The Rains, They Are Dropping

Your Intelligent, Conscientious In-group Has Bad Social Norms Too

On certain forms of misery I notice among my peers

sashachapin.substack.com|Sasha Chapin

Generally, toxic social norms don’t develop intentionally, nobody wants them to happen, they’re not written down, and nobody enforces them explicitly. (The intentional development of toxic social norms is otherwise known as founding a cult.) What happens is that there are positive social norms, like, “talking about epistemics and being curious about beliefs is cool,” or “try to be intentional about the positive impact you can have on the world.” These norms are great! But then, the group acts like a group, which is to say, people confer status depending on level of apparent adherence to values. This leads insecure people who completely depend on the group to over-identify with the set of values, to the extent that even slightly contrary actions become forbidden. Not forbidden in the like “we’ll arrest you” way, but in the like “everyone in the room immediately looks at you like you’re being rude if you talk about spirituality” way. 

And then the second, more sinister stage occurs—the point at which these toxic norms are internalized such that they apply to you when you’re in a room alone. As Wittgenstein noted, it’s hard to tell where aesthetics end and ethics begin; it can start to feel unethical, like, dirty, to perform behaviors your peers would think distasteful. Toxic norms eventually pervade completely, to the point where you don’t even want to think bad thoughts. 

Sometimes—often—these forbidden thoughts/actions aren’t even contrary to the explicit values. They just don’t fit in with the implied group aesthetic, which is often a much stricter, more menacing guideline, all the more so because it’s a collective unwritten fiction. “Rationality is cool” becomes “rationality is the best framework” becomes “Rationalist and Rationalist-flavored stuff is a better use of your time than anything else” becomes “it’s uncool if you want to spend a lot of time doing stuff that has nothing to do with testable beliefs, or our favorite issues.” This is all unintentional and implicit. No Rationalist has ever said, to my knowledge, that you shouldn’t write poetry, but a few Rationalists have told me that they feel like they shouldn’t make weird art because it’s dumb and un-Rationalist to do so—they feel they ought to produce useful thoughts instead, even though their hearts are trying to steer them somewhere else. I point out to them that Scott Alexander wrote a fantasy novel for fun, but somehow this isn’t persuasive enough.

The point of origin of Harlan Ellison as science fiction’s very own enfant terrible can be traced back to the episode of Star Trek he wrote in 1966. “The City on the Edge of Forever” is often called the best single episode of the entire original series, but to Ellison it was and forever remained an abomination in its broadcast form. As you may remember, it’s a time-travel story, in which Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are cast back into the Great Depression on Earth, where Kirk falls in love with a beautiful social worker and peace activist, only to learn that he has to let her die in a traffic accident in order to prevent her pacifism from infecting the body politic to such an extent that the Nazis are able to win World War II. As good as the produced version of the episode is, Ellison insisted until his death that the undoctored script he first submitted was far, far better — and it must be acknowledged that at least some of the people who worked on Star Trek agreed with him. In a contemporaneous memo, producer Bob Justman lamented that, following several rounds of editing and rewriting, “there is hardly anything left of the beauty and mystery that was inherent in the screenplay as Harlan originally wrote it.” For his part, Ellison blamed Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry loudly and repeatedly for “taking a chainsaw” to his script. In a fit of pique, he submitted his undoctored script for a 1967 Writers Guild Award. When it won, he literally danced on the table in front of Roddenberry inside the banquet hall, waving his trophy in his face. Dorothy Fontana, the writer who had been assigned the unenviable task of changing Ellison’s script to fit with the series’s budget and its established characters, was so cowed by his antics that for 30 years she dared not tell him she had done so.

Ellison attended Ohio State University for 18 months (1951–53) before being expelled. He said the expulsion was for hitting a professor who had denigrated his writing ability, and over the next 20 or so years he sent that professor a copy of every story that he published.

Collections: Archery, Distance and ‘Kiting’

This week, we’re going to look at how the effectiveness of arrow fire – especially against armored targets – varies over distance. This is, in a sense, a continuation of my previo…

acoup.blog

At short range – 20m or so – [...] the most powerful longbow is very likely to defeat everything short of a 1.5mm steel plate with padding. [...] Our combined close-range volley is very dangerous to anyone who isn’t wearing well-made and thick plate armor. [...] At medium range – 100m – things are a bit different. [...] well-armored foot soldiers – wearing something like a brigandine over mail, for instance – can advance with some confidence. [...] At long range – 200m – [...] enemies in mail can consider themselves quite safe. [...] the lethality drop-off [...] [is] even more severe for crossbows, which [...] decelerate much faster once fired [...]

actual archers seem to have almost never fired at their maximum range. [...] the existence of the longbow, with its considerable reach, did not drive other missile weapons from the battlefield. [...] if the longbow had rendered crossbowmen next to useless, one assumes the French would stop using them. They did not, despite the crossbow’s lesser range, rate of fire and only small advantage in penetration ability [...] 

maximum range was not only not all important, it was almost unimportant. [...] While the longbow could out-range a period crossbow, it did so at relatively low lethality, so the crossbowmen (given the protection of some armor, or a shield) might confidently expect to be able to walk the range distance and begin firing. This, of course, happened at Crecy – the French-employed Genoese crossbowmen were able to reach range and begin (and lose) an archery duel with the English [...]

Compounding this concern is ammunition. [...] firing endurance – both of the archer and his ammunition – was a real concern. A longbowman might very well spend all of his ammunition – or the strength of his arms – in just a few minutes. Wasting that window of fire on very ineffective long-range ‘plinking’ would have been extremely foolish.

Instead, the evidence strongly suggests that even English longbowmen held their fire until considerably closer distances. I do not know that anyone has nailed down the exact zone precisely (the evidence seems insufficient to support a whole lot of precision) but it seems to be somewhere around 80-100m [....] This, in turn, neatly fits into the distance where arrow lethality against armor begins increasing rapidly as longbow arrows begin reliably penetrating mail (remember that even for plate-armored knights, some vulnerable areas like the armpits, neck or groin might still only have mail protection).

Crabs helping each other out of the bucket

www.michaelashcroft.org

When you put a load of crabs in a bucket together, any crab near the top that tries to escape the bucket is pulled back into the bucket by the other crabs. This is known as crab mentality. [...] The image is compelling because it’s something we see frequently in day to day life. 

[...] But what if we lived in a world where the crabs helped each other out of the bucket? What would that be like? [...] I sometimes find myself reflecting on how I might behave to help the other crabs out of the bucket. Here are three things I’ve settled on as being good things.

First, I reward earnestness with validation, support and my own earnestness. Earnestness is a precious expression of our authentic selves, the person we are when we’re not trying to be anyone in particular. I believe we are at our best when we are in that mode, so I want to see a world that encourages this.

Second, I support people on their creative journeys. When someone is taking their first tentative steps into making something that I might like or pursuing an independent life, I lean towards giving them money for that thing. Where possible I tend to give generously, should it feel appropriate to do so. By doing this I am not only helping this particular crab out of the bucket, but improving their capacity to do the same for other crabs down the line.

And finally, for this note anyway, I try to connect people who share this perspective to each other. I’m not great at this at the moment as it’s not a longstanding habit, but I’m getting better and better at it. If there is a community of people, or crabs, that have a culture of helping each other out, then each new member of that community increases the capacity of that community to effect change and help more people, or crabs.

We’ll never reach a perfect utopia, and that’s probably a good thing, but we can create a cultural pressure that creates ever larger communities that are nourishing, earnest and trusting. And all it takes is for each of us, individually, to make choices, over and over, to help the other crabs out of the bucket rather than to pull them back into it.

How factories were made safe - LessWrong

Angelo Guira was just sixteen years old when he began working in the steel factory. He was a “trough boy,” and his job was to stand at one end of the trough where red-hot steel pipes were dropped. Every time a pipe fell, he pulled a lever that dumped the pipe onto a cooling bed. He was a small lad, and at first they hesitated to take him, but after a year on the job the foreman acknowledged he was the best boy they’d had. Until one day when Angelo was just a little too slow—or perhaps the welder was a little too quick—and a second pipe came out of the furnace before he had dropped the first. The one pipe struck the other, and sent it right through Angelo’s body, killing him. If only he had been standing up, out of the way, instead of sitting down—which the day foreman told him was dangerous, but the night foreman allowed. If only they had installed the guard plate before the accident, instead of after. If only. Angelo was not the only casualty of the steel mills of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania that year. In the twelve months from July 1906 through June 1907, ten in total were killed by the operation of rolls. Twenty-two were killed by hot metal explosions. Five were asphyxiated by furnace gas. Thirty-one fatalities were attributed to the operation of the railroad at the steel yards, and forty-two to the operation of cranes. Twenty-four men fell from a height, or into a pit. Eight died from electric shock. In all, there were 195 casualties in the steel mills in those twelve months, and these were just a portion of the total of 526 deaths from work accidents. In addition, there were 509 other accidents that sent men to the hospital, at least 76 of which resulted in serious, permanent injury. Work-Accidents and the Law, 1910In 1907, according to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the overall fatality rate in the iron and steel industry was about 220 per 100,000 full-time workers. By 2019, however, that rate had fallen to only 26.3 per 100,000, a reductio

www.lesswrong.com

In the twelve months from July 1906 through June 1907, ten [workers at the steel mills of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania] in total were killed by the operation of rolls. Twenty-two were killed by hot metal explosions. Five were asphyxiated by furnace gas. Thirty-one fatalities were attributed to the operation of the railroad at the steel yards, and forty-two to the operation of cranes. Twenty-four men fell from a height, or into a pit. Eight died from electric shock. In all, there were 195 casualties in the steel mills in those twelve months, and these were just a portion of the total of 526 deaths from work accidents. [...]

The root cause of high injury rates was a wrong fundamental attitude towards safety—one shared by both workers and management. Specifically, each individual worker was seen as responsible for his own safety. No one considered it the job of management to provide a safe working environment.

In part, this was a holdover from the previous mode of craft production. Craftsmen were used to managing themselves and taking responsibility for their own safety. This made sense in a shop where workers used hand tools, but not in an industrial factory, where one worker’s actions could endanger others. Fatal accidents happened, for instance, when someone started up a machine not knowing that a repairman was working on it, or when a worker started a car along the rails not realizing that someone was underneath it. [...] 

... the key reform turned out to be a fundamental change in the liability law: the creation of “workmen’s compensation.” [...] rather than any attempt at a determination of responsibility, the employer is simply always liable (except in cases of willful misconduct). If an injury occurs on the job, the employer owes the worker a payment based on the injury, according to a fixed schedule. [...] 

 The price to a company of a fatal accident was raised from hundreds to a few thousand dollars, and insurance premiums increased in many cases as much as fivefold. Moreover, the no-fault nature of the system shifted companies’ focus from fighting liability, in the case of lawsuits, to preventing injuries. This shift is exactly what needed to happen. With this new focus and new financial incentive, companies began to set up safety departments, staffed by engineers.

There is a powerful effect to making a goal into someone’s full-time job: it becomes their identity. Safety engineering became its own subdiscipline, and these engineers saw it as their professional duty to reduce injury rates. They bristled at the suggestion that accidents were largely unavoidable, coming to suspect the opposite: that almost all accidents were avoidable, given the right tools, environment, and training.

McDonald’s Workers in Denmark Won Good Pay and Benefits Through Striking

In Denmark, McDonald’s workers receive $22 per hour and 6 weeks of vacation. But it’s not because Danish capitalists are more enlightened — it’s because, when McDonald’s entered the country in the 1980s, unions launched mass strikes and boycotts.

www.jacobinmag.com

Every few months, a prominent person or publication points out that McDonald’s workers in Denmark receive $22 per hour, six weeks of vacation, and sick pay. This compensation comes on top of the general slate of social benefits in Denmark, which includes child allowances, health care, childcare, paid leave, retirement, and education through college, among other things.

In these discussions, relatively little is said about how this all came to be. [...] McDonald’s opened its first store in Denmark in 1981. [...] When McDonald’s arrived in Denmark, the labor market was governed by a set of sectoral labor agreements that established the wages and conditions for all the workers in a given sector. Under the prevailing norms, McDonald’s should have adhered to the hotel and restaurant union agreement. But they didn’t have to do so, legally speaking. [...]

McDonald’s decided not to follow the union agreement and thus set up its own pay levels and work rules instead. [...] In late 1988 and early 1989, the unions decided enough was enough and called sympathy strikes in adjacent industries in order to cripple the company’s operations. Sixteen different sector unions participated in the sympathy strikes.

Dockworkers refused to unload containers that had McDonald’s equipment in them. Printers refused to supply printed materials to the stores, such as menus and cups. Construction workers refused to build McDonald’s stores and even stopped construction on a store that was already in progress but not yet complete. The typographers’ union refused to place McDonald’s advertisements in publications, which eliminated the company’s print advertisement presence. Truckers refused to deliver food and beer to McDonald’s. Food and beverage workers that worked at facilities that prepared food for the stores refused to work on McDonald’s products.

Once the sympathy strikes got going, McDonald’s folded pretty quickly [...] This is why McDonalds workers in Denmark are paid $22 per hour.

[...] If you didn’t know better, you’d think the Nordic labor market is the way it is because all of the employers and workers came together and agreed that their system is better for everyone. And while it’s true of course that, on a day-to-day basis, labor relations in the countries are peaceful, lurking behind that peace is often a credible threat that the unions will crush an employer that steps out of line, not just by striking at one site or at one company, but by striking every single thing that the company touches.

Xi Jinping’s War on Spontaneous Order

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published a letter I wrote to their editor in response to Kevin Rudd’s exposition on Xi Jinping’s “Common Prosperity” campaign:

scholars-stage.org

The essential challenge facing any observer analyzing [China's crackdown on some industries] is this: what accounts for the target list? What do K-pop fan groups, after school tutoring companies, Meituan delivery men, online algorithms, plastic surgeons, overheated housing markets, celebrity ranking lists, and tech monopolies have in common? [...] 

Xi Jinping is not reigning in capitalism writ large; Beijing is not scrapping market mechanisms altogether. Semiconductor foundries, agricultural conglomerates, and Christmas light factories (to choose three examples of hundreds) have been untouched by Xi’s ‘common prosperity’ agenda. It is a very select slice of Chinese capitalism that is being “reigned in.” [...]

Each [crackdown] targets an industry that seems to strip people of their agency and rob them of their dignity. Each seems to hijack healthy behavior with a set of short term incentives whose end results are self destructive and degrading.

This is how Chinese have been describing these industries themselves. I was interested to see one crackdown explainer state that the after school tutoring industry was “guǒ xié-ing our people.” Guǒ xié (裹挟) means to coerce or compel a behavior or attitude; it carries with the imagery of being swept away by a natural force, like the wind or a riptide. It is an apt metaphor for an industry that urban Chinese hate to pay for yet feel like they cannot opt out of. One does not wish to waste a child’s youth away on 18 hours of evening cram school a week, but to do otherwise is to risk falling behind. It is a classic arms race problem: no player can stop the game from the inside, even though all players would benefit from a cap on the game. An outside force is needed to halt the madness. Xi Jinping has decided to be that force.

Very similar rhetoric has been used to describe the cultural crackdowns (as on video games or online fan clubs). [...] Under this framework, the popularity of video games, celebrity rankings, K-pop forums and the like are an unnatural social contagion. The instant gratification provided by their consumption hijacks healthy development and produces disgusting excess. [...] But the video game developers, executives, and admen are only doing what they are incentivized to do. Within the system there is nothing to stop these conglomerates from enmeshing their citizens even further in addiction. An outside force is needed to halt the madness. Xi Jinping has decided to be that force.

Shoulder Advisors 101 - LessWrong

Motivation for post: As a former CFAR instructor, longtime teacher, and rationalist pundit, I find myself giving lots of advice in lots of different contexts. I also try to check in from time to time to find out which bits of advice actually proved helpful to people. Over the years, I've heard from a genuinely surprising number of people that my (offhand, very basic, not especially insightful) thoughts on "shoulder advisors" were quite useful to them, and remained useful over time. So: a primer. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "There's a copy of me inside your head?" Hermione asked. "Of course there is!" Harry said. The boy suddenly looked a bit more vulnerable. "You mean there isn't a copy of me living in your head?" There was, she realized; and not only that, it talked in Harry's exact voice. "It's rather unnerving now that I think about it," said Hermione. "I do have a copy of you living in my head. It's talking to me right now using your voice, arguing how this is perfectly normal." "Good," Harry said seriously. "I mean, I don't see how people could be friends without that." The term "shoulder advisor" comes from the cartoon trope of a character attempting to make a decision while a tiny angel whispers in one ear and a tiny devil whispers in the other. Many people have multiple shoulder advisors. Some, no doubt, carry a literal metaphorical angel and devil around with them. Others may sometimes hear the whispers of some of their favorite beloved fictional characters. It's quite common in my experience for people to have shoulder copies of their parents, or their best friends, or their romantic partners, or particularly impactful teachers or bosses or mentors. This is not schizophrenia (though for all I know it may use some of the same hardware, or may be a low-key, non-pathological version of schizophrenia in the same way that a healthy self-preservation instinct could be thought of as a low-key, non-

www.lesswrong.com

The term "shoulder advisor" comes from the cartoon trope of a character attempting to make a decision while a tiny angel whispers in one ear and a tiny devil whispers in the other.

Many people have multiple shoulder advisors.  Some, no doubt, carry a literal metaphorical angel and devil around with them.  Others may sometimes hear the whispers of some of their favorite beloved fictional characters.  It's quite common in my experience for people to have shoulder copies of their parents, or their best friends, or their romantic partners, or particularly impactful teachers or bosses or mentors. [...] 

there is simply some kind of subroutine in the brain of most humans that is capable of taking in training data and learning what a given person (or character, or archetype) would say, in a given situation. [...] good shoulder advisors allow you to be (at least marginally) smarter and more creative than you-by-yourself are capable of being.

I don't have a rigorous or technically valid explanation as to why, but it is a straightforwardly observable fact that, for many people, their shoulder advisors occasionally offer thoughts and insights that the people literally would not have thought of, otherwise.  Novel ideas, useful perspective shifts, apt criticisms of one's own actions or intentions, that sort of thing.  It's generally well-understood that "two heads are better than one," especially in times when one is stuck or uncertain, and shoulder advisors can be genuinely almost as good. [...]

Having the right shoulder advisor "show up" at the right moment can be every bit as impactful as having an actual friend or mentor in the room.  [...] shoulder advisors take up zero space and can be called upon at any hour and can include people you could never actually call upon in real life (such as Master Yoda or President Obama or Dwight K. Shrute or Mister Rogers or any number of Lannisters)