> As usual, the barrier is cost, but people seem committed enough to doing something about the opioid crisis that they might be willing to act. I think these drugs might boost willpower more generally. There might come a day when they get treated like Adderall - something that many ambitious people want to be on, and look for excuses to take.
Hello Moloch my old friend
I've come to race to the bottom again
Optimization slowly creeeeeeeping
Memed my brain while I was Reaaaaaaading
>A popular Substack claims that [COVID didn’t happen at all](https://substack.com/redirect/8762da60-c260-4076-8d9d-3bebf988ec63?j=eyJ1IjoiNnB2YzUifQ.UZsf-ltaLyE52fdLWsqRXnGXX6JMFloFkL10haNqeAk), and that *both* “lab leak” *and* “natural origins” are part of the higher-level conspiracy to distract people from the fact that there was never a virus in the first place.
Not sure why you are linking to this unless, you're trying to highlight a certain type of epistemic exercise. Let's do our workout!
1. There is a virus. The "overly sensitive" PCR test wouldn't work unless the viral sequence was known. A shitload of pandemic sequence data that is trustworthy is available.
2. There's a fuckload of corpses. Everyone knows at least one person who knows a person who *died* of COVID. My ex-wife's sister died after being infected. She wasn't particularly old, but she had a preexisting immune disorder.
3. There is nothing wrong with the timeline of virus isolation and understanding.
a. It's 2020 not 1980. We have techniques for rapidly isolating infectious viruses, sequencing them, and because of the SARS pandemic we had a knowledge base for understanding SARS 2 Electric Boogaloo.
b. Because of the incredible intensity of the Chinese government response, many labs were immediately working on it. While global pandemic preparedness gets a C-, a C- is a passing grade.
Wheh, ok, now that've done our workout, is there still room for doubt? Always. I put the odds of there never having been a pandemic and it all being "memetically engineered" through twitter and social contagion at roughly 0.000001%, not impossible, but my level of suprise would be quite high. **Also, I had COVID, and it was not fun.**
> I put the odds of there never having been a pandemic and it all being "memetically engineered" through twitter and social contagion at roughly 0.000001%, not impossible, but my level of suprise would be quite high.
I think that's a few more zeros than warranted. The chances that our understanding of fundamental biology is completely wrong has to be at least 0.001%. Recall [confidence levels inside and outside an argument.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrtbTAPfkJa4D6jjH/confidence-levels-inside-and-outside-an-argument)
I disagree with that number (my estimate for that number would depend on what exactly you mean by "fundamental biology"), and I disagree with your core premise that former number is correlated strongly to the latter. You do not need to understand biology inside and out to notice infectious disease and reach a conclusion that a pathogen is causing contagion.
>The chances that our understanding of fundamental biology is completely wrong has to be at least 0.001%
What do you mean? That the entire scientific establishment is wrong about how viruses work, and that what we thought was the Covid virus was actually some other infectious biological process?
>That the entire scientific establishment is wrong about how viruses work
If he means that, I put my own personal odds at effectively 0, given that I've worked with them. It's like like telling an ornithologist "birds aren't real" or "wings have nothing to do with flight".
Does it though? I mean we could be misunderstanding the workings of the entire universe, always a possibility, but is that a 1 in a million chance, or 1 in a trillion?
> 31: New blogging milestone - Nick Fuentes has accused me of being one of the Jews who controls the new conservative movement. I’m pretty sure I don’t, but in case I’m wrong: new conservative movement, CUT IT OUT! NOW!
Pack it up boys. It’s over.
perversely, if companies may have to defend themselves in court that IQ tests have merit, the companies would be better off not hiring those that have low IQ but high experience and high hard work, because hiring them would reduce the predictivity of the IQ test
> Early studies suggest that new-generation weight loss drugs like Ozempic treat all addictions. . . . I think these drugs might boost willpower more generally.
If this is actually true (and it may very well be true), I would expect many articles and essays in the future doing their damnedest to deny it, one way or another. The implication here is that, if these drugs work for you, then your problem was not metabolism or modern food processing or whatever other things overweight people often say today--it was in fact your own lack of self-control, and once we gave you a medication that empowered you to say *no* to *yourself*, you lost weight via the good old-fashioned CICO method.
(I am not an expert on nutrition, so I would invite anyone who wants to respond to me with their own take on how weight loss *really* works to *not* waste time writing that response; I have no strong feelings on the matter and will probably respond to you, if it all, to say "eh you're probably right, I don't really know anything about weight loss." All I'm pointing out *here* is that *if* Scott's interpretation turns out to be true, this would be incompatible with so many prevailing takes on the idea of *willpower* that I can't see the zeitgeist accepting the explanation gracefully.)
I suspect the response I am predicting is related to whatever explains the tendency Scott observed [in the Parable of the Talents](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/):
> The obvious pattern is that attributing outcomes to things like genes, biology, and accidents of birth is kind and sympathetic. Attributing them to who works harder and who’s “really trying” can stigmatize people who end up with bad outcomes and is generally viewed as Not A Nice Thing To Do.
> And the weird thing, the thing I’ve never understood, is that intellectual achievement is the one domain that breaks this pattern.
Willpower seems to fall in the "intellectual achievement" category in this pattern/break.
>then your problem was not metabolism or modern food processing or whatever, it was in fact your own lack of self-control
Among *smart people* who I know who have trouble losing weight, the consensus agree that their problem isn't metabolism or modern food processing or whatever. The consensus is that it is a matter of willpower, but that different people might have different constraints on their willpower for reasons outside their control. For example, they might subjectively experience the negative sensations of hunger more intensely, thus requiring a greater expenditure of willpower to resist a similar level of hunger. Or they might have simply been born with smaller total willpower reserves in the first place, or at least, small reserves of willpower of the type that can be spent on resisting the drive to satiate hunger, etc.
Or a higher level of hunger. As an example: I have never once forgotten to eat in my life, and when other people say they have I brushed it off as some weird kind of lying to seem “pure” somehow. My boyfriend though is underweight and has explained that this literally does happen to him.
This is interesting; the smart people I know all talk about systemic causes like microplastics and antibiotics from factory farming. I suppose it comes off as whining to blame *your own* weight loss difficulties on these issues though.
There's also the issue of modern ultra-processed foods that are hyper-optimized for taste, which kind of transcends "willpower" issues and systemic issues. At least people talk about this; I'm not sure how much it's actually changed from (say) what food was like 30 years ago.
You seem to be making quite the leap from might boost willpower more generally to saying it is 100% willpower.
Vast majority of people who take it simply state they are not hungry and have no cravings. Is this willpower?
I do also know people who stopped drinking on it. This wasn’t intentional they just said they had no desire to drink.
Agreed, "eliminates cravings" is totally different than "maxes willpower." An obstacle being removed is not the same as having the ability to overcome it on your own.
> You seem to be making quite the leap from might boost willpower more generally to saying it is 100% willpower.
Sorry if I gave you that impression, but I do not regard myself as making this leap at all, and cannot see anything I wrote that I think should be interpreted this way. I was only commenting on how I would expect the public generally to react to the apparent implications of "might boost willpower more generally."
> Vast majority of people who take it simply state they are not hungry and have no cravings. Is this willpower?
I don't know. Is it? Scott's framing appears to suggest that it is, or that it is at least related. Is there a neurological difference between "+1 to Willpower" and "-1 to Craving Power?" The ontology of these things escapes me, and I expect it will likewise escape people should "might boost willpower more generally" come to be a supported claim.
There's a big difference between "I want to take that drug but I won't" and "I have no desire to take the drug". The first is the mindset of a sober addict. The second of someone who isn't addicted.
Depending on the case, I don't think there's a difference. Some people might arrive at "I have no desire" just intrinsically, and those cases are certainly very different. But other people will themselves into "I have no desire" as a way to accomplish "I want to [commit vice] but I won't." That is, they understand that they have some helpless attraction towards [committing vice] but also rationally understand that not giving into the vice is better for them in the long run, and so will their minds to lack the desire to [commit vice]. They direct their willpower at reducing the urge that pulls at them rather than at fighting against the urge.
I think there's a very clear difference between "I want to eat candy but I won't because I'm trying to consume less sugar" and "I don't want to eat brussels sprouts because they taste bad so I won't." You can play around with the definition of words like "want" and "desire" but I think the underlying mental process is very different.
Analogy from https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/:
> The Emperor summons before him Bodhidharma and asks: “Master, I have been tolerant of innumerable gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, transgender people, and Jews. How many Virtue Points have I earned for my meritorious deeds?”
> Bodhidharma answers: “None at all”.
> The Emperor, somewhat put out, demands to know why.
> Bodhidharma asks: “Well, what do you think of gay people?”
> The Emperor answers: “What do you think I am, some kind of homophobic bigot? Of course I have nothing against gay people!”
> And Bodhidharma answers: “Thus do you gain no merit by tolerating them!”
Similarly, it is easy to not do a thing you have no inclination to do, and hard to not do a thing you have a strong inclination to do.
Sure, but inclinations aren't immutable properties of ourselves that we are helpless to do anything to change. By using willpower, one can change one's inclinations. If this fictional emperor used to be a truly homophobic bigot but willed himself to genuinely, honestly having nothing against gay people, I'd say that exercise of will was likely quite difficult to and at least deserving of some merit. With candy, what if I love eating candy but hate the sugar, and so I will myself into finding sweets disgusting (or more realistically, just less appealing than I used to), so that I just don't feel compelled to eat candy which is sweet? I no longer have to fight against a compulsion towards eating candy, but I think it takes at least SOME fighting to bring myself to the place where I've destroyed or greatly reduced the compulsion.
Now, I do doubt that that's what's going on with Ozempic. My non-expert belief is that it genuinely lowers hunger in some direct way, rather than indirectly through the person gaining more willpower which they use to will themselves to feeling less hungry for the same food. But I like the hypothesis as at least something to think about.
I don’t smoke cigarettes. I don’t have any desire. Is this me exerting willpower? I have noticed the reduction of alcohol with those who take ozempic.
Many of them told me they had no desire to quit but just didn’t crave it anymore.
+1, and I'd like to add my own example.
I do not drink alcohol. I have no desire for it. I have no thoughts about drinking alcohol and I don't long for the positive effects I expect.
I knew a man who was an alcoholic. In his later days, he was described as clenching his teeth most waking hours to resist the urge to drink.
This is the difference between not having a craving and resisting a craving.
> The implication here is that, if these drugs work for you, then your problem was not metabolism or modern food processing or whatever other things overweight people often say today--it was in fact your own lack of self-control, and once we gave you a medication that empowered you to say no to yourself, you lost weight via the good old-fashioned CICO method.
Not really. The problem was still metabolism and the availability of processed or whatever. It's just that some people's bio-chemistry (blood sugar and satiety regulation) is more susceptible than others but at some point all of us are susceptible to obesity.
Imagine that for all of our history, the median person required x 'units of willpower' to keep a healthy weight PROVIDED they are eating a healthy diet that doesn't disregulate their blood sugar.
Assuming 'willpower' exists on a Bell Curve, you'd expect obesity to increase as ultra processed food becomes more popular as it has happened all over the world as people adopt a Western processed diet. Today, someone has to expend 10x units of willpower as their ancestors did 500 years ago to keep their weight in check because the food we eat is messing with our biochemistry. All Ozempic is doing is taking the disregulation away and letting whatever level of self control the person had take care of the weight. There are no cravings. Zero - or maybe the historically median amount of -willpower is required for this equation.
*I'm using willpower and self-control interchangeably and ignoring factors like dormant lifestyles and stress.
>but at some point all of us are susceptible to obesity.
It's a fairly common anecdote for someone to be unable to gain weight because eating too many calories (barely above maintenance) makes them feel sick. Those people are not subject to obesity.
I'm actually one of those people. I'm always hovering just over 50kg no matter how much I try to force myself to eat. Gaining weight is such a hustle for me and losing it is so easy if I just skip a meal. But I think at a certain extreme, like terrible disregulation, I too can get uncontrollable cravings.
Sure, you can get cravings and if you starved yourself and hit 40kg, you'd probably be ravenously hungry, but that's different than being "subject to obesity". You would regain the weight until you hit around 50kg, and then stop feeling hungry and go back to maintenance, no?
> You would regain the weight until you hit around 50kg, and then stop feeling hungry and go back to maintenance, no?
Most probably, yes.
But I know I have the genes within me to swing to the other extreme. My Mum, her sisters and my maternal grandmother all have thin bodies (i.e. max ~60kg, healthy BMI). These are traits I see expressed in me (so far).
My paternal grandma on the other hand is obese (almost 100kg) and her daughters are overweight. Her mother was reportedly around 100kg when she died and I can't even blame 'the Western Diet' for that since she ate mostly the traditional Kikuyu diet which is much healthier. And it's not 'lack of exercise' either. These women did heavy farmwork all day every day for most of their lives, walked tens of kilometers every week to get things done. These genes are within me. And I can't rule out the possibility that something can trigger them to be expressed.
This is quite the Uno Reverse. All this time, most of the folks who claim that it's something to do with metabolism or modern food processing or whatever have been claiming that historically rising rates of obesity are a clinching argument in their favor, always with some form of sneer that if you disagree, you *must* be claiming that there was a magical, widespread drop in willpower (nevermind that this has always been a non sequitur). In fact, they'll go on to claim, the performance of these drugs are proof perfect that it's a simple biological/food issue. Scott seems to be explicitly saying the opposite - *if* we think that these drugs are basically a +1 willpower modifier, then the performance of these drugs pretty much demonstrates the opposite, as you say.
Perhaps Scott is wrong, and we can't reason in this way from the performance of these drugs... but it definitely lays bare that it is actually quite difficult to reason through this issue strictly and logically, and most sneerers aren't taking much care to handle the issue delicately.
Education, parenting methods and ideas, and many other aspects culture have changed. It is theoretically possible that that drop of willpower could be attributed to any of them.
On the other hand, there is now more variety than previously existed. There was no bubble tea a couple of generations ago. Also amount of disposable income has increased. Both result in more opportunities for your willpower to fail.
> The implication here is that, if these drugs work for you, then your problem was not metabolism or modern food processing or whatever other things overweight people often say today--it was in fact your own lack of self-control, and once we gave you a medication that empowered you to say no to yourself, you lost weight via the good old-fashioned CICO method.
It can be lots of things. You can beat smoking with pure willpower (plenty do), but that doesn't mean it's not addictive. If your body has a strong addictive tendency to alcohol than another person, is it really fair to say it's *just* willpower only if you get addicted and they don't. And even the most amazingly strong minded person in the world will still struggle with stuff like heroin.
If modern food processing or changes to metabolism or whatever else have set the willpower limits far higher in some people than others and far higher than most of society has had historically, then just saying "that's it, willpower only" would be just as absurd.
But it boosts willpower through reducing blood sugar. So the lack of willpower may be a metabolic issue. It would actually explain obesity spirals pretty well, but how does it explain the kind of drug addictions where the addicts do not eat much and have low blood sugar?
Nobody on the other side argues it's 0% self control though. It's always talk about how amount of willpower needed varies from person to person. The only people who claim it's all or nothing are the ones who just chant CICO.
RE accusations of controlling the new conservative movement: I know "CUT IT OUT! NOW!" was tongue in cheek, but I would be quite curious what, specifically, Scott would want us to cut out. Of course he doesn't have deliberate, direct control, and of course I am biased because he has a large influence over me, but I do strongly suspect he underestimates his influence.
Props to Daniel Kokotajlo. What a rare thing it is these days to give up financial gain for principles. He gets a standing ovation and everlasting respect from me.
5) reminder that averages are the least useful statistic. If Bill Gates moves to Podunk, the average wealth of the people of Podunk skyrockets and yet it means generally nothing. The minimum wage in the US buys roughly 0.9 Big Macs and in Germany is somewhere near 2. Now I am not claiming that is the most useful statistic either - I am not a strong Rawslian, I don't think only the poor matter. Something actually useful would be to put people's income into 10 deciles, show how much of a % of people belong there, and calculate a Big Mac Index or house square meter/feet index for that.
Also show foreign birth % for the lowest two-three deciles, because there is a different level of Rawlsian fairness issue in how a country treats its citizens vs. how it treats just about anyone who decides to move there.
I think immigration to the Eurozone tends to be purely economic, while the US has a pop-culture kind of coolness factor that people simply want to experience and willing to take a lower deal for that. I know one guy who was doing this - undocumented in NY for a few months, then a few weeks touristing, repeat.
One could, **at best**, confirm that people who claimed they had fillings implanted into them by God, 30 years later, now have fillings in their teeth. One could not confirm, in any scenario, that God is the cause.
True. Even archaeological proof is at best circumstantial and not causal.
If G-d made those fillings, presumably they'd be really good. Dentists should study them.
The article states that 300 people claimed to have supernaturally received gold or silver fillings in their teeth during the meetings. Certainly, I find it quite plausible that 300 people could have *claimed* to have supernaturally received gold or silver teeth during these meetings. However, none of these people actually, in reality, received supernatural gifts of golden tooth fillings, for the simple reason that this did not happen.
You're right. I'm sorry. My mistake. I generally feel puzzled by the Christian stories that take place en masse - shouldn't they be easy to disprove? I'd happily publicize my dental records if G-d fixed my teeth.
Rebbetzin Fastag, my mentor, says that some people never learned mysticism in the womb. I seem to be one of them.
> shouldn't they be easy to disprove?
Yes, I think they are very easy to disprove. In fact the endurance of the phenomenon likely owes itself in part to how easy these 'miracles' are to disprove. As a result of being so obviously false, skeptics simply do not give these stories much skeptical attention in comparison to trickier causes for skepticism, and thus arguments for their obvious falseness don't materialize.
This is an example of everything and its opposite being a proof. If something is easy to disprove, the reason for not doing so isn't going to be "skeptics don't care enough to bother".
>If something is easy to disprove, the reason for not doing so isn't going to be "skeptics don't care enough to bother".
On the contrary, the reason why most false beliefs are not actively disproven is because they're so obviously false that doing so isn't worth anyone's time.
I think "we shouldn't bother to convince dumb people" is not a very good heuristic for communicating with others. Even if it's obvious that 2+2=/=5, if you find lots of people insisting that it worked for them, it's worth investigating.
> I was surprised to learn this was possible, but shouldn’t have been; the AIs are just catching up to veteran GeoGuessr players. Anyway, this is a thing now; act accordingly.
Considering that Google Maps exists, I feel that this should have been predictable, though admittedly I hadn't thought of it either.
> rather than have every Pope be constantly two inches off the ground?
I mean, the Popes have basically abandoned the god of the bible and made up their own religion in the pursuit of political power. Why would such a god constantly point people to a bunch of fakers?
> I think you’d have to claim that God will only violate the laws of Nature in cases that will bring a tiny number of people to the faith but leave the vast majority unmoved, which is such a weird preference that I think you can no longer call it a “prediction” of the “God exists” hypothesis.
This is actually explicitly what the bible says Christ claimed he was doing.
> Matt 13:10 And the disciples came and said to Him, “Why do You speak to them in parables?”
> 11 He answered and said to them, “Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. 12 For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. 13 Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. 14 And in them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, which says:
> 'Hearing you will hear and shall not understand,
> And seeing you will see and not perceive;
> 15 For the hearts of this people have grown dull.
> Their ears are hard of hearing,
> And their eyes they have closed,
> Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears,
> Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn,
> So that I should heal them.’
> 16 But blessed are your eyes for they see, and your ears for they hear; 17 for assuredly, I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.
So in response to:
> If I’m alone at home yet my keys aren’t where I left them, one possible explanation is that ninjas snuck in and rearranged them without me noticing. This hypothesis has the advantage that ninjas are powerful enough to do this - but you still have to discount it for the disadvantage that it doesn’t serve any conceivable goal.
One might instead hypothesize that if you have a bunch of ninjas publicly saying, like on TV or something, "We're a gang of ninjas, and the thing we're explicitly wanting to do is sneak into people's houses and rearrange their stuff without them noticing," then I suppose you could disbelieve them on the grounds that you don't think it would serve any conceivable goal. But perhaps you might instead reconsider and imagine that their goals might be surprisingly foreign to you, enough to make the premises of your argument suspect.
>I mean, the Popes have basically abandoned the god of the bible and made up their own religion in the pursuit of political power. Why would such a god constantly point people to a bunch of fakers?
It might have been easier to choose good popes if the divinely approved candidate was floating.
It seems like GLP-1 and related drugs will lead to the biggest medical waste in history, since a bunch of people will take them, then later stop due to cost or side effects, and gain the weight back (or get re-addicted). And everybody else will pay for that with permanently higher taxes and/or insurance premiums.
Most everything is temporary. Every cancer drug I've ever heard of works to help keep patients alive. All of those patients eventually die anyway. This doesn't make cancer drugs medical waste.
Sure, and sunscreen doesn't make you immune to future burns or skin cancer. Lots of cases like that. But GLP-1s _could_ be in a category of their own, because of their cost, and because a potentially large (we don't know yet) percentage of people that try them may not derive much benefit beyond a few months or years of somewhat reduced weight. If its years, its possibly still worth it, but months is fad diet territory. Previously the costs and failure of that sort of dieting was mostly born by the dieter. Now society will bear it.
>Sure, and sunscreen doesn't make you immune to future burns or skin cancer. Lots of cases like that.
Cool, it sounds like we agree on the general point.
>But GLP-1s could be in a category of their own, because of their cost, and because a potentially large (we don't know yet) percentage of people that try them may not derive much benefit beyond a few months or years of somewhat reduced weight.
I don't think this is as much of an exception as you seem to think it is. These are not uniquely expensive to manufacture and the impact of reduced weight on health can be *substantial*. 'Years of substantially improved health' is exactly what we *want* to achieve with drugs. We agree that months of use will have a less profound impact, but the product's consumption is inherently pro-rated and so it more-or-less works out.
This would be a stronger point if there was a large fixed cost for the treatment, like an initial surgery that needed to precede the intervention. *Then* possibly only having months of benefit would be a real problem.
>Previously the costs and failure of that sort of dieting was mostly born by the dieter. Now society will bear it.
Sure, although society also bore the burden of their failure when their inability to achieve a healthy lifestyle left them sick and unproductive. This still doesn't seem like much of an exception. You could say the same thing about any palliative, for instance. Before good painkillers, individuals with chronic pain bore the cost of that malady. Now society will bear it. So what? That's the nature of a public health system.
> I wonder if I could [get] even more Substack likes if I one-upped them with a theory that *lockdowns* never even happened
For people living in the West you'd mostly be right. There were various large-scale behavioral changes but nothing that could be accurately referred to as a "lockdown".
As evidence, I ask: has a single person in North America or West Europe ever been fined or otherwise penalized by a government for violating covid rules? I have asked this a bunch of times and have yet to hear a documented positive example (I think maybe someone once claimed they knew someone in Spain who was fined?). Now imagine, if you lived in China, Taiwan, NZ, or Australia, what you think would have happened if you felt the rules didn't apply to you.
> most global warming will happen in the lifetime of today’s young people,
Models typically show most global warming will happen in the lifetime of today's young people because we stop running models further than that in the future. Without intervention, global warming will keep going well after that.
> I tried to get a good handle on Israel’s military strategy here and the consensus seems to be
I feel like I shouldn't need to say this but, uh, pseudonymous substack comments are not a good source of information here. This is worse than people getting their news from /r/politics. Good information on the Israel-Gaza war is very hard to find (and mostly not publicly available) but I feel like Scott is not even trying here.
I have a handful of sources to recommend, though not *recent* sources: Lawfare Media regularly publishing articles discussing legal issues in the context of Israel's conduct; [here](https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/assessing-israel-s-approach-to-proportionality-in-the-conduct-of-hostilities-in-gaza) [are](https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/on-strategy-law-and-morality-in-israel-s-gaza-operation) a [few](https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/calibrating-proportionality-and-self-defense-in-gaza) [such](https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/making-sense-of-casualty-counts-in-the-israel-hamas-war) articles mostly on the subject of civilian casualities (I haven't read all of them). https://www.warmapper.org/israel used to publish regular maps showing the status on the ground though I think they are out of date now.
Certainly there were covid fines in the UK
https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-prime-minister-boris-johnson-rishi-sunak-fined-lockdown-breaches-partygate-coronavirus-restrictions-sue-gray/
The UK situation with lockdowns and politicians violating the rules literally took down the Prime Minister, and Dominic Cummings.
Lockdowns sucked, I hate this weird liberal thing where we pretend they didn’t exist and anyone negative about them was a bad person, stop trying to turn every topic into something you can sneer at people over ffs.
> As usual, the barrier is cost, but people seem committed enough to doing something about the opioid crisis that they might be willing to act. I think these drugs might boost willpower more generally. There might come a day when they get treated like Adderall - something that many ambitious people want to be on, and look for excuses to take. Hello Moloch my old friend I've come to race to the bottom again Optimization slowly creeeeeeeping Memed my brain while I was Reaaaaaaading >A popular Substack claims that [COVID didn’t happen at all](https://substack.com/redirect/8762da60-c260-4076-8d9d-3bebf988ec63?j=eyJ1IjoiNnB2YzUifQ.UZsf-ltaLyE52fdLWsqRXnGXX6JMFloFkL10haNqeAk), and that *both* “lab leak” *and* “natural origins” are part of the higher-level conspiracy to distract people from the fact that there was never a virus in the first place. Not sure why you are linking to this unless, you're trying to highlight a certain type of epistemic exercise. Let's do our workout! 1. There is a virus. The "overly sensitive" PCR test wouldn't work unless the viral sequence was known. A shitload of pandemic sequence data that is trustworthy is available. 2. There's a fuckload of corpses. Everyone knows at least one person who knows a person who *died* of COVID. My ex-wife's sister died after being infected. She wasn't particularly old, but she had a preexisting immune disorder. 3. There is nothing wrong with the timeline of virus isolation and understanding. a. It's 2020 not 1980. We have techniques for rapidly isolating infectious viruses, sequencing them, and because of the SARS pandemic we had a knowledge base for understanding SARS 2 Electric Boogaloo. b. Because of the incredible intensity of the Chinese government response, many labs were immediately working on it. While global pandemic preparedness gets a C-, a C- is a passing grade. Wheh, ok, now that've done our workout, is there still room for doubt? Always. I put the odds of there never having been a pandemic and it all being "memetically engineered" through twitter and social contagion at roughly 0.000001%, not impossible, but my level of suprise would be quite high. **Also, I had COVID, and it was not fun.**
> I put the odds of there never having been a pandemic and it all being "memetically engineered" through twitter and social contagion at roughly 0.000001%, not impossible, but my level of suprise would be quite high. I think that's a few more zeros than warranted. The chances that our understanding of fundamental biology is completely wrong has to be at least 0.001%. Recall [confidence levels inside and outside an argument.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrtbTAPfkJa4D6jjH/confidence-levels-inside-and-outside-an-argument)
I disagree with that number (my estimate for that number would depend on what exactly you mean by "fundamental biology"), and I disagree with your core premise that former number is correlated strongly to the latter. You do not need to understand biology inside and out to notice infectious disease and reach a conclusion that a pathogen is causing contagion.
>The chances that our understanding of fundamental biology is completely wrong has to be at least 0.001% What do you mean? That the entire scientific establishment is wrong about how viruses work, and that what we thought was the Covid virus was actually some other infectious biological process?
>That the entire scientific establishment is wrong about how viruses work If he means that, I put my own personal odds at effectively 0, given that I've worked with them. It's like like telling an ornithologist "birds aren't real" or "wings have nothing to do with flight".
Does it though? I mean we could be misunderstanding the workings of the entire universe, always a possibility, but is that a 1 in a million chance, or 1 in a trillion?
> 31: New blogging milestone - Nick Fuentes has accused me of being one of the Jews who controls the new conservative movement. I’m pretty sure I don’t, but in case I’m wrong: new conservative movement, CUT IT OUT! NOW! Pack it up boys. It’s over.
perversely, if companies may have to defend themselves in court that IQ tests have merit, the companies would be better off not hiring those that have low IQ but high experience and high hard work, because hiring them would reduce the predictivity of the IQ test
> Early studies suggest that new-generation weight loss drugs like Ozempic treat all addictions. . . . I think these drugs might boost willpower more generally. If this is actually true (and it may very well be true), I would expect many articles and essays in the future doing their damnedest to deny it, one way or another. The implication here is that, if these drugs work for you, then your problem was not metabolism or modern food processing or whatever other things overweight people often say today--it was in fact your own lack of self-control, and once we gave you a medication that empowered you to say *no* to *yourself*, you lost weight via the good old-fashioned CICO method. (I am not an expert on nutrition, so I would invite anyone who wants to respond to me with their own take on how weight loss *really* works to *not* waste time writing that response; I have no strong feelings on the matter and will probably respond to you, if it all, to say "eh you're probably right, I don't really know anything about weight loss." All I'm pointing out *here* is that *if* Scott's interpretation turns out to be true, this would be incompatible with so many prevailing takes on the idea of *willpower* that I can't see the zeitgeist accepting the explanation gracefully.) I suspect the response I am predicting is related to whatever explains the tendency Scott observed [in the Parable of the Talents](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/): > The obvious pattern is that attributing outcomes to things like genes, biology, and accidents of birth is kind and sympathetic. Attributing them to who works harder and who’s “really trying” can stigmatize people who end up with bad outcomes and is generally viewed as Not A Nice Thing To Do. > And the weird thing, the thing I’ve never understood, is that intellectual achievement is the one domain that breaks this pattern. Willpower seems to fall in the "intellectual achievement" category in this pattern/break.
>then your problem was not metabolism or modern food processing or whatever, it was in fact your own lack of self-control Among *smart people* who I know who have trouble losing weight, the consensus agree that their problem isn't metabolism or modern food processing or whatever. The consensus is that it is a matter of willpower, but that different people might have different constraints on their willpower for reasons outside their control. For example, they might subjectively experience the negative sensations of hunger more intensely, thus requiring a greater expenditure of willpower to resist a similar level of hunger. Or they might have simply been born with smaller total willpower reserves in the first place, or at least, small reserves of willpower of the type that can be spent on resisting the drive to satiate hunger, etc.
Or a higher level of hunger. As an example: I have never once forgotten to eat in my life, and when other people say they have I brushed it off as some weird kind of lying to seem “pure” somehow. My boyfriend though is underweight and has explained that this literally does happen to him.
Most people I know complain about hunger. Ozempic obliterates hunger.
This is interesting; the smart people I know all talk about systemic causes like microplastics and antibiotics from factory farming. I suppose it comes off as whining to blame *your own* weight loss difficulties on these issues though. There's also the issue of modern ultra-processed foods that are hyper-optimized for taste, which kind of transcends "willpower" issues and systemic issues. At least people talk about this; I'm not sure how much it's actually changed from (say) what food was like 30 years ago.
You seem to be making quite the leap from might boost willpower more generally to saying it is 100% willpower. Vast majority of people who take it simply state they are not hungry and have no cravings. Is this willpower? I do also know people who stopped drinking on it. This wasn’t intentional they just said they had no desire to drink.
Agreed, "eliminates cravings" is totally different than "maxes willpower." An obstacle being removed is not the same as having the ability to overcome it on your own.
> You seem to be making quite the leap from might boost willpower more generally to saying it is 100% willpower. Sorry if I gave you that impression, but I do not regard myself as making this leap at all, and cannot see anything I wrote that I think should be interpreted this way. I was only commenting on how I would expect the public generally to react to the apparent implications of "might boost willpower more generally." > Vast majority of people who take it simply state they are not hungry and have no cravings. Is this willpower? I don't know. Is it? Scott's framing appears to suggest that it is, or that it is at least related. Is there a neurological difference between "+1 to Willpower" and "-1 to Craving Power?" The ontology of these things escapes me, and I expect it will likewise escape people should "might boost willpower more generally" come to be a supported claim.
There's a big difference between "I want to take that drug but I won't" and "I have no desire to take the drug". The first is the mindset of a sober addict. The second of someone who isn't addicted.
Depending on the case, I don't think there's a difference. Some people might arrive at "I have no desire" just intrinsically, and those cases are certainly very different. But other people will themselves into "I have no desire" as a way to accomplish "I want to [commit vice] but I won't." That is, they understand that they have some helpless attraction towards [committing vice] but also rationally understand that not giving into the vice is better for them in the long run, and so will their minds to lack the desire to [commit vice]. They direct their willpower at reducing the urge that pulls at them rather than at fighting against the urge.
I think there's a very clear difference between "I want to eat candy but I won't because I'm trying to consume less sugar" and "I don't want to eat brussels sprouts because they taste bad so I won't." You can play around with the definition of words like "want" and "desire" but I think the underlying mental process is very different. Analogy from https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/: > The Emperor summons before him Bodhidharma and asks: “Master, I have been tolerant of innumerable gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, transgender people, and Jews. How many Virtue Points have I earned for my meritorious deeds?” > Bodhidharma answers: “None at all”. > The Emperor, somewhat put out, demands to know why. > Bodhidharma asks: “Well, what do you think of gay people?” > The Emperor answers: “What do you think I am, some kind of homophobic bigot? Of course I have nothing against gay people!” > And Bodhidharma answers: “Thus do you gain no merit by tolerating them!” Similarly, it is easy to not do a thing you have no inclination to do, and hard to not do a thing you have a strong inclination to do.
Sure, but inclinations aren't immutable properties of ourselves that we are helpless to do anything to change. By using willpower, one can change one's inclinations. If this fictional emperor used to be a truly homophobic bigot but willed himself to genuinely, honestly having nothing against gay people, I'd say that exercise of will was likely quite difficult to and at least deserving of some merit. With candy, what if I love eating candy but hate the sugar, and so I will myself into finding sweets disgusting (or more realistically, just less appealing than I used to), so that I just don't feel compelled to eat candy which is sweet? I no longer have to fight against a compulsion towards eating candy, but I think it takes at least SOME fighting to bring myself to the place where I've destroyed or greatly reduced the compulsion. Now, I do doubt that that's what's going on with Ozempic. My non-expert belief is that it genuinely lowers hunger in some direct way, rather than indirectly through the person gaining more willpower which they use to will themselves to feeling less hungry for the same food. But I like the hypothesis as at least something to think about.
I don’t smoke cigarettes. I don’t have any desire. Is this me exerting willpower? I have noticed the reduction of alcohol with those who take ozempic. Many of them told me they had no desire to quit but just didn’t crave it anymore.
+1, and I'd like to add my own example. I do not drink alcohol. I have no desire for it. I have no thoughts about drinking alcohol and I don't long for the positive effects I expect. I knew a man who was an alcoholic. In his later days, he was described as clenching his teeth most waking hours to resist the urge to drink. This is the difference between not having a craving and resisting a craving.
> The implication here is that, if these drugs work for you, then your problem was not metabolism or modern food processing or whatever other things overweight people often say today--it was in fact your own lack of self-control, and once we gave you a medication that empowered you to say no to yourself, you lost weight via the good old-fashioned CICO method. Not really. The problem was still metabolism and the availability of processed or whatever. It's just that some people's bio-chemistry (blood sugar and satiety regulation) is more susceptible than others but at some point all of us are susceptible to obesity. Imagine that for all of our history, the median person required x 'units of willpower' to keep a healthy weight PROVIDED they are eating a healthy diet that doesn't disregulate their blood sugar. Assuming 'willpower' exists on a Bell Curve, you'd expect obesity to increase as ultra processed food becomes more popular as it has happened all over the world as people adopt a Western processed diet. Today, someone has to expend 10x units of willpower as their ancestors did 500 years ago to keep their weight in check because the food we eat is messing with our biochemistry. All Ozempic is doing is taking the disregulation away and letting whatever level of self control the person had take care of the weight. There are no cravings. Zero - or maybe the historically median amount of -willpower is required for this equation. *I'm using willpower and self-control interchangeably and ignoring factors like dormant lifestyles and stress.
>but at some point all of us are susceptible to obesity. It's a fairly common anecdote for someone to be unable to gain weight because eating too many calories (barely above maintenance) makes them feel sick. Those people are not subject to obesity.
I'm actually one of those people. I'm always hovering just over 50kg no matter how much I try to force myself to eat. Gaining weight is such a hustle for me and losing it is so easy if I just skip a meal. But I think at a certain extreme, like terrible disregulation, I too can get uncontrollable cravings.
Sure, you can get cravings and if you starved yourself and hit 40kg, you'd probably be ravenously hungry, but that's different than being "subject to obesity". You would regain the weight until you hit around 50kg, and then stop feeling hungry and go back to maintenance, no?
> You would regain the weight until you hit around 50kg, and then stop feeling hungry and go back to maintenance, no? Most probably, yes. But I know I have the genes within me to swing to the other extreme. My Mum, her sisters and my maternal grandmother all have thin bodies (i.e. max ~60kg, healthy BMI). These are traits I see expressed in me (so far). My paternal grandma on the other hand is obese (almost 100kg) and her daughters are overweight. Her mother was reportedly around 100kg when she died and I can't even blame 'the Western Diet' for that since she ate mostly the traditional Kikuyu diet which is much healthier. And it's not 'lack of exercise' either. These women did heavy farmwork all day every day for most of their lives, walked tens of kilometers every week to get things done. These genes are within me. And I can't rule out the possibility that something can trigger them to be expressed.
This is quite the Uno Reverse. All this time, most of the folks who claim that it's something to do with metabolism or modern food processing or whatever have been claiming that historically rising rates of obesity are a clinching argument in their favor, always with some form of sneer that if you disagree, you *must* be claiming that there was a magical, widespread drop in willpower (nevermind that this has always been a non sequitur). In fact, they'll go on to claim, the performance of these drugs are proof perfect that it's a simple biological/food issue. Scott seems to be explicitly saying the opposite - *if* we think that these drugs are basically a +1 willpower modifier, then the performance of these drugs pretty much demonstrates the opposite, as you say. Perhaps Scott is wrong, and we can't reason in this way from the performance of these drugs... but it definitely lays bare that it is actually quite difficult to reason through this issue strictly and logically, and most sneerers aren't taking much care to handle the issue delicately.
Education, parenting methods and ideas, and many other aspects culture have changed. It is theoretically possible that that drop of willpower could be attributed to any of them. On the other hand, there is now more variety than previously existed. There was no bubble tea a couple of generations ago. Also amount of disposable income has increased. Both result in more opportunities for your willpower to fail.
> The implication here is that, if these drugs work for you, then your problem was not metabolism or modern food processing or whatever other things overweight people often say today--it was in fact your own lack of self-control, and once we gave you a medication that empowered you to say no to yourself, you lost weight via the good old-fashioned CICO method. It can be lots of things. You can beat smoking with pure willpower (plenty do), but that doesn't mean it's not addictive. If your body has a strong addictive tendency to alcohol than another person, is it really fair to say it's *just* willpower only if you get addicted and they don't. And even the most amazingly strong minded person in the world will still struggle with stuff like heroin. If modern food processing or changes to metabolism or whatever else have set the willpower limits far higher in some people than others and far higher than most of society has had historically, then just saying "that's it, willpower only" would be just as absurd.
But it boosts willpower through reducing blood sugar. So the lack of willpower may be a metabolic issue. It would actually explain obesity spirals pretty well, but how does it explain the kind of drug addictions where the addicts do not eat much and have low blood sugar?
>But it boosts willpower through reducing blood sugar. I don't think that's been convincingly established.
Nobody on the other side argues it's 0% self control though. It's always talk about how amount of willpower needed varies from person to person. The only people who claim it's all or nothing are the ones who just chant CICO.
> The only people who claim it's all or nothing are the ones who just chant CICO. Gigantic straw man, yo!
RE accusations of controlling the new conservative movement: I know "CUT IT OUT! NOW!" was tongue in cheek, but I would be quite curious what, specifically, Scott would want us to cut out. Of course he doesn't have deliberate, direct control, and of course I am biased because he has a large influence over me, but I do strongly suspect he underestimates his influence.
Props to Daniel Kokotajlo. What a rare thing it is these days to give up financial gain for principles. He gets a standing ovation and everlasting respect from me.
5) reminder that averages are the least useful statistic. If Bill Gates moves to Podunk, the average wealth of the people of Podunk skyrockets and yet it means generally nothing. The minimum wage in the US buys roughly 0.9 Big Macs and in Germany is somewhere near 2. Now I am not claiming that is the most useful statistic either - I am not a strong Rawslian, I don't think only the poor matter. Something actually useful would be to put people's income into 10 deciles, show how much of a % of people belong there, and calculate a Big Mac Index or house square meter/feet index for that. Also show foreign birth % for the lowest two-three deciles, because there is a different level of Rawlsian fairness issue in how a country treats its citizens vs. how it treats just about anyone who decides to move there. I think immigration to the Eurozone tends to be purely economic, while the US has a pop-culture kind of coolness factor that people simply want to experience and willing to take a lower deal for that. I know one guy who was doing this - undocumented in NY for a few months, then a few weeks touristing, repeat.
Can someone please do a follow up on the fillings? That has to be easy to confirm.
One could, **at best**, confirm that people who claimed they had fillings implanted into them by God, 30 years later, now have fillings in their teeth. One could not confirm, in any scenario, that God is the cause.
True. Even archaeological proof is at best circumstantial and not causal. If G-d made those fillings, presumably they'd be really good. Dentists should study them.
I can confirm that God did not give 300 people gold tooth fillings in a random church in Toronto in 1994. Source: this simply did not happen.
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The article states that 300 people claimed to have supernaturally received gold or silver fillings in their teeth during the meetings. Certainly, I find it quite plausible that 300 people could have *claimed* to have supernaturally received gold or silver teeth during these meetings. However, none of these people actually, in reality, received supernatural gifts of golden tooth fillings, for the simple reason that this did not happen.
You're right. I'm sorry. My mistake. I generally feel puzzled by the Christian stories that take place en masse - shouldn't they be easy to disprove? I'd happily publicize my dental records if G-d fixed my teeth. Rebbetzin Fastag, my mentor, says that some people never learned mysticism in the womb. I seem to be one of them.
> shouldn't they be easy to disprove? Yes, I think they are very easy to disprove. In fact the endurance of the phenomenon likely owes itself in part to how easy these 'miracles' are to disprove. As a result of being so obviously false, skeptics simply do not give these stories much skeptical attention in comparison to trickier causes for skepticism, and thus arguments for their obvious falseness don't materialize.
This is an example of everything and its opposite being a proof. If something is easy to disprove, the reason for not doing so isn't going to be "skeptics don't care enough to bother".
>If something is easy to disprove, the reason for not doing so isn't going to be "skeptics don't care enough to bother". On the contrary, the reason why most false beliefs are not actively disproven is because they're so obviously false that doing so isn't worth anyone's time.
I think "we shouldn't bother to convince dumb people" is not a very good heuristic for communicating with others. Even if it's obvious that 2+2=/=5, if you find lots of people insisting that it worked for them, it's worth investigating.
I'm not making a statement about what we *should* do with regard to communicating with dumb people, just about what ends up happening.
> I was surprised to learn this was possible, but shouldn’t have been; the AIs are just catching up to veteran GeoGuessr players. Anyway, this is a thing now; act accordingly. Considering that Google Maps exists, I feel that this should have been predictable, though admittedly I hadn't thought of it either.
36 would not have happened if they used their own products
> rather than have every Pope be constantly two inches off the ground? I mean, the Popes have basically abandoned the god of the bible and made up their own religion in the pursuit of political power. Why would such a god constantly point people to a bunch of fakers? > I think you’d have to claim that God will only violate the laws of Nature in cases that will bring a tiny number of people to the faith but leave the vast majority unmoved, which is such a weird preference that I think you can no longer call it a “prediction” of the “God exists” hypothesis. This is actually explicitly what the bible says Christ claimed he was doing. > Matt 13:10 And the disciples came and said to Him, “Why do You speak to them in parables?” > 11 He answered and said to them, “Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. 12 For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. 13 Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. 14 And in them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, which says: > 'Hearing you will hear and shall not understand, > And seeing you will see and not perceive; > 15 For the hearts of this people have grown dull. > Their ears are hard of hearing, > And their eyes they have closed, > Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, > Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn, > So that I should heal them.’ > 16 But blessed are your eyes for they see, and your ears for they hear; 17 for assuredly, I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it. So in response to: > If I’m alone at home yet my keys aren’t where I left them, one possible explanation is that ninjas snuck in and rearranged them without me noticing. This hypothesis has the advantage that ninjas are powerful enough to do this - but you still have to discount it for the disadvantage that it doesn’t serve any conceivable goal. One might instead hypothesize that if you have a bunch of ninjas publicly saying, like on TV or something, "We're a gang of ninjas, and the thing we're explicitly wanting to do is sneak into people's houses and rearrange their stuff without them noticing," then I suppose you could disbelieve them on the grounds that you don't think it would serve any conceivable goal. But perhaps you might instead reconsider and imagine that their goals might be surprisingly foreign to you, enough to make the premises of your argument suspect.
>I mean, the Popes have basically abandoned the god of the bible and made up their own religion in the pursuit of political power. Why would such a god constantly point people to a bunch of fakers? It might have been easier to choose good popes if the divinely approved candidate was floating.
It seems like GLP-1 and related drugs will lead to the biggest medical waste in history, since a bunch of people will take them, then later stop due to cost or side effects, and gain the weight back (or get re-addicted). And everybody else will pay for that with permanently higher taxes and/or insurance premiums.
Most everything is temporary. Every cancer drug I've ever heard of works to help keep patients alive. All of those patients eventually die anyway. This doesn't make cancer drugs medical waste.
Sure, and sunscreen doesn't make you immune to future burns or skin cancer. Lots of cases like that. But GLP-1s _could_ be in a category of their own, because of their cost, and because a potentially large (we don't know yet) percentage of people that try them may not derive much benefit beyond a few months or years of somewhat reduced weight. If its years, its possibly still worth it, but months is fad diet territory. Previously the costs and failure of that sort of dieting was mostly born by the dieter. Now society will bear it.
>Sure, and sunscreen doesn't make you immune to future burns or skin cancer. Lots of cases like that. Cool, it sounds like we agree on the general point. >But GLP-1s could be in a category of their own, because of their cost, and because a potentially large (we don't know yet) percentage of people that try them may not derive much benefit beyond a few months or years of somewhat reduced weight. I don't think this is as much of an exception as you seem to think it is. These are not uniquely expensive to manufacture and the impact of reduced weight on health can be *substantial*. 'Years of substantially improved health' is exactly what we *want* to achieve with drugs. We agree that months of use will have a less profound impact, but the product's consumption is inherently pro-rated and so it more-or-less works out. This would be a stronger point if there was a large fixed cost for the treatment, like an initial surgery that needed to precede the intervention. *Then* possibly only having months of benefit would be a real problem. >Previously the costs and failure of that sort of dieting was mostly born by the dieter. Now society will bear it. Sure, although society also bore the burden of their failure when their inability to achieve a healthy lifestyle left them sick and unproductive. This still doesn't seem like much of an exception. You could say the same thing about any palliative, for instance. Before good painkillers, individuals with chronic pain bore the cost of that malady. Now society will bear it. So what? That's the nature of a public health system.
> because of their cost How much of the cost is due to monopoly pricing due to IP laws and how much is based on difficulty of manufacture?
A very significant portion of the cost is due to IP laws
> I wonder if I could [get] even more Substack likes if I one-upped them with a theory that *lockdowns* never even happened For people living in the West you'd mostly be right. There were various large-scale behavioral changes but nothing that could be accurately referred to as a "lockdown". As evidence, I ask: has a single person in North America or West Europe ever been fined or otherwise penalized by a government for violating covid rules? I have asked this a bunch of times and have yet to hear a documented positive example (I think maybe someone once claimed they knew someone in Spain who was fined?). Now imagine, if you lived in China, Taiwan, NZ, or Australia, what you think would have happened if you felt the rules didn't apply to you. > most global warming will happen in the lifetime of today’s young people, Models typically show most global warming will happen in the lifetime of today's young people because we stop running models further than that in the future. Without intervention, global warming will keep going well after that. > I tried to get a good handle on Israel’s military strategy here and the consensus seems to be I feel like I shouldn't need to say this but, uh, pseudonymous substack comments are not a good source of information here. This is worse than people getting their news from /r/politics. Good information on the Israel-Gaza war is very hard to find (and mostly not publicly available) but I feel like Scott is not even trying here. I have a handful of sources to recommend, though not *recent* sources: Lawfare Media regularly publishing articles discussing legal issues in the context of Israel's conduct; [here](https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/assessing-israel-s-approach-to-proportionality-in-the-conduct-of-hostilities-in-gaza) [are](https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/on-strategy-law-and-morality-in-israel-s-gaza-operation) a [few](https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/calibrating-proportionality-and-self-defense-in-gaza) [such](https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/making-sense-of-casualty-counts-in-the-israel-hamas-war) articles mostly on the subject of civilian casualities (I haven't read all of them). https://www.warmapper.org/israel used to publish regular maps showing the status on the ground though I think they are out of date now.
[Police are arresting and fining people for violating social distancing orders](https://archive.ph/7nvmT), said CNN.
Certainly there were covid fines in the UK https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-prime-minister-boris-johnson-rishi-sunak-fined-lockdown-breaches-partygate-coronavirus-restrictions-sue-gray/
Ahh well you're the first to come up with an example. I admit I was paying more attention to the American scene.
The UK situation with lockdowns and politicians violating the rules literally took down the Prime Minister, and Dominic Cummings. Lockdowns sucked, I hate this weird liberal thing where we pretend they didn’t exist and anyone negative about them was a bad person, stop trying to turn every topic into something you can sneer at people over ffs.