A Troll on Karl Johan Street

There's a class of skills where I am decent-but-not great at the skill, and it seems if I want a better result, there is a clear way for me, personally, to achieve it, and that's being more meticulous and paying attention to detail.

But there are skills within this set — portrait drawing, making predictions — where I usually care less about being able to achieve a better result with increased effort, and more about improving the low-effort version of the skill.

And it's frustrating to me that I can't figure out a clear way to do that.

@winged-light wrote:

@youzicha wrote:

@kata4a wrote:

In my hreart of hearts, I know this is the correct answer. But my limited experience suggests that in order to develop enough proficiency that those skills become second nature and transfer, you actually have to do the meticulous version of the task *a lot* and *often*. Like much more so than the amount it takes to get better at the meticulous version of the task. It feels like you're spending a lot of time and effort getting good at something you don't particularly even care to be good at just to get better at something else in a bankshot effect. Hence the frustration.

a lot of people don't like AI and that leads them to claim that it can't possibly work, which is silly as they don't have any good reason to believe that and we know for a fact that human-level intelligence is possible because we've seen humans do it.

technically we don't know that superhuman intelligence is possible as we've never seen that before (although we have seen it in specialised domains, like chess, go, general recall and so on), but I have a hunch that there are machines that can think better than humans can as they aren't subject to the same design constraints, can be built from alternative materials, don't need to eat, their brain doesn't need to fit through a human pelvis, etc.

however even if we can only make a machine as smart as Einstein then that would still be pretty cool, I mean Einstein couldn't figure out quantum mechanics but it would be neat to have an Einstein available on demand to tutor you at school or handle your customer service requests or whatever it is you needed.

people who don't like AI also claim that it will destroy the environment, which is unlikely, not least because we know that AI doesn't need to consume more resources than people do and probably a lot less: you should be able to run a couple of Einsteins on your laptop and you're already using that now for sillier things.

another claim is that the companies currently pushing AI will lose money, and that's more plausible as companies lose money on big projects all the time; but it seems like a good outcome for everyone else? let overly optimistic investors fund the research and development of AI while we all get the benefit, that's great!

of course the ultimate fear is that AI works too well and the people who own it now end up owning everything else too, the smug bastards, but wealth disparity is a problem unrelated to AI and one that we should already be trying to fix right now.

it's important not to base your political activism on false claims as they can discredit your platform; the best reason for doing something is ideally true.

we have had ample warning that human-level machine intelligence is coming -- it was inevitable as soon as electronic switches were developed, and Turing's famous paper on the subject turns 75 this year -- but people have resisted the idea in the same way that they resist the implications of humans being assemblages of molecules that can be analysed mechanistically, a resistance that compromises their comprehension of the world and their ability to shape it.

This is one of those surprisingly common cases where I read an argumate post and go "why would someone write this, it's entirely true of course, but I don't see why you'd need to say it, it can't possibly be controversial" and then look in the notes and see "what the fuck are you talking about" and "this is one of the stupidest takes ever"

Nabokov tier list

S: Ada, stories (Spring in Fialta) A: Mary, The Gift, Lolita B: The Luzhin Defence, Pnin C: Pale Fire D: Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister F: King Queen Knave, Camera Obscura

Take to piss off absolutely everyone: the Biden Economy was so amazing for the working class for basically the same reasons (if to a lesser degree) that the aftermath of the Black Death was so good for Europe's peasantry.

Worked on me. I might be an idiot but my understanding was that the Black Death was "good" for Europe's peasantry because under the Malthusian conditions of the 14th century, population is constrained by the land's carrying capacity and so the survival of the peasantry becomes less precarious if there's significantly fewer people.

I don't see how that translates to the aftermath of COVID at all?

the other half of the standard explanation is that reduced labor availability massively increased the bargaining position of the bottom half of society, and so wages shot up and conditions generally improved

which I do think was reflected somewhat in the economy of '22-'23, but given the other various economic woes of that time I'm not sure I'd call it amazing

I can't speak for what OP meant, but how I would interpret a structural similarity is that a short term imbalance in labor power has potentially led to a durable change in norms, the customary bargain has changed and a return to earlier levels of labor competition is not going to roll that back.

then at least in the case of the US, you misunderstand. the beginning of the covid period saw more people lose or leave their jobs faster than any other time in recorded history. ~20,000,000 people, or ~13% of the labor force, stopped working:

employment then rebounds at record speed, but it would not shock me if the fastest hiring spree in history gave applicants more choice! something like 20% of the labor force moved in a handful of months.

it is true that this shows up as high unemployment, which then reverses as people get hired back on, but I don't think this can be ignored as a factor, and total employment does not recover for, it looks like, about a year or so.

anyway, do I think covid had as big of an impact as the black death? no. similar dynamics to a lesser degree? plausible. certainly staffing and norms at many places do not seem to have gone back to their prepandemic norm, some of the changes do seem sticky even as teh labor market becomes more normal.

Take to piss off absolutely everyone: the Biden Economy was so amazing for the working class for basically the same reasons (if to a lesser degree) that the aftermath of the Black Death was so good for Europe's peasantry.

Worked on me. I might be an idiot but my understanding was that the Black Death was "good" for Europe's peasantry because under the Malthusian conditions of the 14th century, population is constrained by the land's carrying capacity and so the survival of the peasantry becomes less precarious if there's significantly fewer people.

I don't see how that translates to the aftermath of COVID at all?

The argument goes that the resulting labour supply crunch from the black death led the lower classes to significant quality of life increases that became entrenched and permanent; the labour supply crunch resulting from covid (from a mixture of reasons) is (likely) part of why low class wages grew so much in 2020-2024.

The signature act of bidenomics was stimulus, yes, but the impact of covid on labour supply during the biden era was a reduction. You can't kill a million people in 3 years and not have it impact the labour supply.

Anyway there's too much damn American election coverage, let's talk about the Canadian election for a bit. This one is less interesting even for Canadians because the only uncertainty is when it will be held: the Conservatives have had a massive, robust lead in the polls for more than a year, for reasons I only half understand but which likely have to do with them choosing a Youtuber kinda guy as their leader and positioning themselves as the party of Not Trudeau. Barring some truly crazy shit happening in the next year, any outcome other than a historic blowout is basically impossible -- even if the polls are off 20% all that would do is put in play the chance of a Conservative minority government (with the Bloc Quebecois).

On the one hand, this is kind of nice, compared to the American election, because even if you don't like it, you know exactly what you're going to get! It feels a little odd that the Conservatives are guaranteed to win before having really even talked about their platform, but that's just regular politics squared, negative polarization and want-to-have-a-beer-with, we're exposing the contradictions inherent in the system, you know, you know, you know.

But the Liberals are still in power right now and they're being Weird about it, because when you've gotten used to governing and you're about to lose "barring crazy shit" there is always a temptation to do some crazy shit. And so people are saying, like, "we should prorogue parliament and do a leadership race to pick somebody with less baggage" and meanwhile Trudeau is trying to project confidence by appealing to a silent majority, and oh my god this stuff sucks, this is my second-least-favourite part of politics, after the politics.

The issue is that if you run at the head of a major party and get killed then you can't really lead again, and there aren't that many good candidates, so either you pick a weak, reckless candidate (traditionally with glass-cliff cachet) and they get blown up, or else you pick a really good successor and "waste" them by making them stand in front of an oncoming train, when you could have just accepted defeat and spent your 40 years in the desert building a brand around them as the leader of the opposition. Come on!

This is one of the perverse offputting things about electoral politics, I think, you aren't allowed to acknowledge that you have no chance and are just showing up for the participation trophy. I think it can be good to make a showing when you don't expect to win, and not just on the off chance -- I have some respect for serious candidates who campaign in someone else's safe seat, even when it's quixotic. But everyone has to talk it up like it's either a tight race or a sure thing in their favour; I've heard the NDP leader say confidently, leading into a prior and more favourable election, that he would be the next Prime Minister of Canada, something that seemed to warrant a laugh track. But because electoral politics is about marshalling a coalition, it's fundamentally motivational, and people are just more motivated by confident lunatics than by realistic losers.

One of the ways in which I am abnormal is that I find this whole thing really offputting; I honestly kind of like the realistic losers. I would, you know, have a beer with them. One is tempted to say we should just make a Loser's Party ("We're Not Going to Win, But We Should"), but even with PR it'd still be a joke. What I think is actually needed, in the longer sweep of history, is to think about what kinds of democratic systems can make people feel motivated in politics and invested in the results, even when getting blown the fuck out. Is there a way to do this without just making it impossible to govern most of the time? God knows, but since the modern experience is to spend two-thirds of your time in "election mindset", I suppose we'll all have plenty of time to think about it.

So about that-

Honestly I'm still feeling pretty good about that call! We've definitely ventured into other outcomes, but then some truly crazy shit has in fact happened and that's why, so I think I was more or less correct in my assessment. That's why you always add that force majeure clause!

I mean I took as part of the claim in the OP, as much as any of the OP is any kind of claim at all, that the Liberals would have been better off not trying, and I think that part was clearly wrong.

Also, of course it's easy to say after the fact and I certainly by no means called it, and all the stuff about annexation was obviously unpredictable and a big deal, but "Trudeau resigns (highly likely), Trump gets elected (50% chance or better) and imposes stiff tariffs on Canada (a priori unlikely, but he said lots of times that he would do this, so I figure it's not that crazy) and therefore association with Trump becomes unpopular (highly likely given above)" is not so crazy a set of circumstances, and I think even without the annexation stuff that takes some of Poilièvre's lustre.

Political parties have to try just to go through appearances, but I do think that most of the things they might have tried before all this happened would have been detrimental. Rightly, most of their big moves came after, and I'm not sure anyone really cared if Carney got blown up in a game effort, so in that sense he was a good sacrificial candidate.

Enough about that though, let's talk probabilities! I think these are really overshooting. Like, if you were giving even a 50% probability to Trudeau resigning in late 2024, I'd say that was overkill? At that point we had been having the "should Trudeau resign" discussion for a year and he had made it clear he had no intention to do so and was capable of quelling dissent within the party. The ideal window had already closed and the timing was getting worse by the day. And indeed if he'd had a realistic path not to resign, I get the sense he wouldn't have. What actually happened was that Freeland's harsh exit shattered his ability to discipline the party, and he chose to exit in anticipation of a caucus meeting that might have ejected him. The general consensus was that Freeland's departure -- not just the fact of it but the manner -- was shocking, and unless you predicted that you could not really have predicted anything that happened since.

You can go back and read coverage of the "Trump question" from 2023 and 2024; at the time, the most common position was that having Trump in office would help Poilievre because he'd be better able to find common ground and Trump was known to specifically dislike Trudeau. No one anticipated anything like the kind of falling-out with Canada that he's actually initiated -- people expected something like his first term in terms of relations, difficult but not like this. Anyone who had a strong guess that US-Canada relations would look like this in 2025 had the potential to make a lot of money on that hunch at the start of November 2024, so if they didn't, I'm skeptical. 2024 was a year thick with speculation and analysis and hedging about the US and Canadian elections; if this outcome wasn't highly implausible it should show up in how that all was weighted, right?

A key detail here is that the current turn owes a lot to Trump's bizarre annexationist fantasies -- not just for Canada, but generally. Nobody really accounted for that, I don't think, and everything goes very differently if he just makes one crack about that and drops it, if he was able to credibly look like he was joking (as opposed to being serious about something which unbeknownst to him is a joke). I was sort of expecting someone to sit him down and explain that, beyond being impossible, his dream would lock Republicans out of Senate control for ages, but he's just been hammering that "induce Canadian nationalism" button like he's scratching an itch. I don't even know why we have that button!

Take to piss off absolutely everyone: the Biden Economy was so amazing for the working class for basically the same reasons (if to a lesser degree) that the aftermath of the Black Death was so good for Europe's peasantry.

Worked on me. I might be an idiot but my understanding was that the Black Death was "good" for Europe's peasantry because under the Malthusian conditions of the 14th century, population is constrained by the land's carrying capacity and so the survival of the peasantry becomes less precarious if there's significantly fewer people.

I don't see how that translates to the aftermath of COVID at all?

The argument goes that the resulting labour supply crunch from the black death led the lower classes to significant quality of life increases that became entrenched and permanent; the labour supply crunch resulting from covid (from a mixture of reasons) is (likely) part of why low class wages grew so much in 2020-2024.

Take to piss off absolutely everyone: the Biden Economy was so amazing for the working class for basically the same reasons (if to a lesser degree) that the aftermath of the Black Death was so good for Europe's peasantry.

Worked on me. I might be an idiot but my understanding was that the Black Death was "good" for Europe's peasantry because under the Malthusian conditions of the 14th century, population is constrained by the land's carrying capacity and so the survival of the peasantry becomes less precarious if there's significantly fewer people.

I don't see how that translates to the aftermath of COVID at all?

the other half of the standard explanation is that reduced labor availability massively increased the bargaining position of the bottom half of society, and so wages shot up and conditions generally improved

which I do think was reflected somewhat in the economy of '22-'23, but given the other various economic woes of that time I'm not sure I'd call it amazing

Take to piss off absolutely everyone: the Biden Economy was so amazing for the working class for basically the same reasons (if to a lesser degree) that the aftermath of the Black Death was so good for Europe's peasantry.

Worked on me. I might be an idiot but my understanding was that the Black Death was "good" for Europe's peasantry because under the Malthusian conditions of the 14th century, population is constrained by the land's carrying capacity and so the survival of the peasantry becomes less precarious if there's significantly fewer people.

I don't see how that translates to the aftermath of COVID at all?