I cringed when I read them years later. But Chomsky answered within a day, giving gentle, thoughtful answers to each of my questions. It was a far kinder response than my email merited. I used to read and watch everything by Chomsky, and one thing that does cut through is his basic human decency.

As someone who has made this trip countless times, London-Edinburgh is sluggish. The UK's only true high-speed network is the Eurostar from London ('HS1'), under the channel.

Paris-Marseilles in 3.5 hours is a better comparator.

Honestly, this just strikes me as typical of the the kind of heavy-handed, bureaucratic box-ticking that now dominates academia.

One of the first things I had to do as a post-doc was complete a 4-page document on whether my chair was comfortable enough.

I have been involved in major EU grant applicants that exceed 100 pages, and consist of excruciatingly obtuse questions as to how our project aligns with their institutional goals and byzantine definition of 'success'.