What is it specifically about the 1970/80s that causes this dip? Was there an explosion of this academic writing around that era or something else to have this effect?
There are a lot of things religion provides that modern society is really dismal at providing: community, care, socialization across class/career lines, relationships with people who live near you, a support system for sick/hurting people, and other benefits
The thing is, none of those are innately tied to religion. We've abandoned churches for what I feel are largely good reasons, but we haven't found something else to fill that void in community and care. We're more insular, more online, less of us know our neighbours or really have a stake in our community welfare in the same way. I don't think the solution is going back to religion.
I think you are right in that in theory you could have "all that stuff" sans religion. And in fact I think Atheism in the boomer generation benefited from cultural inertia - like, you could say you don't belong to a religion but still marry, have kids, participate in community etc simply because that's what everyone else (by the virtue of their religion) was doing around you.
But today it seems like critical mass is elsewhere, and it seems like the religious folks now have a huge advantage over everyone else in terms of marriage, family formation, community and maybe even mental health. So while in theory it's possible, it seems like in practice all of those things declined among the non-religious, just perhaps with a lag of a generation.
The reason I think it might make sense to reengage with religion is the crux of this question: does life have a point, a meaning, etc. Not even "what" the point is but does it exist at all. The idea that the universe is a total accident and nothing is relevant takes you in a certain direction in life and society, while the idea of "there's meaning and purpose" in another.
I think it's hard to anchor your life in the value of meaning without logically accepting a creator of that meaning.
So I think there's an element of faith - either you chose to believe there's meaning or you chose to believe there isn't, everything else is implied by that choice of belief.
I love this idea. I often find getting a big group together for a BBQ or something is great for mixing social groups, cross-pollinating friends, and seeing people I don't often see - the downside is I don't tend to get much 1 on 1 time to really talk with friends, and often people can't make a specific time (especially as we get older). I also have a fair amount of friends who are introverted or have social anxiety and don't feel comfortable in larger groups, and this feels like it would benefit that too.
I'm not sure why page count instead of word or character count is used - feels like there could easily be external factors such as page size or typeface that are effecting this.
That was my first thought. Maybe it’s not “books are getting shorter,” but “publishers are getting cheaper.” Decreasing margins, decreasing font size, etc could all explain a diminishing page count to save on printing costs.
That said, from looking into publishing, it seems like consensus is anything over 100k words (approx 400 pages) is basically unsellable unless you’re Stephen King or something. It’s not clear to me if this has always been the case.
Slightly related, but I'm a fan of web serialized fiction (fanfics, but also original works like Worm, Worth the Candle, Mother of Learning, Unsong, etc), and when I occasionally order paper copies I'm always astounded at just how physically large they are, in a way that doesn't come across in a purely digital format.
I should note that this rebuts the idea that long-form fiction is disappearing, it's just not getting physically published, because the internet remains the best way to distribute information (and often make a living, since patreon can often end up paying more than a publisher).
Btw, got any interesting book recommendations? (And yeah, I already know about r/rational ;))
Seems like we both got very similar book tastes. And to recepriociate, I think you might enjoy:
- Pretty much everything by Ted Chiang, but especially Understand
- Asimov's Nightfall
- Greg Egan's Reasons to be happy
Yep! Count of Monte Cristo is known as a long read but it was originally serialized. You can kinda tell too, the plot meanders a couple times. Nonetheless extremely entertaining, I'd highly recommend.
Same for Count of Monte Cristo and some of his other works. Also Don Quixote if I recall correctly. I actually read them one to two chapters a week to stay on a similar to original schedule.
I have wondered if the reading of Don Quixote serially was a very different experience from reading it as a novel. It was a serial satire, so I could see reading the "new episode" every week being funny. Before I got side-tracked, I was reading it like any other novel and, while any particular episode is set up comedically, Don Quixote's mostly harmless delusional actions being given exponentially more brutal responses I found increasingly depressing.
There’s a really great app called Serial Reader that breaks books in the public domain down into ~15 minute chunks and “delivers” the issue to you every day. The app is free (no ads, even!) but you can pay a small fee for a few extra features like scheduling the delivery days/time and being able to read ahead. I think it’s like $3 or maybe $5? I can’t recall. But I’m pretty sure it’s a one person operation. I have no affiliation with the app other than being a happy paying user.
Specifically, works published from roughly 1830 through the first quarter or half of the 20th century, driven by falling publication costs and rising literacy. Charles Dickens on particular developed the model, with The Pickwick Papers, published in 1836. Another notable work, the Sherlock Holmes series debuted in 1887 ("A Study in Scarlet").
Earlier novels (relatively few in number) tended to appear as their own works in whole form, so far as I'm aware. Though many may have been adaptations of other works --- sagas or legends (e.g., the Faust legend), plays, and other forms.
Not just page size and typeface, how about those books with 100+ chapters, clearly just to increase the page count, as a new chapter ends the current page and the new chapter starts halfway down a new page. And don't get me started about those crazy large margins.
Oh excellent. But of course the key addition is handing off this information to lawyers who use it to shut you down and/or extract money from you.
If you are using some torrent of a dataset, nobody is indemnifying you, and once you get to the discovery phase of a lawsuit, they are going to know that you intentionally grabbed a dataset you knew you shouldn't have had access to. Treble damages!
The literature has pretty consistently shown that adversarial examples can be found with only black box access (even with truncated prediction vectors), robustness methods are primarily a cat-and-mouse game between attackers and defenders, and the existence of adversarial examples is likely inevitable (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.02104.pdf).
The big question that remains is - so what? There's exceedingly few use cases where the existence of adversarial examples causes a security threat. There's a lot of research value in understanding adversarial examples and what that tells us about how models learn, generalize, and retain information, but I am not convinced that these attacks pose a threat remotely close to the amount of attention given.
Self driving cars seem like a dangerous threat vector if an adversarial image can be deployed in such a way as to cause them to commit dangerous maneuvers on demand.
I completely agree, but that's a very big "if". I'm not terribly familiar with autonomous vehicle driving systems, but my passing understanding is that there are multiple components working together that help make predictions, and these systems do not rely on any single point of failure.
The classic example of a sticker on a stop sign is, in my view, more of a dramatization than a real threat surface. Designing an adversarial perturbation on a sticker that can cause misclassifications from particular angles and lighting conditions is possible, but that alone won't cause a vehicle to ignore traffic situations, pedestrians, and other contextual information.
Plus, if I wanted to trick a self driving vehicle into not stopping at an intersection, it would be much easier and cheaper for me to just take the stop sign down :)
I'll be more inclined to start believing that self driving / autonomous vehicles are actually "coming soon" when the federal government decrees it is illegal to wear clothing with certain markings/colors. No red octogons, no reflective red and white parts, no yellow vertical stripes, etc.
I don't think that "cause an air to fail to stop" is the correct threat to address, I think "making AI stop and therefore cause traffic" is.
Wake me up when I can have any two arbitrary addresses as start and end points and a machine or computer can drive me between them, 24/7/365 - barring road closures or whatever.
My prediction is that it will happen with 50% confidence before/after 2029. Or 50% confidence that it will be between 2026 and 2031.
Basically they need to improve their driving software some 10 000x times. From driving 100km before safety critical disengagement to 1 million kilometers. 1 - 2 million milles is benchmark presented by CJ Moore, Tesla’s director of autopilot software to California Department of Motor Vehicles.
> “Tesla is at Level 2 currently. The ratio of driver interaction would need to be in the magnitude of 1 or 2 million miles per driver interaction to move into higher levels of automation. Tesla indicated that Elon is extrapolating on the rates of improvement when speaking about L5 capabilities. Tesla couldn’t say if the rate of improvement would make it to L5 by end of calendar year.”
If they manage to keep on doubling distance driven every 6 months then we should be there in:
