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Eli Tyre Profile picture
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20 Jan, 7 tweets, 2 min read
This is a great question. Anyone have examples?
This is useful for calibrating our expectations about tools for thought.
"Allows us to solve problems we couldn't solve before" isn't the only thing that tools for thought might allow us to do. They might also help us discover new problems, or streamline an otherwise-viable but costly creative process.
But if they generally don't help us solve problems that we otherwise couldn't solve, that's a pretty important fact to keep in mind.
And if they DO help us solve problems, but only of particular types, that is even more important, because it gives us some pointers to the shape of the constraints on human problem solving, and which constraints are susceptible to information-technological interventions.
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More from @EpistemicHope

Eli Tyre Profile picture
21 Jan
One thing that I currently (weakly) believe:

Giving money to charities is broadly useless or close-to-useless.

If you have $100,000, and want to improve the world, you're better off investing it in the stock market then donating it.

(Though, of course, there are specific organizations, both for-profit and non-profit, that are much more promising than either "random good sounding charity" or "broad-based index funds".)
That is, I claim that the default assumption should be that giving away money approximately doesn't do anything (and might even cause harm), and that a high burden of proof is required to overcome that prior.
Read 7 tweets
Eli Tyre Profile picture
21 Jan
My current understanding is that while there was some impeachment of US sailors by the English, the admiralty had ordered the British navy to cut it out, and the practice mostly ceased by the start of the war of 1812.
"Impeachment!" was the official causis belli for the war, that was just an excuse to try to seize British-controlled land in Canada.

Does anyone dispute that story?
(Who should I tag, and what should I hashtag, to bring this to the attention of the history buffs that like talking about this sort of thing?)
Read 6 tweets
Eli Tyre Profile picture
20 Jan
Something I just realized:

If literal infant trauma is a real phenomenon, then their should be some psychological impact of circumcision.

There aren't many things that are more traumatic than someone cutting off a piece of your penis.
Circumcision rates vary widely.

For most of western history, it was just the Jews. Then in the late 19th century medicalized circumcision became common in the US.

link.springer.com/chapter/10.100…
Circumcision rates rose for decades, but there started to be push-back in the 40s and 50s. And they've falling again in the second half of the 20th century. Image
Read 7 tweets
Eli Tyre Profile picture
19 Jan
There's a particular kind of romantic partnership, with a certain sort of person, that I've wanted since I became a self-aware, directed agent at around age 15.
Empirically, this kind of relationship has been hard to achieve. It hasn't worked out yet, at least.

And this sometimes leaves me wondering if my standards are unreasonable.
In years past that desire was often very alive.

These days, I'm rarely directly or viscerally in contact with it.
Read 28 tweets
Eli Tyre Profile picture
17 Jan
I was reading something that suggested that trauma "tries" to spread itself. ie that the reason why intergenerational trauma is a thing is that the traumatized part in a parent will take action to recreate that trauma in the child.
This model puts the emphasis on the the parent's side: the trauma is actively "trying" to spread.
This is in contrast to my previous (hypothetical) model for IGT, which puts the emphasis on the child's side: kids are sponges that are absorbing huge amounts of info, including via very subtle channels. So they learn the unconscious reactions of the people around them.
Read 13 tweets
Eli Tyre Profile picture
15 Jan
I read a claim that the royal governor of Virginia, John Murray (4th Earl of Dunmore), striped George Washington of his (very valuable) lands in the Ohio Valley, which Washington had originally been awarded for his service in the French and Indian War.
It seems like there was some _plausible_ legal ground for that. Since maybe the land was only supposed to be allocated to regular royal soldiers, and colonial militiamen, technically, didn't count.

And Murray called him on this technicality.
If true, this is relevant because it might give a personal, financial, justification for supporting the revolutionary war.

Washington was a multi-millionaire in danger of losing his fortune because of English policy. Rebellion, though risky, would make the problem go away.
Read 5 tweets

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