67IsTheNew69
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User ID: 4109
67IsTheNew69
9d ago
Another factor is that benefits are only sent out on certain days of the month. (Looks like in California it's the 1st through the 10th depending on your account number.) So you're more likely to see people using EBT on those days, or the weekends after those days, especially if people are doing the responsible thing and planning out a single big shopping trip to get all the stuff they need for the month.
67IsTheNew69
13d ago
I followed the citations, and the "sexual aggression scale" the researchers used in their questionnaire involves asking questions with five possible answers ranging from "not at all likely" to "very likely". However, they got that 30% statistic by re-coding the answers as either "yes" or "no".
So this seems like the classic social-science trick where you inflate the number of "yes" responses to a question by providing one answer choice that means "no" and four answer choices that all mean "yes". And because they asked about both "rape" and "forcing a female to do something sexual she didn't want to", you get the bias where people want to answer that one is less likely than the other.
(The "Materials and Methods" section of the paper makes clear that the "something sexual" wording was what they actually asked on the questionnaire. The researchers seem to have paraphrased that as "force a woman to sexual intercourse" in their results, which also seems kind of misleading.)
67IsTheNew69
13d ago
The dates given in the Wikipedia article for the incident suggest that the victim was about 59 years old at the start of the incident, and it continued until she was about 68.
Where I'm from, I think that'd be called "old age". And to @ActuallyATleilaxuGhola's point above, it seems like a stage of life where it'd be pretty normal to have a lot of unexplained aches and pains.
67IsTheNew69
16d ago
I'm not a lawyer, but your proposed workflow sounds a lot like "CC a lawyer on an email conversation that you don't actually need to involve a lawyer in, solely so that you can claim attorney-client privilege on the whole conversation". That's something that big companies like Google have tried, but judges don't look very kindly on it: https://www.reuters.com/technology/landmark-google-ruling-warning-companies-about-preserving-evidence-2024-08-06/
67IsTheNew69
16d ago
I do suspect Scott himself leans quite a bit further to the left on this issue (after all, he's managed to survive living in the San Francisco Bay Area), but the post does a good job describing the "bailey" version of the position that's more palatable to moderates.
67IsTheNew69
17d ago
Indeed, the core argument of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ is that using preferred pronouns is something you should to do to "make a little effort to be nice to people," in the same way that you might tell a little white lie to spare your friend's feelings (or, in the example that Scott uses, humor someone who jokingly declares himself Emperor of the United States).
A journalist reporting on a mass murderer probably doesn't owe them the same level of social nicety.
67IsTheNew69
17d ago
I think OP is trying to recount his impressions as someone who stumbled onto Gamergate in, say, 2016 or so. Especially if you're a kid with a poor sense of time who hasn't looked into the details, I think it's fair that you might've gotten the impression that it had been going on for longer than it really had been.
A bunch of stuff that happened prior to The Zoe Post, like the backlash to the 2012 "Tropes vs Women" Kickstarter, kind of ended up getting rolled into "Gamergate" in retrospect -- people on both sides saw value in either joining the popular/trending movement, or painting all their critics as members of the same hate group.
I think this gets to the heart of the argument that the original tweet is making: the "egg cracking" movement also carries the same sort of implicit assumption that transitioning will turn you into someone attractive. It only takes a bit of scrolling through /r/egg_irl/top listings to find memes about how trans is when you want to be a hot anime waifu or pretty video-game princess.
This fallacy works even if people's perception of what a "woman" is is more realistic. If you're in the half of men that are below average attractiveness, and you imagine that transitioning will make you more like some composite image of what a typical woman is like (i.e., average attractiveness), that's still a positive change.
Those same men would also buy a button that magically transformed them into a man, if not for the fact that they are already men, and thus the expected outcome of the button is "nothing happens" rather than "I become what you'd get if you look up 'man' in a stock photo library".
Your first problem is that LLMs are bad at counting, so trying to get them to count is a waste of time. Instead you should ask it to assign a category to each row, so that you can then use Excel or something to count how many times each category appears.
Depending on how many rows you've got, this might require a multi-step process where you first get the LLM to come up with a list of categories, then assign each item to a category one by one. (Or some other process, such as going one by one through each item and deciding whether it fits in any existing category or requires a new category to be created.) You may need to write a script that calls the LLM's API and uses features like "tools" or "structured output" to force it to follow the process.
You should be prepared to try lots and lots of times until the LLM produces results you're happy with; a good rule of thumb is to spend at least as much time as it would've taken you to complete the task manually.
67IsTheNew69
1mo ago
The drug analogy I'm imagining is a scenario like this:
At a sleepover, one kid starts talking about the thrill of tripping on cold pills - "It's the most amazing high and makes you forget everything." Someone asks him/her how it's done, so they go into the bathroom and find some pills to crush up for a demonstration.
(source is a random worksheet I found on Google, because I couldn't find the one that I was given at school)
It is not necessary for the kid to be lying in this scenario; he/she could be telling the truth about the high, and just not be aware of the potential downsides of abusing cold medicine (or not believe the authority figures who try to tell him/her about them). People can hurt you by being mistaken, even without deliberately lying.
Looking at it another way, Amelia is kind of like the cool uncle who offers you a sip of beer even though you're only 16. Most of society thinks that's totally fine, but the police officer at the D.A.R.E. assembly wants you to know that it's a slippery slope to ruining your life with addiction, DUIs, and a painful, untimely death. I think the term "disinformation" is getting at the same kind of thing: the idea is that people should Just Say No to infohazards dangerous opinions, even if they appear benign or are factually true statements.
The problem for Pathways is that that's a really hard sell. (It was a hard sell for D.A.R.E., but it's an even harder sell for this.) I think a successful version of this story would involve Charlie getting more extreme and radicalized on their own, maybe even to a point where they push Amelia away or hurt her somehow, because the ideas themselves are just that dangerous. But even setting aside that that's a much harder story to write, and as you mention Pathways is too afraid of actually depicting or engaging with those ideas to convincingly portray them as being harmful, the game's creators ultimately wanted it to be a game about doing the "right" thing. You're supposed to choose the options where Charlie decides not to go to the protest and maybe speaks to a counselor about their career concerns. But if the alternative was a long and compelling story about how attending a protest was the first step in a radicalization pipeline that eventually led Charlie to abandon their family and gaming buddies and gruesomely murder Amelia, the "don't do that actually" button would just feel like an early game over.
67IsTheNew69
1mo ago
It would have been easy for one of the scenarios to be Amelia bullying a non-white classmate, for instance, but nothing of the sort happens. Amelia bears the symbols of being socially unacceptable, but nothing more.
Making Amelia openly malicious or unlikable would, I think, be missing the point that the game was trying to convey.
Early in life, a lot of children are told a story about a kind stranger who offers them candy, but then kidnaps them. (Sometimes the story is called "Hansel and Gretel"; often it's a more generic "guy with a van" sort of situation.) The purpose of this story is to teach children about the concept of betrayal -- even if someone seems nice, they might be plotting to harm you. You can't always trust people who act like your friends.
A little later in life, many children are told a similar story about drugs. This one's a bit more subtle because the antagonist isn't directly scheming to hurt people. Maybe they're a dealer who can genuinely be trusted to give you the drugs you want for a fair price. Maybe they're a friend who genuinely wants you to have a good time. (On a more abstract level, maybe they're a substance that will genuinely make you feel good when you consume it!) But when you're dying of an overdose, or chemically dependent on a substance that no longer makes you feel good, they either won't care or won't be able to help you. In the end, you can't always trust people who genuinely are your friends. It's a different kind of betrayal.
Pathways is trying to apply the same idea to politics. Amelia could be cool and attractive and a great friend, and she could have convincing evidence to support her political positions, and the things she asks of you could seem totally reasonable. The game needs to convince you to distrust her regardless. It can't give you an easy out to say "well she's clearly an evil witch, look at her cackling about her plans to kidnap and eat children, obviously I can follow my gut instincts and avoid people like that".
I think even if the game managed to convey any actual reason why it's a bad idea for Charlie to watch an unapproved video or attend an unapproved protest (maybe it's the first step in a radicalization pipeline that turns children into classmate-murdering monsters like in Adolescence), it would still get the criticism that Amelia is cool and based, because her being cool and based is kind of the point.
67IsTheNew69
1mo ago
Another example of the "indifference" on display here is that Pathways refers to the protagonist Charlie using they/them pronouns. Some commentators like Asmongold took that at face value, like the creators of the game made Charlie non-binary as some sort of woke diversity-oriented casting decision.
When in reality, the game lets you pick between a boy character and a girl character for the protagonist, and recording alternate versions of voice lines costs more. A more clever writer could've worked around this problem by avoiding third-person pronouns for the protagonist altogether, but "they" is good enough for government work.
67IsTheNew69
1mo ago
The name of the charge makes for a nice tweet, but the indictment makes clear that he was charged under 18 USC 924(c) for possessing guns while committing a different US federal crime (specifically, trafficking drugs into the United States, which he's also being charged for).
67IsTheNew69
1mo ago
Is it common to speak one-on-one with a priest about your personal problems? This is a genuine question; pop culture depictions, and the few times I've personally attended church, gave me the impression that priests mainly give sermons/speeches to large audiences (and do some very limited things like Confession), and it wouldn't have occured to me to approach one with the kind of issues I'd bring to a therapist.
67IsTheNew69
1mo ago
@HighResolutionSleep's proposals (in particular the "demand-side" proposals and the "shotgun wedding" proposal) do seem basically aimed at getting men to view fatherhood as a way of locking in an existing relationship with a woman, like reverse babytrapping.
But there's an asymmetry that would make reverse babytrapping a lot less appealing than regular babytrapping: the state can force you to give up money, which is the thing that men traditionally contribute more of to a relationship, but it can't force you to provide emotional support or intimacy, which is the thing that women traditionally contribute more of.
The $151B number is listed as "Eliminations" on page 28; the same number is broken out by segment as "Total revenues - affiliated customers" on page 66. (The missing $7B is Optum Insights, an IT vendor that seems to sell software to both UnitedHealthcare and the other Optums.)
67IsTheNew69
2mo ago
Put simply, social security and other forms of elder welfare need to be either phased out or replaced with something far less permissive to the old and intrusive to the young.
At least in my peer group, this seems to be priced in; we already believe that Social Security is a kind of Ponzi scheme that we won't receive any benefits from. For example, The Hill reported on a 2023 survey where 45% of Zoomers believed they "would not get a dime" from SS. We're already planning our own retirement savings. (Unless there's dementia in the family, in which case we're planning our DNR and MAID paperwork. No amount of support from his children has made my granddad's life less miserable.)
I think if the government gave out a few standardized food items to every benefits recipient, that would actually heavily encourage trading. They'd basically be minting a currency, except instead of coins that all contain the same amount of silver, it's bags that all contain the same amount of Kraft cheese product or whatever. There'd be big opportunities to take those items and smuggle them back into the regular supply chain en masse for cash, or sell them to people who want a reliable source of cheap Kraft cheese product.
Ideally, if you want to prevent trading, you want to give people stuff that seems valuable to those people, but worthless to everyone else. So they're incentivized to consume the items themselves rather than try to sell them. The mushroom "superfoods" described in OP actually seem like a excellent example of this principle in action.
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