07mk
3hr ago
MathWizard's comment is correct. I first encountered the film in a logic class I took in middle school, as a way to contrast the emotional thinking of most of the jury against the logical, evidence-based thinking of the protagonist who wins more and more jurors over by forcing skeptical analysis of the evidence and witnesses and their statements.
As a complete aside, I've had thoughts at various points over the past decade+ that a modern remake of 12 Angry Men, featuring 12 women on a rape case with a fratty white male defendant would be appropriate. There's a lot of kinks, like how an all-woman jury doesn't make sense like an all-man jury does in the 1950s, and obviously evidence and witnesses to a rape would be quite different from the ones for murder. Maybe in a few years, I'll be able to have Claude generate a script, and in a few more years, have Grok generate a feature-length film of it.
07mk
11hr ago
The final guy wasn't shamed for racism. That was a different, old man. And the shaming and ostracism was in support of logic and evidence, because his rationale for finding the defendant guilty was just racism, in the face of the logic and evidence that they had gone over the movie up to that point. I also don't recall anyone shaming him for his guilty vote, in order to change it; it was his terrible logic they were shaming him for, since the defendant's race couldn't possibly have anything to do with his guilt.
The actual last guy had some personal trauma from his son disavowing him, and the defendant was on trial for the murder of his father. His sticking with the guilty vote due to this, too, was irrational, because his personal history couldn't possibly have anything to do with the unrelated defendant's guilt.
07mk
19hr ago
The only solution is to keep demanding each side do better without regard to what the other side is doing, even though each side would really prefer to use their outgroup's sins as a blank check to be as terrible as they want.
This has been my personal hobby horse since November 2016 when Trump's victory caught me square in the jaw. As someone who firmly believed that diversity was our strength, it seemed to me that obviously the right thing to do was to seek to understand those who thought so differently like me and my ilk that they were willing to vote for someone like him, but it's been depressing to see that most of my side are firmly in the camp of "their sins justify ours; in fact, when you think about it, our sins are actually virtues, because they're directed at the Bad Guys." I enjoy beating the meat as much as any other guy, but I think I'm fatigued of beating a dead horse at this point.
07mk
19hr ago
If/when self-driving cars take off into the mainstream, I wonder if it will become a common prank by teenagers to paint murals of tunnels to cause accidents, a la removing Stop signs. I really don't want to go down in history as the first Roadrunner casualty. But by that point, teenagers doing anything outside and/or away from supervision might be considered as quaint as kick the can or hoop rolling.
07mk
23hr ago
Sure you might be right it’s laudable but if you can point out they aren’t being fair, then they either need to be fair or drop the kayfabe.
Either that, or they develop extra epicycles - and, in the long run, entire industries that generate more and more epicycles - for why all the people pointing out that they aren't being fair are actually wrong.
07mk
23hr ago
Why do they need to lie themselves in their own minds unless they actually have a real conscience somewhere in there that recognizes fairness is better than pure selfishness
This is an excellent point, and, as with all things involving subconscious motivations, I don't think there's a real rigorous way to confirm any of this. My current hypothesis is that it feels better to believe oneself to care about being fair than to believe oneself to be purely selfish which is distinct from believing that fairness is better than pure selfishness. Of course, one could argue that "feeling better when one believes oneself to be X rather than Y means that they believe that X is better than Y," but I'd posit that believing that caring about something isn't a feeling, it's an action. When one acts in naked self interest while feeling really really bad about it and internally beating themselves up in their minds about how bad they're being for not caring about fairness or performing Olympics-level mental gymnastics to believe that they're actually being fair despite the naked self interest, one is clearly caring about naked self interest and basically not at all caring about fairness.
07mk
1d ago
Ok, so are you saying that the people who make these arguments don't actually care about fairness, they are only pretending in order to enhance their credibility?
Something like that. Furthermore, the voters who find these arguments convincing and decide to vote for them (or vote for the demagogues' preferred politicians or policies, etc.) are also pretending to care about fairness, possibly even to their own conscious mind, so that they can honestly, genuinely believe that they care about some sort of higher order principles beyond naked self interest.
07mk
1d ago
In fact, it seems pretty common for fairness (explicitly or implicitly) to feature prominently in arguments about public policy.
I think this may reflect that it's very common to convincingly appear as if one cares about fairness (even, possibly, to one's own conscious mind) in order to get advantages for oneself. It's a kayfabe that, by its very nature, must never be acknowledged or talked about, as doing so impacts how convincingly one appears to care about fairness. It's only weird autists like us on this website who either believe it or try to penetrate through the layers of deception to get at what people actually care about.
07mk
1d ago
If too many of your students pass the material, teach harder material.
Well, yes, and capping the number of As seems to be the means by which one incentivizes the professors to do so. I went to a semi-elite college in the mid-00s, and grade inflation in elite colleges (we considered our college elite, even though it really was only semi-, because of course we wanted to think we were peers to the Ivies) was an actively talked-about problem back then, as something like 40%+ of all grades were As. As best as I can tell, school administrations have tried to address the problem by telling professors really really hard over the last 20 years, and it has resulted in things only getting worse. So telling professors to make their material harder such that grade inflation doesn't happen doesn't seem to have any real impact; it appears that they need actual incentives.
Now, who's to say if a professor, especially a tenured one, will face any consequences if they make their material so easy as to give out more As than the cap allows? Talk is cheap, after all. But if properly enforced, it seems significantly more likely to cause professors to teach harder material than just telling them really really hard to make their material harder.
Perhaps a cap-and-trade system like with pollutants might be better still? Not sure exactly how it would work, but a humanities professor might want to "buy" the right to give out more As from a STEM professor. Not sure what the currency would be, though, to create the right incentives.
07mk
1d ago
I think there is a good case to be made that a fig leaf is still nudity. If I see the bare ass of someone, I will not say hm, they might be nude, but they might also be not nude because they have covered their genitals. Phrases like full frontal nudity exist to describe the notable absence of any fig leafs.
Fair enough, but then the analogy largely breaks down, because the reason that fig leafed genitals are less outrage-inducing or more okay is that they are, in some meaningful sense, less nude than non-fig leafed genitals. In terms of corruption, corruption that is covered up/hidden/unknown isn't somehow less corrupt by nature of it being covered up in the same way that genitals that are fig leafed are less nude.
It may be true that Trump is meaningfully more corrupt than other POTUSs (if I had to bet, and this were possible to adjudicate in any fair way, I would bet yes - but I'd prefer not to bet, because I know that my judgment on him and his actions is too biased to make a judgment that I have any confidence in being accurate), but that has nothing to do with the fig leaf analogy.
07mk
1d ago
I don't think "preferring one candidate over another" is generalizable to "murdering someone."
07mk
1d ago
The meaning of nudity is that there's no fig leaf covering anything and, as such, someone being okay with fig leaf covering the genitals isn't being okay with nudity, they're being okay with something close to nudity but isn't nudity. Corruption, on the other hand, is something that exists mostly orthogonal to what is or isn't covering it (there's certainly an appearance component of corruption, where the mere appearance of corruption is corruption in itself, even if, in actuality, behind closed doors, everything is on the up and up, but I don't think that's relevant in this case).
07mk
1d ago
Naturally theres risk of losing principle, but thats true of all investing. The exact investment profile is TBD, i was just using S&P for some back of envelope calcs.
Well, even FDIC-insured accounts have some risk of the principal being lost, but if I were executing the plan you were, I'd put most/all of the principal into a savings account for very low risk 3.2-4% return instead of a low risk 8-10% in an index fund. In a 1-72 month time horizon, I think the difference in risk is sufficiently high as to be worth the lower returns, personally.
07mk
2d ago
I'm not sure what your criterion for "good character writing" is, even with those examples, but I've long found Ico to be one of the best-written stories ever, in terms of everything, including dialogue. But it's essentially a fairy tale with the writing complexity of "See Spot Run," where you can probably count the number of lines that come out of each character's mouth in both hands (and if not, then both hands and feet).
As a side note: do not ever read the "Castle in the Mist" novelization. It is truly awful. It's about 400 pages long, and I got like 100 pages in before giving up - by that point, Ico hadn't even gotten into the castle (this happens in the first cutscene of the game, which lasts like 5 minutes or less), with extensive backstory written about Ico's village and its leaders and the larger society in which they existed. All irrelevant details for the actual story of Ico. Ico's "novelization" really should have been a picture book with, again, the complexity of "See Spot Run."
07mk
2d ago
Gay marriage seems to be the least zero-sum of the progressive causes
I think this may be precisely why it was a turning point. The tactics used to win this battle - "born this way," "how does two loving men/women getting married and getting [marriage rights] affect you?" - were so successful in large part because it was so close to zero-sum. But once that battle was won, the same activists applied the same tactics to other things which were not nearly so close to zero-sum (insisting that MTF transwomen be treated exactly the same as women in every context is the most obvious example, but smaller scale examples in things like representation in fiction also count), which resulted in significant push back, which resulted in the activists take the "beatings will continue until morale improves" approach.
07mk
2d ago
The fact that Trump has happened to preside over some major high leverage situations in world history (ie AI, and also having more SCOTUS picks than average) makes me have a horrifying/fantastic thought, depending on one's point of view. What if Trump ends up being right on the "living" side of the longevity escape velocity, such that immortality is achieved such that whatever therapies are required for it are implemented on him just seconds before he would have died? We certainly live in interesting times, and that would make it interestinger still.
07mk
2d ago
underlying assumption that being horny is something enviable that women are disadvantaged by not being the equal of men.
I don't think that's the underlying assumption, except maybe in a subconscious way that's close to unfalsifiable. The underlying assumption is that men and women's minds are precisely identical in every way that matters. Therefore, any observation that women are less/more X than men is necessarily the consequence of patriarchy, whether due to bias of observers or unfalsifiable "internalized misogyny" of women or anything else. And but for that patriarchy, if freed from their shackles, women and men would have precisely the same level of X.
07mk
2d ago
Does that mean they get personal blame for everything a random employee does? No. But it's still nonsense logic to try to sue your administration for what your admin did.
That'd depend heavily on the precise set of details. As you said, the POTUS doesn't get personal blame for everything a random employee does.
07mk
2d ago
Now maybe he was too incompetent as a boss to ensure that the workers under him don't leak things,
I don't think competence is the limiting factor in something like this. Without resorting to scifi or fantasy, it's hard to fathom how the POTUS could be sufficiently "competent" as to guarantee that no leaks in the entire federal government happens ever. Of course, the buck stops with the POTUS, but also, e.g. we don't execute the POTUS every time someone in the federal government is convicted of treason, and I think the reason we don't is that we don't assign blame to the POTUS for every individual crime that anyone working under him commits (maybe we should! The world might be a lot better in a lot of ways). And I think it's reasonable to believe that not assigning such blame is the correct thing to do.
07mk
3d ago
A thought I had over a decade ago is that my generation (elder millennial) grew up with the notion "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross" being fed to us so consistently and ubiquitously that the notion that it could come while burning the American flag and destroying the cross never even accidentally crossed our minds. Thing is, of course, we were also force fed the idea of challenging power structures and rebelling against the hegemon, which would necessarily involve challenging such notions that we grew up swimming in, and it used to confuse me why so many people seemed not only to refuse to take this obvious step but to be downright hostile to it.
07mk
3d ago
I don't know about product endorsements, but in Latin class in highschool, I recall translating some text from actual Roman times that described some specific gladiator as causing women to swoon or get weak in the knees or somesuch (probably some different idiom that I'm not remembering now), and our teacher explaining that top gladiators were legitimate celebrities. I never followed up on it to confirm with independent research, but product endorsements would seem in line with that.
07mk
4d ago
Growing up in the 90s, I recall some of my friends sharing tapes with recordings of songs from the radio and CDs with each other. But what I don't recognize is people calling them "mixtapes." That was something you might share specifically with your boy-/girlfriend as a way to convey your affection, and the exact specific order mattered. Tapes you shared with friends were just tapes that had songs on them, because merely having the song available for play - even with the delay it takes to rewind/fast forward the tape to the specific track - was something very valuable.
07mk
4d ago
I think people generally do think photography is different to painting (less artful even). Obviously there's a lot of creative decision-making involved in a given photo, but not as much as for a given painting.
I'm not sure what "less artful" means, but certainly no one would claim that ai generated images aren't different from paintings, even when they explicitly use painting styles. Much like how photorealistic photographs are different from photorealistic paintings which are different from photorealistic collages which are different from photorealistic CGI renderings, in non-trivial ways. Same would go for any AI generated images.
Whether it's "as much," I'm not sure how it's possible to quantify the amount of creative decisionmaking in a way that can be meaningfully compared like that.
Across a photographer's oeuvre, you start to see more and more evidence of intentionality, and it takes collections and curation to establish your bona fides as a photographer to a greater extent than as a painter.
This phenomenon is quite evident to exist in people who use AI generated images from following anyone who has posted AI generated images for a long time as well. It applies just as well when you take the AI generated part out of it; even Twitter accounts that merely share pre-existing images of any provenance inevitably establish a pattern of intentionality in terms of the images they deem worthy to share, ie curate. I don't know if a curator is an "artist" who deserves "credit" for their "art," but certainly a curator is someone who makes creative decisions.
What I'm saying is that density of micro decisions is a relevant criteria for assigning credit. I'm not suggesting that an ai prompter deserves no credit.
Again, this seems perfectly cromulent to me, but also, I really don't think "deserving credit" is a particularly meaningful thing. People subjectively credit various things for their works, like God or their family, or only their hard work and effort, or their 5th grade teacher, or the barista whose off-hand comment triggered something in their brains, etc. and I don't really have an opinion on that, other than that it doesn't seem worth having an opinion on. My point is just that "creative decisionmaking" isn't a line that cuts between AI generated images and paintings/sketches/etc. and this applies for any other analogous media.
That's the porn parody, at least if this film turns out to be well-received enough to deserve one.
Another aside: there's a clip of Ken Jennings on Jeopardy that goes viral every once in a while, where he gets a "question" wrong, for the "answer" of something like "this word for a gardening tool can also refer to a sexually promiscuous person," and he gets it wrong for saying "what is a hoe?" Of course, the correct "question" was "what is a rake?" This confuses a lot of people right now, especially young people, who believe that both should be correct (and/or don't even know that "rake" would be correct). Back when that episode of Jeopardy was being recorded, the proper spelling of the slang term for "whore" was actually "ho," but it was almost immediately after that that "hoe" also became a correct spelling due to social media blowing up and people typing such words out much more often than before and naturally going for "hoe" as a familiar word (and possibly spellcheck). I'm just reminded of this anytime I see the term "hoe" these days, not referring to the gardening tool.
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