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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
15d ago
Helmetless biking is fine if you're riding on bike paths or flat roads with little traffic. If you're riding in traffic or on more topographically interesting terrain they're a good idea, and if you're mountain biking they're a necessity. Every once in a blue moon I'll see someone in the woods without a helmet and it's almost always a guy with a cheap bike not suited to the trail and nothing else to indicate he has a clue what he's doing.
I don't buy into the traffic part (though it might be more applicable in the US, where drivers are not trained or compelled to give cyclists proper room?), but mountain biking, sure. At that point you are doing a hazardous sport rather than utilitarian transportation; I'd accept the necessity for parachutes when high-altitude tightroping too, without being for making them mandatory while walking on firm ground.
And you can put bluetooth speakers in the ear pockets and have headphones that you can easily control with a gloved hand.
I really don't want people who are wearing headphones on my piste (or, on that matter, on the road)...
I was actually convinced to try wearing a ski helmet once. It was not only uncomfortable, but also messed with my situational awareness (since it restricts wind flow around my face and heavily buffets my ears), though perhaps if you are the sort of person to want to wear bluetooth earbuds while skiing you don't particularly use that sense anyway.
Relevantly, perhaps, I don't see what gear there really is to hold down. I'd use a single heavy knit cap with lining, which holds itself in place just fine, and maybe add polarized sunshades if it's a sunny day. If I am going to engage in skiing where I expect head-down crashes of the type that would get snow on my neck, then sure, there is an argument for helmets, as there was for mountain biking - but again, we would be engaging in a strange conflation where we force the safety standards of an adjacent high-risk activity on a lower-risk one that doesn't need them, unnecessarily encumbering the lower-risk one in the process. Most biking does not involve uneven dirt paths that weave between trees, and most skiing does not involve doing 360-degree flips or unmaintained mountainsides.
(cf. Rust: Most programming does not involve people dying if a use-after-free happens!)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
16d ago
· Edited 16d ago
Helmetless biking (and skiing, omg, the 0-to-100 in the uptake rate of ski helmets in Europe in the past decade is making me fume) achieves a lot. It makes the difference between a bike being something you can just hop onto, go from A to B with and leave wherever, and it being an activity that requires locating a particular piece of gear and hauling it with you everywhere at the destination, leaving you with either -1 hand or -1 head's worth of volume in whatever bags you bring until you return home, unless you engage in extra planning to be able to leave it somewhere.
Seatbelts are ok because the delta-inconveniencs to driving is small. Bike helmet advocates, though, belong together with Rust programmers and playground securers on the scrap heap of history for being scolds that would sap all efficiency and convenience out of life by a thousand cuts for the sake of their padded-cell utopia.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
17d ago
Just to follow up, now that about 2 months have passed, do you think Charlie Kirk is still on people's minds? My sense is that in the conversation it's been completely displaced by the government shutdown and Epstein electric boogaloo, but maybe there are subcultures in which people still talk about it.
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18d ago
· Edited 17d ago
Notably, Russia promised it would have Pokrovsk (and much more) by the end of the summer.
What is the source for that promise? I'm seeing this "our top secret leaks from the enemy suggest they aimed to achieve X by time Y, since they didn't that means they are losers" pattern since the start of the war, and it's a bit facile.
Generally, I think there's a strange sort of alignment of interests between the two sides in continuing the current near-static attrition warfare until one of the sides folds. For the Ukrainian side, it's not like anything that's behind the current frontline is more defensible than the commieblock smelter fortress hellscape of the Donbass; and for the Russians, between having to fight a given Ukrainian soldier while pulverising anything he could use for cover in Pokrovsk and having to do the same thing while pulverising cover in Zaporizhia/Kharkiv, the former is preferable, since if they do the former and prevail, they eventually can capture Zaporizhia/Kharkiv (which are actually worth something) intact. Allowing the frontline to move while there is still meat to keep it where it is is more or less strictly negative-sum.
not be allowed to return, but will be given land in conquered Ukraine
I don't think they really have the social machinery, or stomach, to actually implement some sort of way to prevent them from returning - after all, many of the contract soldiers likely signed to get money for their families, which means that they have ties in the old country forcefully cutting which would cause widespread discontent. Just turning them into some modern version of Székely-style marchers by giving them allotments of conquered land, in the hope that the most unhinged elements stay put and perhaps even make the land more defensible should Ukraine go in for a rematch, seems fairly plausible though.
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18d ago
At it it's most basic level what is a moral conviction if not a pre-commitment to be unreasonable.
A positive term in your value function. Rationalism is about achieving your terminal goals, not about choosing them. There is nothing "irrational" about acting optimally to, say, purge all idolatry.
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19d ago
5: Which ones specifically?
4: Russia hasn't even managed to wipe out Ukraine's aviation or train network yet, and most of Europe would be rather further away.
2: It's about half the size (of presumably full-sized Ukraine), plus Poland and the Baltics have Russia by the balls due to Kaliningrad (whatever happens later on, it probably gets turned into a parking lot or occupied/taken hostage in the opening weeks of a conflict)
1: I mean, if Ukraine falls, what further ways does NATO have to validate Russia's fears? There will be no immediate Russian objectives like controlling Ukraine that NATO can actively prevent, so the ball will be in their court. If they then actually start something (like the aforementioned moves on Kaliningrad), then sure, all bets are off, but so far I thought the lizardmen were trying to be a bit more subtle about the whole "look how dangerous and unhinged they are, if we punch them they punch back" schtick.
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19d ago
On the other hand, I'd wonder if Ukraine's leadership wouldn't have jumped ship and left the country headless by now if they saw that there is no opportunity for profiteering. Kickbacks are the superstar CEO salaries of politics.
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19d ago
· Edited 19d ago
Well, we shouldn't forget that Poland, too, has actually greatly increased the size and funding of its army since 2022. Besides, how likely is it really that there would be no NATO response in case of a Russian invasion of the Baltics/Poland? (even if it's not immediate, the rest of the EU certainly would get involved, and if it possibly goes badly for them, I don't see a world in which the US stands by idly)
It seems to me that you just need to believe a lot of fairly peculiar (and likely unacceptable to any in the pro-UA camp apart from people like Julian Roepcke who went off the deep end in contrarianism) things to imagine a Russian invasion of Poland or the Baltics being successful: either you really think that NATO is already lending Ukraine most of its power (and so Russia is really currently barely prevailing in a stalemate against the collective West) and so Poland and friends will be weaker when Russia comes for them because they were already stripped bare, or that NATO is not giving Ukraine that big a fraction of its power and so the current stalemate means that Russia and Ukraine alone are about evenly matched and each stronger than NATO.
(Mind you, technically I think the picture is more complicated than that because the non-entry of the West has currently kept Russia several steps below the top of the escalation ladder, e.g. by leaving NPPs and civilians alone. However, to use this in your argument, you would have to concede that Russia is not currently evilmaxxing, which is also taboo for pro-UA.)
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19d ago
You're quoting the latter for the economic argument, which is indeed the more solid part of your post (though I think that the "two weeks to flatten the curvecrash the Russian economy" arguments also have a really bad track record). Not sure where you are even getting the P-man himself (I don't particularly count a pro-Ukrainian source cherrypicking his quotes as being him as a source, any more than Russian telegram channels quoting Zelensky become pro-Ukrainian).
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19d ago
I mean, if your goal was to actually make a mirror image of that post by @No_one, you didn't quite succeed. He didn't resort to putting crass quotes in the mouths of those he argued against implicitly or explicitly, said what he meant rather than engaging in ironic snark, and most importantly the sources he linked to bolster his point were all pro-Ukrainian, while yours were also mostly pro-Ukrainian.
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19d ago
I think the second point still is ridiculous, because there is neither the means (unless you really flog your brain into accepting the "the enemy simultaneously weak and strong" pattern that is every propagandist's dream goal) nor really the motive (unless the Baltics really decide to force it by blockading Kaliningrad or the like) for them to take on NATO. Ukraine really was, in many ways, sui generis: at the outset it was almost 50% culturally and politically Russian, it hosted the best European warm-water port Russia had (and if you accept that the Russians did not want to surrender it, that alone almost made the path to the current situation inevitable - the Maidan government wanted to tear up the lease so Crimea had to be taken, and the post-Maidan governments wanted to starve out Crimea so more territory had to be taken), and it's a single-authority transit country linking Russia to the easternmost loyal hydrocarbon customers it has in Europe (Hungary and Slovakia), which the pro-Atlanticist forces in Europe and Ukraine were very keen on using against them through out the 200Xes.
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19d ago
· Edited 19d ago
I think this might not be a useful discussion to have without identifying a concrete example of a person who is confused about it (and is really convinced that the answer should be something else, rather than just being like "uh, I don't know, 50/50?"). For the 50/50 answer, I'm positing a theory that is more or less:
(1) people won't do particularly complex math;
(2) people have a strong intuition that a well-informed adversary enthusiastically doing something for you will not help you;
(3) this intuition is adaptive and justified by real-life experience;
(4) if you accept as an "axiom" that Monty's opening of the door did not help you, then you can conclude something like that the outcome of Monty's action can at most be as good for you as if the state it brought about (one door open, has goat) were naturally there from the start. In that scenario, though, the conditional probability of the car being behind each remaining door is indeed 1/2.
As for why people would think that "the bound is tight"/it's not even worse, there might be some other technically-incorrect-but-adaptive axioms in play.
It is true that I am implying a form of "peaky", and not very introspectively closed, intelligence here: I think that people are okay at basic probability, and have a set of very solid but not perfect intuitions about benefit, trade and competition in the sort of weakly iterated games that were played within and among tribes since times when they looked more like apes. These intuitions do in fact operate extensively on comparison, as evidenced by the fact that in all of recorded history they were conveyed by way of allegorical stories.
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20d ago
· Edited 20d ago
I do think that my description captures the essence of the confusion, but that isn't to say that I think that the confused would necessarily describe their confusion like this, or be able to describe it at all. I'm following a fairly mechanistic analysis of "normies" here: their everyday experience, and perhaps their memetic heirloom (in the form of tropes, stories and catechisms), tells them that if they are in an asymmetric-information setting and a person who knows more than them and has interests misaligned with theirs tries to persuade them to act in a particular way, that person is probably trying to bait them into harming themselves.
The exact way in which this self-harm happens doesn't even matter: "they wouldn't be trying so hard to convince me if this were actually good for me" is a straight corollary of this life lesson, and if you analyse the corollary carefully you see that it all but says that the game show host's behaviour may depend on your choice of door (=whether switching would be good for you).
(By the way, I'm not terribly impressed by the invocation of Erdős. People who actually have to deal with his output may tell you that while he certainly had great flashes of intuition and a superhuman tolerance for grindy proof work, he was also hardly a precision machine in the vein of von Neumann, and had plenty of moments where he got sloppy or just didn't get something.
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20d ago
Early scifi dealt with it a lot; I'm thinking Arthur Clarke (The Star, the Nine Billion Names of God for a more comedic take that would be up the alley of our Caliph) or even Asimov with The Last Question. It probably only really stopped being a thing once scifi became a mass-market endeavour.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
20d ago
The description that you quoted says nothing whatsoever about whether the host is guaranteed to pick a door. It talks about exactly one possible "run" of the system, namely the one where you started by picking door 1. Supposing the car is actually behind Door 2, it is perfectly consistent with this description that if you had picked Door 2, the host would not have done anything. There is nothing whatsoever about it suggesting that it talks about a set of rules, and in general, I will never read any text that is written as an account of events ("you do this, and then he does that, and (...)") as if it were an account of rules ("whenever you do this, he will do that (...)").
If you wanted to write a description to the effect that the host will always behave in the same fashion, you could write it as follows: "You are on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors. (...) Per the rules, after you pick a door, the host, who knows what's behind the doors, will open one of the other doors that has a goat behind it. He will then say to you: (...) Is it to your advantage to switch?". The description was not written in this way.
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21d ago
The answer for 95% of those decision theory puzzles/paradoxes is that the puzzle as stated is underspecified. In the Monty Hall problem, it's the counterfactual behaviour of the host (is it guaranteed that he would pick and open a door regardless of what you do? If yes: switch; if he actually only picks a door when you have picked the winning door: don't). The Allais paradox (in my opinion) is actually similar, just with an added element of deeply baked in common-sense mistrust towards a seemingly complete specification - academics tend to find this inconceivable but people's world model quite wisely reads "shady guy in labcoat says 1% chance of 0" as "shady guy in labcoat will give me 0 and invoke some sophistry to tell me that it was an unfortunate 1% fluke", just as it reads "game show host opens door and asks me if I want to switch" as "game show host saw I'm about to win and is trying to bait me into losing". It's not a surprising find that experiment participants don't use logic to evaluate your thought experiments as stated but just imagine themselves in the situation, importing additional beliefs about reality that you never stated in the process.
In the Sleeping Beauty problem, it's the nature of the question that is even being asked - what does even actually constitute the right answer to the question? Why is 1/2 or 1/3 more "right" than 0? (Monty Hall does better there, right answer is whatever maximises your probability of getting the car.) I think Groisman, in the paper you linked, gets close to this, but stops short of outright committing to paper that the whole debate is just consequence of a Zen-like deepity bamboozle. Unfortunately, in my experience (my PhD was in this academic neighbourhood) people working in this field really won't take any of the above for an answer, and will go back to "no, but really, what is the sound of one hand clapping? Don't dodge the question" straight away.
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21d ago
We had a discussion about this quite recently, and as then I want to argue that we have not figured out a way to maintain technologically advanced civilization while forcing high birthrates either. "We are going to die, better preemptively kill ourselves now" does not sound like an appealing policy platform.
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22d ago
How does chuds using terms like "troon" on Twitter translate into kids in the Tenderloin dropping out of their polycule?
What do polycules have to do with anything here?
Also, I'm sure there is more discrimination going on than some chuds talking on Twitter. People (including yours truly) naturally avoid them, for one.
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22d ago
· Edited 22d ago
They are no more persecuted for their self identity then the man who thinks he's Jesus, or that lizardpeople are the world elite.
So? It would be perfectly fair to say that a trans-Jesus detransitioned because of persecution, too. Persecution does not need to be baseless.
Do you even notice what you are saying yourself? The paper quoted in the original post says
This type of experience is often mediated by external barriers such as discrimination
and then the response that you are here defending is calling it "fantasy discrimination". And yet, you proceed to say yourself, "This is a perfectly reasonable set of criteria to discriminate against." If this is not "it's not happening, and it's a good thing that it is", then what is? Do you actually have an argument, or does the driving principle just amount to "this post was directionally anti-trans, so I should agree; the post arguing with it must have been pro-trans, so I should disagree"?
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22d ago
On what basis do you jump to "fantasy"?
I posit that discrimination against the trans is a great example of what the resident right-wingers like to gloss as "it's not happening, and it's a good thing that it is", and complain about endlessly if the other side does it. Here, it's even more egregious: it can hardly be simultaneously true, as right-wingers typically believe, that trans women naturally evoke revulsion, and that any adverse social consequences that they experience are imaginary.
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25d ago
I think this changing idea of the "size of the world" may, at least in certain aspects, purely be a matter of the self-understanding of the same Western culture you hail from and are speaking to. For a specific example, in 1990, Japanese was more important than it is today: the bubble had not popped yet, the population was peaking, a big fraction of the dominant tech companies were Japanese, people's English was worse and they had no Google Translate to pull out in an emergency, and American pundits were actively and credibly nursing fears of a future of complete Japanese dominance. Now Japan is where the Chinese fly to do their low-cost duty-free shopping and Westerners make off-grid LARP videos where they buy some abandoned house in the mountains and farm cucumbers. Yet, a modern James Bond would be considered more cringe for not knowing Japanese than a 1990 James Bond was.
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27d ago
· Edited 27d ago
But on the other hand, you could be having the children right there in the trenches, training them on the job from day 1, so to speak! Imagine the logistical benefits, on top of the beauty and justice of a single standard.
The silly banter aside, I don't think the "mine stupid quotes from the other side's authorities" game would work in your favour, were both sides to play it seriously? After all, you have to reach for quotes from all the way back in 1905. If someone wanted to sneer against gender equality, they could easily find similarly ridiculous quotes from egalitarian academics who are significantly more recent, and actually still upheld as authorities by many to the present day. Something along the lines of, how can you argue that the necessities of childbirth disqualify women from intellectual life, when some of those who give birth are men? (I hope we never stoop to the levels of that sort of Kiwifarms slop, either.)
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28d ago
Is it Red Tribe to actually trust the government now?
Always has been. I remember feeling the same when the Ukraine war was the dominant theme of the day here, and suddenly all the people here who thought themselves experts in spotting and dismissing cathedral media misinformation joyfully slurped up the same manipulative slop deployed in the sense of the USG's foreign policy agenda. If you believe anyone actually adheres to principles rather than just using them as rationalisations for naked tribalism, you will be disappointed time and time again.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
28d ago
· Edited 28d ago
I actually agree with you regarding the ridiculousness of the positions you are arguing against, and yet. I would be so much more inclined to join your crusade against double standards if you finally started using your considerable rhetorical talent and political cachet to push Ukraine to draft its women in equal numbers already - or do you believe that your uteruses are using up too many phosphates for you to pilot Mavics?
Besides, "local woman goes to debate forum and ignores the rules to engage in theatrics because she is too outraged by some of the positions" is not the compelling advertisement for women's participation in intellectual life that you seem to believe it is. In fact, it's somewhere in the general class of "local man goes to kindergarten and molests the children to prove that akshually he can do that without getting an erection" as a protest for men's suitability for nurturing professions.
(Explanation of the pattern, because my bulging testes instill an insatiable urge to mansplain and engage in tone-deaf high-decoupling: [member of group x] does [bad thing] because of [behavioural compulsion ascribed to the group to argue for their unsuitability for y], to push for members of group x doing y)
On the other hand, women's participation in the North Vietnamese army is generally taken to be very high (I've seen figures like 30% bandied around, and certainly anecdotes check out), and since the war ended, Vietnam has done rather well. Its GDP per capita (Wikipedia figures) went about 60x from 80 USD to 4745 USD since 1975, while the US one went from ~12x from 7713 to 92883.
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