Don't click the links on your phone

Holy chicken, look at that tail!

Full text of It Can Be Easier to Fall Victim to Fraud on Mobile than Desktop is below, so you don't have to click on links.

Also: How Metrics Make Us Miserable (podcast)
Have you ever met an optimizer (or hard-core EA, or capital-V Vegan) who was enviably happy?
Also, from 10 Rules For Dealing With Uncertainty, "Discipline matters more than optimization.... perfect is the enemy of good."

Why You're Always Right (funny cat story) (also, you don't need "maybe" about astrology)

It Can Be Easier to Fall Victim to Fraud on Mobile than Desktop

This article is the second in a series about cybersecurity/fraud prevention. (You can find the first article here: What Does a Thief Need to Access Your Financial Accounts? It’s Likely Less Than You Think.)

I recently received a very clever phishing attempt by email. (In hindsight, I wish I had taken screenshots prior to deleting it.)

Here’s what it looked like in my inbox:

• From: Vanguard Brokerage Services
• Subject: Your Vanguard statement is ready

Looking at the email via my desktop browser, it was very easy to see that it was a phishing attempt.

Looking at the email on my mobile device, however, there was no immediately obvious sign that the email was not legit. Based on everything immediately visible via my mobile mail app, it looked exactly like a genuine Vanguard email.

Looking at the “From” Field

When I viewed the email on desktop, the “from” field was a dead giveaway. While the “name” of the sender was “Vanguard Brokerage Services,” the email address of the sender was complete gobbledygook. Something like “senderx34x3@xyzpayments.info.” Clearly, that’s not actually Vanguard.

On mobile though, the sender’s email address does not appear immediately (at least not on most mobile mail apps). You just see the name. When viewing the email, there will be somewhere you can tap to display the sender’s email address. But you have to go out of your way to actually do that. And of course the percentage of people who do that with every single email is vanishingly small.

Body of the Email

The text of the email was a character-for-character copy/paste of the real statement-notification emails that Vanguard sends, complete with the appropriate images, branding, etc. Everything looked exactly as you’d expect.

The only thing about it that was wrong is that the links that appeared to point to Vanguard’s login page actually pointed to a scam URL. (That is, the “anchor text” of the link was the appropriate URL, but that’s not where the link actually pointed.)

In other words, it was something like this:

https://vanguard.com/

If you look only at the text of the link itself (the “anchor text”) you’ll think the link is going to take you to Vanguard. But it doesn’t. The link points to ObliviousInvestor.com. On desktop, you can see that easily by hovering over the link. Your browser (usually in the bottom corner) will show you where the link points. (Though even this can be spoofed. So as with the email address, if it looks suspicious, it definitely should not be trusted. But if it looks normal, that doesn’t necessarily tell you that it’s genuine.)

On mobile, however, “hover over” isn’t an option. You can tap a link and hold your finger down, in order to see where the link points. But how many people actually do that for every link they consider tapping? Also, there’s the risk that you tap the link and accidentally take your finger off the screen too early — and now you’ve visited the scam link rather than activating the “preview” functionality.

Browser Location on Mobile

Of course, I did not visit the links in the spam/phishing email. But if I had, I’m confident that the destination page would look exactly like Vanguard’s real login page. Except, of course, it wouldn’t have actually been Vanguard. It would have been a fraudster’s website, set up to collect people’s usernames and passwords as they entered them.

On desktop, at the top of your browser window, you easily see the full URL of the page you’re on. That makes it at least somewhat easier to recognize whether you’re on a legitimate website or not.

On mobile, depending on your browser and device, you often don’t. You might see the first several characters or the last several characters. But you might, for example, have accidentally visited:

vanguard.com-payments-us-vanguard.com

If you only see the beginning or end of that URL, you might think that you’re on Vanguard’s website. But that’s not Vanguard’s website. The actual domain in that URL is “com-payments-us-vanguard.com”, which any old fraudster could have purchased. (The “vanguard” at the start of the URL is a subdomain.)

What To Do

There are a handful of ways to avoid falling for this sort of thing.

Firstly, it’s helpful to actually look at the email address of the sender, even if it’s not immediately displayed in your mobile app. But even that can be spoofed. So while a spammy email address tells you it’s spam, a legit-looking email address does not necessarily tell you it’s genuine.

Secondly, it’s helpful to generally be aware when using mobile that 1) you aren’t seeing as much information as you would via desktop and 2) sometimes the information that you’re not seeing would have been a clear red flag.

Thirdly, if you did end up falling for the email and visiting the link in question, you’d be in better shape if you use passkeys or a password manager (both topics for another day, which we’ll get to). Your passkey would not work on the fake domain. And a password manager would recognize that the domain in question was not actually Vanguard.

But the most effective way to avoid falling for this? It’s the same exact rule that we discussed in the first article in this series! (I promise I’ll move on to other topics soon. But I just want to drive home how critical and valuable this rule is.)

If you receive any inbound communication (whether email, text, or phone call) that purports to be from a company with which you have any sort of account:

• Do not reply.
• Do not give them any information whatsoever.
• Do not click on any links.

Essentially, don’t interact with inbound communications. Instead, if you think it might be genuine and require some sort of response, reach out directly, via trusted means (i.e., either typing the company’s URL directly into your browser or calling the number on the back of your credit/debit card) and ask the company in question about it.

How Progress Happens (and Prepping, and Living Longer)

• Exercise variety—not just amount—linked to lower risk of premature mortality
  A follow-up to We have found the magic drug
  
  
• Preparing Without Predicting
  For anyone who thinks about the future. Has this great quote from an OK movie: "History is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present."
  
  
• Freakonomics Episode 666: This Is How Progress Happens
  95% fantastic!

The one nitpick: With regard to climate change, Mokyr uses the word "existential" to mean "bad," not existential. 

The example he gives is 50 million people moving from Bangladesh to Manitoba. You know when 50 million people wanted to move from Bangladesh to Manitoba? As soon as Bangladesh was formed! 

Check out, for example, 1970's Bhola cyclone and its aftermath. (Including George Harrison's "Concert for Bangladesh.")

Weather events aren't going to be a problem. They've always been a problem! 

Climate - old or new - isn't the problem. Poverty is the problem. 

Development is the answer. 

(For humans at least. I've been thinking about this tradeoff for months and still not had a clear enough thought to write up.)

Even better scams are coming for you

The Catalina Mountains; as always, click for bigger

This Freakonomics podcast is some eye-opening stuff! I didn't know the example below (and more):

And so, Daffan estimates, in 2024, in the U.S.: Between $31.3 billion and $195.9 billion was lost to fraud. ...

Some of the best [scams] take advantage of existing problems with our slow bureaucracies, poor customer service. Let’s say you get a text from your bank that says, did you make this purchase? It says you bought an Apple computer or something. So, of course, a wise, scam-literate person would say, “I’m pretty sure I didn’t purchase an Apple computer, and this is probably a scam, but let me call my financial institution. And I’m not going to be foolish and click the number that appeared in the text message, I’m going to go on the website and I’m going to call their actual number.” So here’s the thing. Bank call centers are so busy that you often hear a message that, “We will save your place in line, just click 1, record your name, and we’ll call you back when it’s your turn.” Scammers know this. So what will they do? They’ll wait 30 minutes after they sent that text message, and call you. And they will have faked the caller ID. So it will say Chase Bank, U.S. Bank, Bank of America — whatever the bank that they initially pretended to be. And ask you questions and confirm your identity. They’ll probably have information about you already. They might have your full Social Security number, your name, your date of birth. And it works. And that would work for many of us. ...

A.I. has made it so that all of our old consumer-education rules of thumb — we’ve had to throw out the window. Things like, look for spelling errors in the email — gone. Do a video call with this person that says they’re in love with you — gone. So we’re having to kind of reinvent the wheel and adapt to this environment that’s changing so quickly that sometimes in my public presentations with older adults I look at them and I say, I don’t know what advice I can give you to stay safe in today’s world. ...

Last year, Reuters reported that leaked documents from Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) showed that 10 percent of Meta revenue comes from running ads for scams and banned items. ...

...so that companies like social media companies, telecoms, that they take more action in preventing the scam messages from getting to us in the first place.

DUBNER: And how hard would that be for them? How hard would it be for Facebook, for instance?

DeLIEMA: The technical capacity of these companies to identify and flag scams is there. I think what we saw with the recent Meta leak about the profits that they make from these scam ads really shows that they’re making a calculated choice to either show and host known false and fraudulent ads or not. 

How Liberals Fund Russia's Invasion of Ukraine

Not an April Fools, sadly.

I've written a lot about how "environmentalists" are making the world a much worse place (just one example). I've also written about how some EAs seem to be intentionally undermining EA, and how they serve as useful idiots for Tyson, Trump, and TB.

But this Substack - Who really killed German nuclear? - might be the worst yet. The title really undersells it. Russia wouldn't have had the money and resources to invade Ukraine if not for "liberals" and "environmentalists." 

(If you want more economics of energy policy, check out "The gas price shock will expose Britain’s catastrophic energy misjudgment" by the great Matt Ridley.)

PS: One friend reacts to the main German nuclear link: "One more reason I support removing tax-exemption from 'charities.' They're just businesses, and many are (ethically) bad businesses at that."

After I replied about churches being good </sarcasm>, they replied:

"We shut down Enron since they engaged in unethical accounting tricks, but the church rapes thousands of children for decades and they're allowed to continue existing and be tax-exempt!" 

Bad Medicine, Better Medicine?

The source of a modern miracle. 

News update: Good riddance to the bad Paul Ehrlich, a terrible influence in the world. (Not to be confused with the good Paul Ehrlich.)

Podcast: AI, GLP, and the Future of Medicine. (Transcript of the first part.) 
(Also, very long: Statins and the future of heart disease.)
(Also, an excellent discussion of when and how to use an LLM instead of Google.)

I regularly hear people badmouth LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude in terms of medical advice or diagnosis. I don't know in what world those people live (maybe they've never had a health problem) but I have had, over and over again, absolutely horrific and incompetent medical "care." And I have always had insurance, I'm smart enough to understand a lot, and Anne is there to help.

Just last year, I experienced absurd (and unbelievable) malpractice. My primary care doc (who has since retired) said, "You have the weirdest things happen to you." The NP for my new doc said, "That's the weirdest story I've ever heard." 

But it wasn't unique, not even to me. (At least I wasn't told I had cancer when I didn't. Ugh.)

I'll take health care by algorithm any day.

The Horror of GMOs

OMFG! 

Now do you understand, "scientists"???*

Copy cat v2. 

*In case it isn't clear, that's sarcasm. Selective breeding - including radiation breeding - is far more significant than any "GMO" work.

In case you found that boring / predictible, here's a good podcast about how life on Mars became accepted by basically everyone.

An actually worthwhile listicle

Copy Cat 1.

Not too long, not too indulgent, and all useful:

26 (Hopefully) Useful Thoughts For 2026
A Listicle About Self-Control, Understanding, and Sampling Bias
by Tommy Blanchard

Life in the Universe

The great Fraser Cain, creator of Universe Today and animal advocate, believes we are alone in the universe. His reasoning:

If life had evolved elsewhere, it would inevitably evolve to intelligence. Any intelligent species would eventually send out von Neuman probes throughout the galaxy. It would only take ~10 million years (a very short time compared to the ~14 billion year history of the universe, or even the ~4.5 billion year history of Earth) for an intelligent species' probes to reach every corner of the galaxy. 

To quote Enrico Fermi: Where is everybody?   [OTOH]

Hence, Fraser concludes, since we see no evidence, there must not be any other life out there.

Fraser could very well be right. But if I had to bet my life, I'd bet he's wrong.

The Earth formed 6,000 ~4.5 billion years ago. That's 4,500,000,000 years ago. For the first millions of years, the Earth was uninhabitable - no liquid water, many asteroid strikes (including the biggie), non-stop volcanism, etc. 

Almost immediately after Earth was cool enough for liquid water, life came into existence -- even before the Late Heavy Bombardment! 

That makes the question all the more compelling: Where is everyone?

I think the answer lies between "life evolves" and "technology spreads throughout galaxy."

There are many filters between the evolution of life and a technological civilization spanning the galaxy. Just two examples:

1. For ~75% of the history of life on earth, there were only unicellular organisms. Life itself evolved almost immediately, but then took literally billions of years to evolve into the simplest multicellular organism. It took relatively forever to go beyond single cells, even on a planet that is basically perfect for life. 

If life existed on Mars (which seems more likely than before?), that life was always relatively simple. If life exists on Enceladus or another watery moon, it is probably simple-ish - i.e., unlikely to evolve further than life on earth evolved over billions of years. It seems entirely possible that multicellular life might only evolve under the rarest circumstances.

2. Even given multicellularity and many other assumptions, technological intelligence certainly doesn't seem inevitable or even likely. Dinosaurs dominated Earth for about 180,000,000 years; humans have existed for only about 300,000 years, ~0.004% of Earth's existence (and humans have been "technological" for a vanishingly small fraction of that time; we're still not close to sending out von Neuman probes). Give just the tiniest nudge to the Chicxulub meteor* and dinosaurs would still rule the Earth. 

There are many other reasons why technological life might be vanishingly rare, even with life "eager" to come into existence. (Complex cells, land+water, oxygen levels "just right," moon, complex animals, not going extinct, relatively stable climate, fire, not going extinct again, energy capture, metallurgy, institutions.) For more, see the book Rare Earth.  

What data we actually have shows: 

1. Life existed for 100% of the billions of years Earth has been habitable. 
2. We've been able to search for life elsewhere ~0% of that time.
3. We have been von-Neuman-capable for exactly 0% of that time.

This is not to say technological life is impossible outside of Earth.

But it would necessarily be exceedingly rare compared to life itself. Other technological civilizations could be out there, and we might still be millions of years from their probes reaching our solar system. 

Or, at least in our galaxy, we could be the first. Someone has to be the first. Even in a universe where life is common, by Fraser's logic, it would appear to the first technological species that the universe is devoid of any other life. 

PS: Just to be clear, I don't want there to be other sentient life in the universe, as suffering seems to be the natural state of life. Here is a good insight into how we take our biases and make them "universal" truths.

*The animation at that link is funny.

TV! (short)

 

Paul McCartney - Sometimes

One of the most beautiful songs you've never heard

You've probably heard of Pluribus (or Plur1bus) on AppleTV. That is definitely worth watching. Quite funny.

But you might not have heard of Mrs. Davis on Peacock. That is also worth a watch! I couldn't stop saying, "This is so weird!" and "How can this show keep being so unexpected?" And I laughed a lot, too. 

Not funny but really well done: Devs from 2020. Warning: there is a pretty harsh scene in the first episode.

Try to avoid spoilers as much as you can!

This brought me to tears

"What're you lookin' at? Never seen devastating cuteness before?"

PSA: If you have a Bank of American credit or debit card, many museums are free the first full weekend of every month!   More.


Preface: The ending of this interview with Roland Fryer on education reform brought me to tears.*

As did this quote I just came across:

Wollstonecraft inveighed against marriage as the only means for women to “rise in the world,” which in turn reduced their aspirations to those of “mere animals” [sic] and made them act as children once they did enter this institution of wholesale dependency. What she called for instead — equal access to education and an emphasis on the intellectual and moral development of girls, rather than their looks, dress, and manners — seems banal by our present standards, almost embarrassing. The luxury of being embarrassed by it — in just five human lifetimes, in a species 7,500 generations old — is the measure of our progress.

from Dying Mothers, the Birth of Handwashing, and the Bittersweet True Love Story Behind Frankenstein emphases added

*Russ Roberts: But, you've had a huge impact. Not the impact you wanted, but when you lay in bed at night and you look back on this part of your career, will you ever come back to it? Is it just something that you sometimes wish had turned out maybe better? Do you feel satisfaction? Just reflect on it in your own life.

Roland Fryer: It's a phenomenal question, and I'm going to answer it in a brutally honest way, as I always try to do. I am wholly unsatisfied with that work. I'm happy we did it. I think it changed some lives, not enough. I'm going to tear up, man. But, we also lost some students on the way, Russ. There's a kid named Marcus that was in a high school there. And, they came to me, and they said, 'Hey, Marcus is maybe not make it. What can you do?' I flew down to Houston--this is just one of several examples like this--talked to Marcus, and a phenomenal kid. Phenomenal kid: smart, witty, thoughtful, could get science concepts like that. But, he's in jail now for 20 years for armed robbery. And I failed him. I failed him.

There's another kid in the Crown Heights, P.S. 399 [Public School #399]. He was a fifth grader, and I was told that his gangs were starting to kind of circle around him, and whether I'd take him under my wing. I said, 'Absolutely, 100%.' Gave him a flip phone at that time--I'm so old. I told him, 'Call me any time.' I was just about to get on stage to do a keynote, and he called me and he needed help. I looked out at an audience, and there was a thousand people waiting. I said, 'I'll call you right back as soon as I'm done with this.' And he never spoke to me again. I failed that kid.

I lay awake at night, and I don't sleep much because I feel personally responsible for what's going on. These are my people. They're your people, too. And, we have to do absolutely everything we can, in my opinion, to change their lives.

I tried hard at that stage of my life. I worked as hard as I physically could. But I don't think it was enough. Yes, we had some impact, but it wasn't enough.

From the Ecomodernist: Utopia & Apocalypse after Revelatory Environmentalism

This Saguaro is pretty doomed.

Full piece here, but Taylor really needed an editor, so below are excerpts. If you want a historical context for the climate Doomers, the AI Doomers, etc., check out the book Everything Must Go. Two quotes: "In 1981 ... a startling 80 per cent of Harvard students said ... they would die [in a nuclear war]." "[In 1971] Since World War II over one billion human beings who worried about A-bombs and H-bombs died of other causes. They worried for nothing."

Doomers have always existed.
Doom gives life meaning. Every new batch of Doomers insists “This time for real!”

On October 22, 1844, tens of thousands of Americans left their homes and climbed their local hilltops. There they waited through the night, expecting Christ’s return. These were the Millerites, followers of a 19th century preacher named William Miller. He believed that he had pinned down the date of the second Advent—albeit after a few erroneous predictions. His adherents spent the year forgiving debts, dispensing with personal belongings, and neglecting to sow their fields. On that fateful October evening, they dressed themselves in simple handmade garments and went out in the cold to await the end of the world. Only it never came.

I have never spent a cold October evening sitting on a hilltop in anticipation of the end times. Yet, sometimes I feel like a recovered Millerite. The only difference is that I sat on a mountain of anxiety, worrying about climate change. This was back in the 2010s, when many of us also believed that the world was about to pass the peak of global fossil fuel production. We awaited a future that not only featured unimaginable climatic horrors but also lacked any remaining energy resources to be able to deal with them. ...

The politician and diplomat George Perkins Marsh once wrote, “the earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant, and another era of equal human crime and human improvidence…would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species.” Although that might sound like a timely point of view, Marsh actually wrote those words back in 1864.

The past century has witnessed a litany of apocalyptic environmental proclamations. The 1970s were dominated by predictions of overpopulation leading to widespread famine. [Yup.] Some scientists even claimed that “in a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution.” In 2007, then-IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri claimed that we had five years to get our acts together, lest we suffer a global catastrophe with submerged islands states and declining GDP. Yet, a United Nations report managed to find an additional seven years of grace time for humanity, albeit eleven years later in 2018. ...

Environmentalism’s chronic apocalyptic refrain isn’t really emblematic of the Millerites, who mostly went back to their normal lives after the Great Disappointment in 1844. No, today’s apocalyptic environmentalists are more like the Adventist sects that superseded them, the diehards that believed that the Millerites had simply misread the signs—those who even today continue to await the End Times. ...

What explains the persistence of apocalyptic beliefs? The seemingly commonsensical answer would be, “The end of world, duh.” Yet the sheer weight of falsified predictions should disabuse us of that argument. As British literary critic Frank Kermode observed, “Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited.” There is something striking about the resilience of environmental apocalypticism in the face of the fact that it never seems to actually arrive. ...

Even advocates of the most dismal vision of ecological calamity take pains to comb through the scientific literature. ...

Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene elaborately reconstructs humanity’s climatic history before concluding that “we’re fucked.” It is a conclusion that he arrives at only by presuming that a long outdated and unrealistically extreme climate scenario (RCP 8.5) represented a conservative prediction of Earth’s climatic future.

David Wallace-Wells’ [a lying POS] The Uninhabitable Earth likewise provides an avalanche of citations to scientific studies. He assembles what seems to be a full compendium of all the scary possibilities of climate change to reach a conclusion not unlike Scranton’s. Wallace-Wells insists that “whole regions will become unlivable by any standard we have today as soon as the end of this century,” even as he hedges scientific claims with words like “would” and “might.” The intended effect of thousands of alarmist “maybes” is a kind of cataclysmic certainty.

Wallace-Well’s perspective was heavily criticized by scientists and climate scholars. [And others.] Indeed, it’s not difficult to pick a random cited study in The Uninhabitable Earth and find that the actual state of the science is less certain and more complex that Wallace-Wells depicts it. For example, he blames a warming climate for an epidemic of kidney diseases among El Salvadorian men who work sugarcane fields. Yet, scientists have found that sugarcane workers are almost uniquely prone to the disease, when compared to similar professions. The likely culprit may be sugarcane ash. When the residues from the sugarcane extraction process are burned, workers inhale kidney-damaging silica particles. No doubt that heat and humidity don’t help, but Wallace-Wells’ implication that a warming world was coming for all of our kidneys was just him leveraging partial and uncertain scientific results in service of an apocalyptic narrative. ...

[F]or those who have correctly received Wallace-Wells’ revelation, they are now ready to act. To Guenther, we need climate apocalypticism, for only then can we have “the groundswell of fear and desire that forces the necessity of action. The scientists must let the writers do their jobs. On their work, on all our work, the world depends.”

Such logic uncovers the workings of apocalypticism, in environmentalism as much as elsewhere. Scenarios and forecasts function less as predictions and more as prophecies. Predictions are fallible, an effort to try to understand tomorrow based on our limited knowledge of today. And failed predictions should lead us to reevaluate our theories about reality. Prophecies, on the other hand, are never falsified, just reinterpreted. And they are primarily about moral guidance. Repent and change your ways. Or else. ...

The apocalypse perhaps meets a deep seated need to see the world in terms of angels and demons, and to daydream about restoring Eden. As environmental scholar Eric Zencey put it, we can’t seem to shake “the legacy of a resentment that longs for a revenge through a final, accounts-balancing judgement upon those who do us wrong.”

At its most extreme, apocalypticism has served as a backdrop for genocide. [It still does.]

... Each flavor of eco-apocalyptic thinking has its own bogeyman. Planetary doomists wring their hands over the average human’s environmental irrationality. Only the righteous few fight a hopeless battle against people’s willful ignorance. 

For advocates of economic degrowth, of turning back the clock on technological societies, the champions and beneficiaries of capitalism are the planet’s nemesis. A podcast about Donella and Dennis Meadows, authors of the infamous Limits to Growth report published by the Club of Rome in 1972, called Tipping Point, tells of the tragically influential disagreement between the report authors and economists, such as William Nordhaus. Without those pesky economists, the podcast implies, the Club of Rome’s warnings about worldwide collapse back in the 1970s would have been heeded. Governments would have begun negotiating “an orderly transition to a stable world.” [LOL. Is there anything that someone, somewhere won’t believe?]

As much as degrowth’s supporters try to frame the issue in terms of models and datasets, ultimately its underlying story points to the moral decay of growth-based, technological society. ...

Today’s worries about ecological collapse motivates calls for “transformative change.” According to the recent values assessment from the Intergovernmental Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, this entails a “fundamental, systemwide reorganization” of society in order to mobilize “broad values that are consistent with living in harmony with nature.” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change researchers now wonder if they should be given the ability to prescribe national policy, and oversee their implementation. James Lovelock said the quiet part loud back in 2010, when he argued that climate change necessitated putting “democracy on hold for a while.” ...

[F]or climate change and other environmental challenges, prophesies of catastrophe and revelations of ecological decadence have long run out their usefulness. Given that the more doomist environmentalists may never be persuaded to dispense with their apocalypticism, the best we might hope for is partially redirecting alarmism toward more productive political ends. A more inclusive practice of environmental politics could impart the sense that, whatever the actual odds of cataclysm, we’re at least in it together. 

AI, Jobs, Synchronized Sleeping

Too much good stuff here (including the graph above), with the first (of many) headline, "The centuries-long shift to better jobs continues in the age of AI."

And:

Fun with Tech (and Cats)

Kitten Cody (found in a Burger King parking lot, has joined Dusty....

This YouTube video on the creation of modern computer chips is beyond amazing. Incredible. Magic. hattip to Ken

Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company -- incredible book on multiple levels. Jon Stewart nails it: “Phenomenal…a jaw-dropping book.”  

Another link worth reading: The Doomsday Clock is a myth machine, linking to AI Tools, Not Gods. "Doom makes for compelling theater. But a civilization obsessed with fictional annihilation risks missing a consequential reality: Its problem-solving capacity is compounding faster than the threats stemming from its apocalyptic imagination."

“Don’t replace the unknown with the unknowable.”

Cody and Dusty, via Nano Banana

 
“Don’t replace the unknown with the unknowable.”
Losing p. 90

All through history, humans have faced unknowns. Why do we exist? What causes lightning (earthquakes, etc.)? Where did the universe come from? Why was there more matter than antimatter at the Big Bang?* How did inanimate matter give rise to life? Why do good things happen to bad people?

And nearly everyone has answered these questions with some form of “gods” – an answer that ends any further inquiry or insights. 

(The main exception might be the question, What is life? Then lots of very smart people posited vis vitalis, a ”vital force” outside of materialism. This was true even well into the 20th century.)

I bring this up because a smart, thoughtful person insists to me that since materialism doesn't (currently) explain consciousness, we have to move beyond materialism.

No thanks. 

Could they be right? Sure. But history is not kind to those who claim we have to move beyond materialism because we're currently ignorant about something.

History shows that the correct response to the unknown is always: I don't know.

It may always be mysterious

Specific to consciousness, I have to agree with Sam Harris: I don't even know what form a satisfying explanation of consciousness could possibly take. 

When humans faced the question of ”What is life?” we had specific attributes to explain: reproduction, energy production, (locally) countering the second law of thermodynamics. For the longest time, we didn't know how to explain those, so we posited a vital force. Then scientists figured out DNA, the Krebs cycle, proton pumps, membranes, etc., explaining every single attribute of life within a materialist framework.  

We still don't know for sure exactly how life first arose from inanimate matter, but there is no reason to invoke magic; materialism is entirely adequate.

OTOH, I can't imagine an explanation of consciousness that explains its single attribute: How does it feel like something to be a conscious entity. 

I tend to broadly agree with Antonio Damasio's homeostatic hypothesis of why consciousness came about and what purpose it serves. But maybe Integrated Information Theory is right. Or something else.

But none of those theories explain how anything feels, how matter and energy gives rise to subjective experience.

The Hard Problem might just be The Impossible Problem for our feeble minds.

And that is OK.

The universe as god

When faced with this particular unknown, a surprising number of people go to panpsychism – that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. But again, this doesn't explain how consciousness emerges, why anything feels. Panpsychism simply says, ”That's just how our universe is." 

To me, this is even worse than saying ”God did it.” For one, it has just ridiculous implications, like electrons are conscious (and the ultimate, inescapable EA endpoint for all you expected value junkies). 

But more importantly, all the actual evidence shows that consciousness is an emergent property of certain types of systems. As I write in ”When we believe absurdities, we commit atrocities”:

How do we know the brain leads to consciousness? Because we can manipulate conscious, subjective experience by manipulating the structure and chemistry of the brain [not by changing ”fundamental reality”]. Even with our excruciatingly limited understanding of the brain, we can dim consciousness, deepen it, distort it, dement and derange it, depress it, disengage it, dull it, diminish it, and destroy it with relatively small [material] changes.

Fantasies are harmful; Ignorance is OK  

Again, this doesn't explain why having a (certain kind of) brain involves conscious feeling. (This is separate from the question of what purpose consciousness plays once it does arise. Like most everything, that question can be understood in its evolutionary context; see, for example, Walter Veit.) 

We simply don't know how a certain arrangement of matter and energy gives rise to subjective experience. We might never know.   

And that is OK.

Saying that consciousness comes from ”fundamental reality” or god or spirit or quantum mechanics doesn't do any good. It goes against the evidence and doesn't give us any actually useful information.

Positing a modern vis vitalis might makes us feel [sic] less ignorant, but that doesn't make it correct. 

More importantly, panpsychism etc. distracts us from what we do know – consciousness arises from brains** – and keeps us from acting on what we can (or might) know – what kinds of brains are capable of (different kinds of) subjective experience (see postscript). 

We might never know how our universe came into existence, why there is something rather than nothing. We might never know how that universe gives rise to subjective experience.  

And that is OK.

The only thing we can know is that consciousness exists. Even without knowing how or why, this is enough to lead a meaningful life: 

PS / tl;dr
When I mentioned this to Anne, she said, “Maybe we should stop fretting about what consciousness is and instead help those who are conscious and suffering.”

*OK, the antimatter question isn't something we've wondered about for all of human history.   😉

**This isn't to say that consciousness can only arise from biological brains; there is no evidence that consciousness is substrate-dependent. 

The Past Was Way Worse (plus personal indulgence)

Not that long ago, the most common age of death (mode) in many countries was zero. The past was truly terrible. 

"In the bad old days, say two hundred years ago, men lived twice as long, on average, as women (mostly because of the dangers of childbearing and -birth). And everybody in general lived about half as long as they do today." from here

Here makes the point that it wasn't just infant mortality.

More good news re: mosquitos, a point I made in Losing. (tl;dr - fuck mosquitos, the deadliest animal in the world, and fuck everyone who argues against their eradication.) 

Although things are still horrific for many, if we are going to live, the average human is incredibly lucky to live now.

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Speaking of luck, on this date in 1993, Anne and I got our piece of paper (which came back to bite her; see far below):

"[S]he wanted to get with me. Why, I’m not sure. But using all my life’s luck for that was worth it."

p. 166

PS: I've been sick this week such that Anne has had to cancel going in to school to tend to me. She wrote to one of her colleagues: "Of course, I'd rather [come in] but I took that pesky vow."  😉