ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
1d ago
because I could not longer believe that the earth is 6000 years old, because I could no longer believe that God would damn someone to an eternity of hellfire for being born in the wrong place
Man, it's not that hard to find a church that doesn't screw these things up.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
I was not the original commenter, so I made no such claim.
The extent to which game theory maps well to real world situations with humans participants is hotly debated, even among expert practitioners. My experience is that it is phenomenal how you can sometimes get abstractions for some particular problems that are quite beautiful and genuinely aid with intuition. However, as you increase the realism and complexity, many methods run into difficulty. Naturally, that's why we have a lot of work in those domains, to try to extend the set of formal problems where we have methods that work. There might be upper-level undergrad courses which can somewhat survey the simpler settings and mayyyybe touch a bit on the rest of the field, but I think it's most likely going to be a grad class, if one exists at your uni (you'd be surprised how rare they are), and honestly, it probably is still difficult to really survey the lot of it.
I don't know what the other commenter would say, but I personally have seen a ton of extremely shitty appeals to game theory when it comes to politics or morality. I haven't harped on the former yet (though it's been on the back of my mind to do so for a while), but I've definitely harped on the latter. The vast majority of folks who appeal to it for these purposes do not have any idea about these features of the field. The vast majority of them have, like, heard of the prisoner's dilemma. And that's sort of it. They know approximately zero more and just imagine the rest of the effin' owl in their mind.
variants of prisoner's dilemma that are mapped for real world situations - such as iterated prisoner's dilemma that can be used to study problems like nuclear arms race
I'll note the kind of funny bit that the classic iterated prisoner's dilemma is two participants, complete information. Yes, one can do imperfect/incomplete information or multiple-player, and there's a lot of interesting work there. Good luck if you think you're going to find someone in a forum like this who has a reasonable sense of the state of those parts of the field and is able to use it to usefully inform their view of politics/morality. It's always, over and over again, just repeats of arguments about chump-level understanding of variants of the iterated prisoner's dilemma.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
The classic prisoner's dilemma is one of complete/perfect information about the game, including the opponent's payoff information. There are a variety of incomplete/imperfect information games (some people distinguish between the two), where a player may lack information about the environment, their own payoff, other parties' payoff, some form of secret goal/intention/capability/etc.
You are right that there is one piece of information that is lacking, namely, what specific strategy the opponent will, in fact, choose. Given that this is generically a feature of almost all games that are considered in the field, it is usually not a feature that gains the moniker of "incomplete/imperfect information". That is reserved for those other games, and things like the classic prisoner's dilemma are, indeed, called "complete information games".
Games in which one knows what specific strategy the opponent will pick are, in my own view of the field, not even properly called "games". They are simply optimization problems.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
That's an interesting claim, considering that it came significantly out of atheism. E.g.:
Most movement atheists weren’t in it for the religion. They were in it for the hamartiology [the study of sin, in particular, how sin enters the universe]. Once they got the message that the culture-at-large had settled on a different, better hamartiology, there was no psychological impediment to switching over. We woke up one morning and the atheist bloggers had all quietly became social justice bloggers. Nothing else had changed because nothing else had to; the underlying itch being scratched was the same. They just had to CTRL+F and replace a couple of keywords.
I'm pretty doubtful that if one examines the continental->critical philosophy pipeline that may have undergirded some of the trend, one would find a pool of Christian heretics, either. I guess if you say that all the atheism is just Christian heresy (would be quite a claim) and that Wokism is just atheist heresy, blink and imagine some form of transitive property, you might be able to think that Wokism is just Christian heresy.
ControlsFreak
4d ago
It's like expecting to get a decent new car for $10,000.
We don't allow Chinese branded bicycles to be sold in the US either, huh?
ControlsFreak
5d ago
I'm sure it's quite field and role dependent, but mine is definitely a good one on that front. They're already pursuing "my project" as a large component of their role. So if I have the makings of a promising idea, it's not uncommon for them to spend hours trying to make the details work. I'm pretty impressed pretty often, but I also have managed to get myself a set of impressive collaborators.
ControlsFreak
5d ago
I've seen both sides, as I have some collaborators who go back and forth with enough significance that we keep up when they're abroad. There are nice things about being able to stroll down to their office. There are also nice things about, "Here's what I've been thinking about today; it's still kind of a hazy idea, but I think I'm on to something," and then I head home, go to bed, they work on it all through my night, and first thing in the morning, I have an email about their progress in taking my idea and running with it. Similarly for working a document toward a deadline. I can do what I can do, leave some notes, and magically, much progress has occurred while I was sleeping. It's a wonderful feeling when it happens.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
I think that depends on how you define "intentionally".
I mean, please try? Sketch out some plausible definitions that reconcile your presented distinction and what is in the Wiki article.
the idea is still that the microaggression is stemming from genuinely-if-perhaps-subconsciously-held prejudices
Possibly so. That's a far cry from your distinction that:
A microaggression properly understood is a deliberately microaggravating comment, knowingly pitched by the offending party as a subtle enough thing that it has inherent plausible deniability and affords them the ability to deny any ill intent while still getting the satisfaction of making the receiving party momentarily uncomfortable. [emphasis in original]
You call out both deliberate and knowing as primary parts of your definition. You possibly even require specific intent behind the statement (plausible deniability and satisfaction from the receiving party's discomfort).
I don't think a genuinely coincidentally aggravating turn of phrase would properly count as a microaggression even by the more expansive definition Wikipedia puts forward, although, of course, this is a hard thing to prove, perhaps by design.
I think this is pretty obviously not true in the case of the Wiki definition. I think you either need to just say that Wikipedia (and most purveyors of the term) are just wrong on this... that many of the things that they think are in the category of "microaggression" should be properly understood to be in the category of "microaggravator" (namely, the ones that lack at least some of your qualifiers of deliberate, knowing, intent of plausible deniability, and/or satisfaction from the receiving party's discomfort)... or you need to do some actual work to reconcile things.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
Fair enough, but terms mean things based on how they're used, and the progressive identity politics crowd have done a pretty good job using this term (since they're generally the only ones who want to use it anyway). These people own the humanities and the media, so it'll be hard to keep them from redefining words as they see fit.
I can simply regularly point out that War is Not Peace, that There Are Four Lights. Maybe people will not listen to me. I'm just some guy on an Internet Forum. But as for me and my comments, we'll just point out what is true and not worry too much about what bad things nebulous people may or may not continue to do (if I don't do what... start shooting people? I'm not going to stop them). Yes, people will still do bad things. No, I will not call those bad things good things. Sure, they might persist in recruiting others to do bad things. What did you think the gospel of Christ meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Righteous violence against political opponents? That we're going to magically stop people from doing bad things by writing comments in an Internet Forum? Mostly, we try to hold on to some measure of truth, observe that the wickedness of man becomes great in the Earth, and hope to not have to suffer too terribly in the intervening time.
I find that there is more incentive for people to disguise the former as the latter, as evidenced by the vast majority of the examples that people give for the latter are clearly just disguised versions of the former.
FWIW, Wikipedia explicitly disagrees with you, calling out in the very first sentence that it can be "intentional or unintentional".
EDIT: Some quotes from that Wiki article:
In contrast to aggression, in which there is usually an intent to cause harm, persons making microagressive comments may be otherwise well-intentioned and unaware of the potential impact of their words.
They are thought to spring from unconsciously held prejudices and beliefs which may be demonstrated consciously or unconsciously through daily interactions.
Because microaggressions are subtle and perpetrators may be unaware of the harm they cause...
ControlsFreak
6d ago
You're trying to work out the definition based on the etymology. Words generally don't work that way, and especially so for ideologically invented terms like "microaggression." The function of the word "aggression" in there isn't to describe what happened, it's to provide negative affect for anyone listening to the term.
This is what I'm explicitly against, ideology-based redefinitions that are clear perversions of the words, themselves, generally for the purpose of leveraging positive/negative affect for ideological purposes. War is Peace and all. No, sorry. We already have definitions.
The defining portion of a microaggression is that the microaggressor genuinely has no idea that he's doing anything aggravating to the microaggressed-upon. Their failure to model the other person well enough to recognize that what they said would be aggravating to them is enough to describe as an act of (micro) aggression.
I'm sure they genuinely have no idea that by doing this redefinition, they're microaggravating me. But if their definition holds, then again, they are committing a little act of violence against me every time they use the term that way.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
Man, this is also the best illustration of my take on the term - that it's just named wrong. It's close; it's very very close to being named correctly, but they just barely missed. What they mean is "microaggravator". An aggravator is something that is aggravating; it's unpleasant or irritating, particularly via the mechanism of happening over and over again. The micro bit is that it's, objectively, a small thing that is irritating, like the tag on your shirt being irritating.
Whereas to call it an "aggression" is just completely unsupportable. No one is committing a forceful attack, being hostile, etc., when they're too dumb to make a unique joke and say the stupid obvious thing for the gazillionth time. Not even a micro one.
I actually think it would be an affirmatively good thing if people talked about "microaggravators". It captures exactly the phenomenon that they claim to be pointing out, that sometimes people can find some things mildly irritating that you might not have realized, possibly due to different cultures or whatever. That seems perfectly fine. It's the bullshit move of trying to turn it into an aggression, a mini act of violence, alongside page after page of other nonsensical claims about what violence is, that, well, aggravates me. If "microaggression" is what they say it is, then using it that way is a microaggression against me, and they're literally committing a little act of violence against me every time they use that term that way. But really, it's just irritating to me; it's a microaggravator.
ControlsFreak
7d ago
It's a tough line to walk, especially because as you get closer to the optimal frontier, the quality of evidence for what is "best" declines significantly, so many folks find themselves swimming in all sorts of claims about minute details, which, even if real, may only have an extremely small effect size. E.g., people nitpicking about exact timing of protein intake and its exact composition at those times. Like, sure, if you're an elite athlete and your pay may depend on whether you can eek out an extra percent here and there, maybe it's worth trying to figure it out, but it's just not for most people. It's definitely not worth the psychological hassle of trying to wade through the various claims or attempting to micromanage a signal which may not even be high-quality enough to ever capture the phenomenon you're looking for.
On the other side, there are basic things that many people just don't grok until you collect their specific data from them and show it to them. For a couple examples, I've met people who simply did not truly comprehend that calories correspond noisily but directly to body weight or that alcohol messed up their sleep until it was shown to them with their own data.
Of course, it's always difficult to know which category you're in, because, well, you don't know what you don't know.
ControlsFreak
9d ago
Nietzche was a loser and his ideology is for losers. Usually the people who are proclaiming that God Is Dead and that Game Theory Is The Way are the sickly, marginalized, unattractive, and resentful. The purveyors of the ad hominem are often the best targets of their own devices.
ControlsFreak
13d ago
Perhaps this was all just a bit of confusion. I was responding to your bit:
This also touches on Trump's dreaded funding cuts. We've had a number of people here complaining about them, claiming that Trump should have used a more precise approach. It can't be done. Any presumption-of-innocence approach would yield no significant outcome, as institutions could hire activists faster than you could get them fired.
where the internal link was to funding cuts to academia, with the context being whether or not there were goal-oriented, somewhat tailored ways of approaching it compared to what I've perceived in these fora as calls for 'indiscriminate chemotherapy'. So, I guess, I'm not really sure what you're meaning or going for.
I think I already linked it, but it might not have been worth the time to read it before, but here is some context, with links to prior discussions where I was pushing back against the 'indiscriminate chemo' calls, culminating in the more recent cuts being targeted and linked to institutional behavior.
ControlsFreak
13d ago
"Right and wrong"? What's that? I keep hearing here that those things don't real. Naive meta-ethical relativism, you see. Best you can do is something something game theory (don't ask how that's supposed to work). And best as I can see, assassination is a strategy in the strategy set. Ergo, there's nothing "wrong" about it.
ControlsFreak
14d ago
SPLC
This seems pretty apart from a core problem within academia.
harassment
Uh, likewise? That's sort of just a general phenomenon that exists in a variety of places?
which they can then use to their advantage in future fights (any other university considering work with SEGM will either come across the scandal when vetting the organization and get cold feet, or in the event they don't, activists can forward it to them once any such future relationship is discovered.
Yeah, uh, the same?
I'm really struggling to see how any of this is actually about academia qua academia. There's almost nothing here about the typical workings of academia, interactions with the federal government, levers that could be pulled, specific goals to be accomplished.
Big picture, it seems like most of this is that there is some influence on academia's decision-making, and that influence is political in nature and bad. ISTM that the goal would be some form of reducing that influence or the effectiveness thereof, rather than detonating all of academia, itself. Would that at least be a reasonable statement of a plausible goal?
ControlsFreak
14d ago
I find this to be, frankly, borne of ignorance and lack of creativity. That is, similar to what I wrote here, it scans to me like "Joe Sixpack" bloviating on Middle East politics. Perhaps some of that is epistemic helplessness, seeing for example the classic hapax legomenon about Afghanistan, then just casually coming to the conclusion that all is hopeless and we should just nuke 'em all and turn the sand into glass. There's no sense of theory of war/politics involved, no understanding of the concepts behind consolidating gains, just shooting from the hip without much thought.
Even here in your latest comment, you seem to grasping for something to 'work' (you don't use the word, but ISTM that it's what you're going for), but there's no sense of what 'working' is. There's not even really a well-formed goal. Just a vague sense of these people seem bad, and it seems complicated, and I don't know what to do, so I'll just go in blastin'.
ControlsFreak
15d ago
This also touches on Trump's dreaded funding cuts. We've had a number of people here complaining about them, claiming that Trump should have used a more precise approach. It can't be done. Any presumption-of-innocence approach would yield no significant outcome, as institutions could hire activists faster than you could get them fired.
This is, like, just a non sequitur, no? Something something, list of grievances, declaration that $Thing can't be done, because something something, the other side can recruit or something? Is the implication here just the @gattsuru comment? No bother firing (upon) them one-by-one; no bother even considering any other possible pathway either; really gotta just go for a mass casualty event?
ControlsFreak
15d ago
I think the slightly easier steelman would be riffing off your phrase "much-bigger news than a murder". That is, one might think that this is "just a murder". Murders happen all the time. They're often not Paper of Record material. So the steelman view could be something like, "This wouldn't be Paper of Record news if it wasn't for Republicans Pouncing to try to make it news."
Of course, this still exposes some significant premises. One could have taken a similar view for several other cases that became cause celebres mostly due to the left "pouncing". It takes more time and effort to work through some reasoning for why any given incident is "legitimately" newsworthy versus primarily being pushed for political concerns. Nevertheless, the most basic observation that is difficult to explain away is that I can't really remember any incident being reported with the opposite valence. That is, I don't think there are stories presented in the form, "This wouldn't really be news if it wasn't for the fact that the left is 'pouncing'." Their concerns just are; they're inherently just and true; there is no intermediate agent actively choosing to pump up the situation for political purposes.
But all these sorts of observations require realizing the possibility and then having sufficient time/exposure to realize what's happening, which is more sophisticated than most observers are likely to be.
ControlsFreak
15d ago
What stood out to me the most in that article was that it was, "Republicans Pounce". The style guide is dumb, but that's sort of baked in at this point. It's almost mechanical, like if someone changed their spellchecker. Whereas making the affirmative choice to headline with "Republicans Pounce" requires more in-the-moment intent.
ControlsFreak
16d ago
Yeah, I basically haven't meaningfully read any of these, but every time I skim one, I kick myself more and more for not commenting what I thought when the very first one was posted: "I wonder whether they'll do Jews or Blacks first when they get around to it."
#HlynkaWasRight
This is a recurring theme in Jim's writing, explaining goodness in terms of game theory and material consequences. As he notes, this ends up to a large extent rederiving traditional Christian morality
Pretty much doubt. I mean, I'd probably have to wade through a bunch of garbage to distill out an actual attempted derivation; it's much more likely to be a loose collection of handwavy claims than any sort of serious deductive argument.
It's kind of funny how all sides of the atheist internecine war want to make claims that the core of their morality is game theory. Of course, this game theory is somehow "not objective", meaning that other people can't simply rederive it from the premises... but good luck asking them to explain how that's supposed to work. And more funny is that they all seem to come up with quite different conclusions about what their handwavy game theory premises are supposed to imply (derivation often not shown). I'm pretty confident that the folks here who appeal to it don't think it directly derives traditional Christian morality. ...especially not Jim's version.
ControlsFreak
19d ago
Yeah, I guess. I was looking at WINE/such first, and my "cursory amount of research" was basically just asking an LLM, which IIRC told me that they had problems with Excel. I should revisit doing it with a VM. Biggest challenge will be making a workflow that is wife-approved, since she needs to use it, too.
My sense is that both of those topics have been subject to debate within the realm of Christian thinking long before modern science. The debate over the latter issue seems pretty unaffected by modern science, as well.
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