A wayward math-muddler for bizarre designs, artificial intelligence options, and spotting trends no one wanted; articles on Medium as Anthony Repetto
Anthony Repetto
Ah, yes! I have found my slice of the forum! If anyone is in these domains who would like to dive further into conversation, potential collaboration, that is key for me. I’ll link to the various articles I’ve written over the years, or at least leave a blurb, on a number of these topics:
Great Power Conflict: 1) China wants Pakistan, and may walk in as ‘peacekeepers’ to subdue the Baluchi people, or protect Pakistan from India. Either way, they have a railroad and port to circumvent India and the Strait of Malacca. 2) Life-extension gives dictators the power to torture forever, which they will use as SOON as they can, to exert influence over their people. Meanwhile, henchmen will want to kill the boss—it’s the only way to get a promotion. Sabotage is likely, and conflict will be blamed on enemies, instigating wider conflicts.
Global Governance & Public Goods: 1) I explore the core constraints I see for any method which might internalize most externalities as much as possible. 2) I see sea-steading as an opportunity for the ‘True Fans’ of each political ideology to form their own government… and so, they cannot blame their failure upon anyone else! We desperately need these experiments in political methodology, to determine which ones actually work. With sea-steading, we will finally have willing volunteers and no restrictions. 3) We can ask each person “Which people do you admire, and why?” Follow-up with those admired people, to see who they admire; step-by-step this way you find the most admirable folks.
Outer Space Governance: I identify a few of the key dynamics of space industry, and the immense value of the planet Mercury, which is likely to become the primary source of contention in the coming centuries.
Voting Reform: 1) I identified an unexplored avenue that may allow fair, non-strategic voting (Gibbard’s Theorem only applies to ranked-list data-types, while latent-space vectors allow more powerful operations in their algorithms). 2) I have pushed for a switch toward a volumetric assessment of the combined concerns and interests of the entire population, updated electronically without waiting for elections, as a mandate for government activity, as distinct from one side being ignored for four years at a time and politicians ignoring the issues concerning us most.
Malevolent Actors & Lie-Detection: IIRC, EEGs are able to spot folks with the dark triad, because the region of their brain responsible for projecting their feeling empathically is simply dysfunctional. I expect that sea-steading will allow communities to explicitly BAN anyone who cannot pass the EEG for empathic responses. Successful reduction in crime and corruption in those places would be the proof motivating adoption in ‘stickier’ countries.
Economic Growth: 1) To subsidize super-abundant computer power, as well as re-establish a single dominant reserve currency after the decline of the petro-dollar, we could push to make the US dollar backed by computer hardware. Each computer chip can be ‘bound’ to a crypto-token, (using Samsung’s patented method for on-chip encryption, which takes advantage of unique defects to make a key that ONLY that computer chip can use) and as those computer chips sit in servers, running the internet & businesses, apps, then the token-owner is paid a dividend from that activity. 2) Wealth experiences a positive feedback, simply by possessing it. I argue for a progressive-rate wealth tax, beginning negative as a rebate, exemptions for home, farm, and first biz, hefty cuts for leaving citizenship. Without such a damper, wealth will always concentrate, until it destroys us.
Scientific Policy: Researchers need a devoted team of supporters who can make videos and publicize the research proposals, as a ‘Kickstarter’, so that scientist can get to work without wasting time writing grants and being rejected.
Lie-Detection: Artificial Intelligence can be used to spot bias in a human judge—the A.I. is trained to imitate that person’s past decisions; then, you can quiz the A.I. to spot bias, because its ‘frozen’ brain doesn’t remember your previous questions, and doesn’t think to lie.
Wild Animal Welfare: 1) I recommend reading “The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography”—because, when we reduce habitat, all those diverse species will still be present, YET they are consistently losing allele diversity until their total species diversity collapses in a cascade. I fear that we have a few centuries before “inbreeding” kills most biomes, and we have no way to find “good” alleles to give them, once they lose the ones they have. Each decade is the loss of millions of years of allele experimentation, with no hope of a quantum computer large enough to simulate nature properly. 2) Terra Preta do Indo is one of the best soil types—and it was made by natives 3,000 years ago. If we invest more into soil science, to recreate this anthropogenic soil, we can build lasting fertility instead of deserts.
Climate Impacts: I recently posted about a possible avenue worth simulating, to get a cost-estimate, for using water spouts (humidity-twisters forming over water) might prevent hurricanes.
I am glad to go into greater detail; I’ll be posting more about each on the EA Forum, bit by bit. Let me know what you’d like me to cover, first!
This aged well… and it reads like what ChatGPT would blurt, if you asked it to “sound like a convincingly respectful and calm cult with no real output.” Your ‘Anti-Avoidance,’ in particular, is deliciously Orwellian. “You’re just avoiding the truth, you’re just confused...”
I was advocating algal and fish farming, including bubbling air into the water and sopping-up the fish poop with crabs and bivalves—back in 2003. Spent a few years trying to tell any marine biologist I could. Fish farming took-off, years later, and recently they realized you should bubble air and catch the poop! I consider that a greater real-world accomplishment than your ‘training 60+ people on anti-avoidance of our pseudo-research.’ Could you be more specific about Connection Theory, and the experimental design of the research you conducted and pre-registered, to determine that it was correct? I’m sure you’d have to get into some causality-weeds, so those experimental designs are going to be top-notch, right? Or, is it just Geoff writing with the rigor of Freud on a Slack he deleted?
I’d also like to ask clarification about your last sentence: I said ‘nerds’, and that may be what you found particularly offensive, there; or, that I hypothesize that men in those organizations are hiring hoping for a date? I am not attempting to ‘blame a woman’ for getting a job, by the way—I am pointing to the people who are doing the hiring for potentially selfish reasons.
Yes, I understand that funding can let me hire people to do that work—and I don’t need funding to free my time. I understand that, if I delay for the sake of doing-it-alone, then I am responsible for that additional harm. It doesn’t make sense for me to run a simulation or lobby by myself; and I’ve been in the position of hiring people, as well as working with people who are internally motivated. I hoped to find the internally motivated people, first—that’s why I asked EA for connections, instead of just posting something on a job site.
I apologize for lumping your funding-suggestion along-side others’ funding-misrepresentation. I see that you are looking for ways to make it possible, and funding is what came to mind. Thank you.
(I am still surprised that funding is continually the first topic, after I specify that the government is the best institution to finance such a project. EA would go bankrupt, if they tried to stop hurricanes...)
And, I understand if people don’t consider my proposal promising—I am not demanding that they divert resources, especially funds which are best spent on highest guaranteed impact! Yet, there is a cliquishness in excluding diverse dialogue based upon “social capital/reputation”—I hope you can see that the social graph’s connectivity falls apart when we cut those ties.
It’s also odd that the only data-point used to evaluate me would be the slice of time immediately after I’d been prodded repeatedly. I wish I could hand you the video-tapes of my life, and let you evaluate me rightly. When I am repeatedly misrepresented, defending myself, then you don’t see a representative slice of who I am.
Worst of all, no measure of my persona or character is a measure of the worth of a thought. If I am not a good fit for making it happen, then the best I can do I find someone who fits that well. The idea itself stands or falls on its own merits, and measuring me ignores that. I won’t know if it’s worth doing until I have a simulation, at least. I don’t know how anyone else has certainty on the matter, especially from such a noisy proxy as “perceived tone via text message”.
I am terrified that you were downvoted to obscurity. These posts, the ones that EA hides, are the ones the public needs to see the most.
“Remember that the marginal value of another HEA is way lower than the marginal value of an actual legitimate criticism of EA nobody else has considered yet.”
Thank you for saying it!
Thank you for your detailed response! I am glad when we explore the design-space; to find a decent idea, we must find the patterns amongst many.
In regards to each specific option you mentioned:
futarchy hopes to create a prediction-market, and reward those who make good predictions, yet it does nothing to reward those who invest in the implementation of beneficial projects, the key difference.
Eliezer is looking for a way to coordinate crowd actions; again, the people who invest time and resources are not rewarded directly and materially for funding those benefits.
pigovian taxes, for negative externalities, are included in my line of reasoning, yet they miss the key point again: material reward for those who invest in beneficial projects.
partisan cost-benefit discussions are commonly among elected officials prior to knowing the truth; I contrast that with verification that policy performed as expected, carried-out by apolitical experts randomly assigned, by metrics agreed upon in legislation, in line with the concepts of principled negotiation (see Bill Ury’s classic “Getting to Yes”). I have no expectation that a legislature should ever determine the worth of each proposal—they’d never finish! And I would be glad to pass a ban on political parties at a Constitutional Convention, though I know that won’t happen. Instead, I expect we will need to start from scratch, in which case a foundation of apolitical metrics is better than none.
quadratic funding is nice, to balance the interests of the majority, yet again it does nothing to directly and materially reward those who invest in the solutions. A hope that the coin functions better, maintaining its value or increasing in value, is only a secondary reward, and that reward is focused in the hands of the largest holders.
So, the key difference I have with all of those mentioned is that I propose an incentive for regular, self-interested investors to pay for benefits. That certainly would not happen in each other method. (And yes, those taxes and dividends would be retroactive, similar to the prizes for social good you mentioned.) Without material rewards for the investors, we will only pull a few tens of billions in philanthropic dollars toward benefits every year, while my goal is to internalize externalities in totality or close to it.
This is a critical distinction, because there are a few hundred trillion dollars sloshing around in businesses and real estate, NOT because the investors like capitalism—rather, they like a high rate of return! :0 Due to the efficiencies available in the space of positive externalities, we can give investors that rate of return, while keeping the lion’s share of the benefits in the public. Investors would look at their distribution of assets and say “oh, I was only holding this real estate as a HEDGE against inflation, I’d rather put my cash into a diversified portfolio of public benefits, because they earn an annual return of greater than 12%!” That’s how we can get tens of trillions thrown toward beneficent work. Just give them enough cash back that they are happy. (...and, that shift in assets would lower the price of urban real estate, once they clear out of it!)
[[It’s also worth noting that the article you gave to dismiss wealth taxes only showed that “European countries had all kinds of weird exemptions, while they didn’t exclude basics like your farm or small business, so some people suffered… they also let the millionaires leave—which they did.” Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax plan, in contrast, is shown in that same article to address those concerns. Compared to the disincentives from sales tax and income tax, I’d prefer a progressive-rate wealth tax only, with a hefty cut taken from those who leave citizenship behind.]]
I see some form of governance as essential to enforce taxation; and that taxation is the only reliable means to gather the broadly-distributed value of most positive externalities, in order to reward investors. Without that reward-structure, we’re leaving tens of trillions of dollars on the table, when we could be spending that on public benefit. So, what might that governance look like? A smart contract, binding sea-steaders into a loose federation, perhaps? I look forward to any other ideas that come up! It should seek to internalize as much as possible, ideally leaving no externality untouched, so that pricing is an accurate representation of public value, and allocation is efficient. Then, I wouldn’t be so worried about markets ruining planets. :)
Alistair, I regret to inform you that after four years of Leverage’s Anti-Avoidance Training, the cancer has spread: the EA Community at large is now repeatedly aghast that outsiders are noticing their subtle rug-sweeping of sexual harassment and dismissal of outside critique. In barely a decade, the self-described rats are swum ‘round a stinking sh!p. I’m still amazed that, for the last year, as I kept bringing-forth concerns and issues, the EA members each insisted ‘no problems here, no, never, we’re always so perfect....’ Yep. It shows.
Thank you for recognizing that my concern was not addressed. I should mention, I am also not operating from an assumption of ‘intrinsically against me’ - it’s an unusually specific reaction that I’ve received on this forum, in particular. So, I’m glad that you have spoken-up in favor of due consideration. My stomach knots thank you :)
Here are the less contentious parts, I hope?
“Ben Delo’s involvement with EA just quietly stopped being talked about without any kind of public reflection on what could be done better moving forwards.”
“Failing to share information because you suspect it will make me less supportive or more critical of your views, decisions, or actions smells of overconfidence and makes you difficult to trust, and this has regularly happened to me in my engagement with EA.”
Yes, exactly. Thank you! EA Berkeley had to remove their leader just two years ago, for reasons that none of the membership there is willing to even mention—which makes it sound particularly bad, which means that ‘the fact that EA is keeping that bad stuff hidden’ is even worse.
Similarly, EA Berkeley members were targeted by a higher-up for blacklisting, and mentioned such in emails to me, only to go silent on the matter until I brought-up the blacklisting as an issue on their slack. At that point, they mentioned that “we’ve been in private talks with the Blacklister, asking them to stop their behavior”—nothing public until absolutely necessary.
The EA houses in Berkeley, who are a magnet for EA Berkeley campus members to move-into (most residents are post-grads who were EA Berkeley prior to graduation and moving into the EA house), had repeatedly splurged unnecessarily, and when I pointed this out, the near-universal response on the EA Berkeley slack was ‘well, that’s them, not us. We’re not responsible for anyone else in our org if they’re committing petty fraud.’ The slack poster Charles He even suggested that I be banned from their slack, for ‘disrupting’ things by bringing-up their bad behavior!
EA definitely has a brand they’re protecting, and other posters seem to be bumping into other icky spots under the surface, too! (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eoLwR3y2gcZ8wgECc/hubris-and-coldness-within-ea-my-experience) & “Power dynamics: What procedures exist for protecting parties in asymmetric power relationships? Are there adequate opportunities for anonymous complaints or concerns to be raised? How are high-status individuals held accountable in the event of wrongdoing?” from (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sEpWkCvvJfoEbhnsd/the-ftx-crisis-highlights-a-deeper-cultural-problem-within)
Further: when I have posted new ideas on this forum, I was repeatedly strawmanned by EA members until other members eventually pointed-out that I was being strawmanned, and those who did so never admitted and apologized; they just downvoted every comment I made, as a team. EA protects the trolls who downvote-mafia and misrepresent, while looking for reasons to exclude ‘non-aligned views’.
Behaving decently is nice; that doesn’t remove the point I was asking about: ignoring the other arguments I brought-up. It seems, repeatedly, that the call of appropriateness is used to ignore the substance of the other arguments; which continues to be the case, in this thread.
Well, there’s a simple empirical measure, rather than relying on whether an argument is approved-of or not: Do any of them date? Are they hoping to keep that fact hidden?
I am frustrated that I am repeatedly misrepresented, which is what I said in my responses. I am not frustrated by a lack of “people doing leg work for me”. I am specifically asking if anyone has connections toward the relevant specialists, so that I can talk to those specialists. I’m not sure why that would be “something I should do on my own”—I’m literally reaching out to gather specialists, which is the first leg work, obviously. Re-inventing the wheel to impress an audience by “going it alone” is actually counter-productive.
I don’t need a “fully general engine”—you are misrepresenting my request, as others have. I am asking if anyone knows someone with the relevant background. I am NOT asking for funding, nor a general protocol that addresses every post. Those are strawmen. No one has apologized for these strawmen; they just ghost the conversation.
And, if you are using the fact that I stood-up to repeated mis-representations as “telegraph a sense of powerlessness and sometimes vulnerability”, and as a result, I should not be taken seriously, then you are squashing the only means of recourse available to me. When my request is repeatedly mis-represented, and I respond to each of them, I am necessarily “repeatedly posting”—I’m not sure why that noisy proxy for “lack of effectiveness” is a better signal for you than actually reading what I wrote.
Whoo. Last cross-post for the night, I think I’ve responded to the major points… and I hope this shows a bit more of the complexity underneath my simplistic presentation!
How quickly it rains down depends on a few factors, and we can tip those in our favor:
--> Humid Rise—humidity (just the h2o molecule) is only 18g/mol, while oxygen molecules are 32g/mol, so humid air is quite buoyant! Especially considering that water vapor reflects heat (infrared) back to the ground, creating a heat bulge beneath it. The result is that, once humidity begins to rise, it naturally pulls air in from all around it, along the ground. It begins to drive convection. Yet! That humid rise is normally billowy and easily dispersed by cross-breezes, which means that the humidity cannot rise high quickly; it mostly travels far overland, or stays in place. Your rain wanders to an unexpected location! We want to form rain clouds nearby, instead, so we need that humidity to rise really high, quickly, without being torn apart by cross-breezes. That’s where the solar concentrators help, with their tall tower at 1200C and radiant, they blast infrared into all the water vapor around them, pummeling a plume high up, carrying that vapor. Up high enough, the air pressure drops, which is key for causing a rapid cooling, and the formation of nice heavy clouds. The faster we take air from the ground up to a few kilometers, the more water it’ll still be holding. [[Only a fraction of one gram per m3 is needed for the thinnest clouds, but we could toss a few grams up and it’ll come down soon. We want the water to rain, evaporate, and rain down again, in as many cycles as it can. That gives plants time to grab it, in numerous locations, as well as time for the ground to catch some.]] When we look at water-demand for plants in the wild vs. water-resilient greenhouses, we can drop water demand ten-fold because nine-tenths of the water was lost in the leaves to evapotranspiration! As a result, if that leaf-sweat keeps rising and falling as rain as it travels further South, then the same bucket of water ends up getting ten times the use (assuming ground water is eventually used, as well).
--> Albedo—the desert rock is pretty bright, so the addition of vegetation and especially any water-bodies (!) will multiply the solar absorption, which will drive that heat-bulge and evaporation for humidity-buoyancy, to help loft water vapor and form clouds. This is how the Amazon does it—most of her clouds are her armpit fog, caused by solar-to-thermal foliage!
--> Vortices—the solar concentrators themselves can be rigged with a few flanges, to nudge their inflowing convection as it quickens toward the center, to spin that up-draft, helping it stay coherent and push higher, for rains nearby. Any Youtube video on Rocket Stoves by Robert Murray-Smith is best for enjoying such a vortex!
--> Swales—I love swales. I’ve been preaching swales since 2010. I heard, almost immediately, when Sepp Holzer started pitching his “crater gardens” … which were dug by an excavator, four feet deep. I was aghast—my favorite swales are micro-swales, a few inches deep, in flakey soils that rain seasonally, to catch it as it dribbles. That’s what they’re doing in the Sahel, south of Sahara, to stop the deserts. By halting the flow of water along the ground, keeping it for seep, roots, and another evaporation, you prolong the residence-time of each ton of water, leading to a greater equilibrium stock—that is, a high normal lake line, because each ton of water rarely ever leaves.
And, as to infrastructure before success—California could probably boost rains enough to help farmers and forests, here, without needing to conquer an entire desert the size of Europe!
Another cross-post from Lesswrong about a detailed example, the entire Sahara:
Thank you for diving into the details with me, and continuing to ask probing questions!
The water brought-in by the Sahara doesn’t depend upon the area of the source; it’s the humidity times the m3 per second arriving. Humidity is low on arrival, reaching only 50% right now in Tunisia, their winter drizzles! The wind speed is roughly 2m/sec coming in from the sea, which is only 172,800m/day of drift. Yet! That sea-breeze is a wall of air a half kilometer high—that is why it can hold quite a bit.
If we need +10% of a 500m tall drift, that’s 50m; if we can use solar concentrators to accelerate convection, we can get away with less. And, we’re allowed to do an initial row that follows the shoreline closely, while a second row is a quarter kilometer inland, running parallel to the shore, where mixing of air lets you add another round of evaporate. So, we could have four rows across the northern edge of the Sahara, each row as thick as it needs to be to hit high humidity, and 10m tall, to send +10% moisture over the entire 9 million km2 of the Sahara.
How much water would we be pumping? The Sahara carries 172,800m/day flow per m2 intake surface x 500m tall x 4,000km coastline at 10g h2o per m3 = 3.5 billion tons per day, a thousand or so dead seas. (About 1.25 Trillion tons a year, enough to cover the 9 Million km2 with 139mm of rain, on average, if it had fallen instead of being sopped-up by adiabatic heat.)
We need 10% of that, or a hundred and eighty dead seas. It seems monstrous, but much of the coastline there is low for miles, so pumping 1 ton to the top of 10m at even just 20% efficiency costs 500kJ. If you want to pump that in a day, using solar, you’ll need 1/4th of a square foot of solar. That 1 ton, if we cross the threshold and it becomes surplus rain, will water 3 square meters their annual budget… and the solar is paying for that amount of irrigation every day; 1,000 m2 of rains from a dinner plate of solar, each year. It’s that energy efficiency, combined with dead simple capital expenditures, which would make something so insane potentially feasible. I’d pick California to try, first!
500kJ per ton, for 350Mil tons per day—that’s 175TJ per day, or 2 GW. That’s a nuclear power plant. To pump enough water, continuously, to irrigate 9 million km2, potentially feeding a billion people, once we dig swales! (Check out Africa’s better-than-trees plan: “Demi-Lune” swales that catch sparse, seasonal rain, to seep into the ground, with minimal tools and labor!)
These details might help see the complexities
[[a cross-post of my comment from the Lesswrong cross-post of the original post, in that thread of comments!]]
Let’s start at a more practical scale: make the Negev Bloom.
The Negev is 12,000 km2, which, if we want grasslands, needs some 300mm extra rain or more each year. That’s 3.6 billion tons per year, or just 10Mt a day. With 20g/m3 humidity, we’ll need passage of 500 billion m3 of air-flow each day. With convection driven by solar concentrators (those same which drive the pumps) to increase wind velocity during the day to 4m/s, across trays stacked 12.5m high, provides 50m3/sec, 4.32 million m3 per day across each meter of intake.
Next, we pump rows inland, as each humid layer rises, to capture drier air as they mix and move-past. Additional solar concentrators power these, and conveniently, the concentrators’ intense heat pushes humid air higher than it would during gentle billowing convection, rising to cool & enter the cloud-cycle faster. We would only be prevented from extending more rows if the elevation rises too high, or we create so much humidity and cloud-cover that our solar concentrators cease. Let’s just say we have four rows.
With 4.32 million m3 per meter of intake width, we’ll need 116,000 meters… that’s only 72 miles. With our four rows, that’s a length of coast 18 miles long. The Gaza Strip is enough to water the Negev.
And, as I mentioned in an earlier response to you, the vast majority of the humidity released by the Persian Gulf, Dead Sea, Red Sea, Mediterranean, is being used to fight-against the immense downdraft of adiabatically-heated and ultra-dry upper atmosphere, which is descending because of the boundary between Hadley and Ferrel cells. So, yes, there are billions of tons of water evaporating, and no rain!
Yet, we know from geological records as recent as 9,000 bc, the Sahara was wet, with vast lakes—because of a slight increase in humidity above the threshold for accumulation. The deserts are not ‘infinitely’ dry, such that all water never results in rain. Rather, they are just below a ‘threshold’, with water added by evaporation in huge amounts, and a slightly huger amount being taken away by adiabatic downdraft. If we add just a portion of humidity, we are doing exactly what occurred across the Sahara repeatedly, and it led to accumulation, because it was enough to cross the desiccation threshold. Our own soil records prove that the desert can be green, with just a little more water than it currently evaporates.
Oh, no—not ‘because-dating-already’, nor as a favor, nor her aspiring to use beauty, or being unqualified. Rather, if people doing the hiring are selecting among excellent candidates, yet their selection favors people who those same authorities hope to try dating. It’s the hirer, not the one hired, who I call into question; as I said originally “hoping to hire-in” which places agency and blame with those being biased in their hiring.
Also, I don’t expect a flat ‘gender disparity’ to be indicative of this sort of hiring—rather, internal measure of co-worker and boss relationships would show if the social graph is incestuous. And, though it isn’t reasonable to say “the funder of a charity was hiring inappropriately, so the charity must also be doing so,”—and, at the same time, “a bunch of young college kids with money who all live and hang out together, dating each other,” is the shared characteristic that I argue warrants inclusion of that risk.
Thank you for letting me know.
“If it’s also sufficiently likely that some people could figure this out and put us on a better path, then it seems really bad that we might be putting off those very people.”
Here! When I was twelve, I spent four years finding the best way to benefit others, then I developed my skill-set to pursue a career in it… 26 years ago. So, I might qualify as one of those motivated altruists who is turned-off by the response they’ve gotten from EA. I think I’m one of the people you want to listen to carefully:
I don’t need funding—I already devote 100% of my time as I choose, and I’m glad to give it all to each cause. I am looking to have the 1-to-2 hour long, 2-to-5 person thoughtful conversation, on literally dozens of existing and EA-adjacent topics. I am not looking for a 30min. networking/elevator-pitch at a conference, because I’m not trying to get hired as a PA. I am not looking for the meandering, noisy, distracted banter at a brief social event. This forum, unfortunately, has presented me with consistent misrepresentations and fallacies, which the commentators refuse to address when I point them out. Slack is similarly incapable of the deeper, thoughtful conversations, with members and outsiders, that fosters insight and understanding.
There are numerous ideas, opportunities, methods, that are going un-noticed because of the barriers placed in front of thoughtful dialogue. It is a burden that should rest upon those EAs who are dismissive of deeper conversation, instead of being the “price I have to pay, to prove myself, before anyone will listen”, as I was most recently told on this Forum.