ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
It's not the kind of thing you can realistically ban.
I think this mistakes different types of bans/controls and their different purposes.
One way a ban/control may operate is to try to pre-emptively prevent certain events from occurring. When folks try to control, say, ammonium nitrate following the Oklahoma City bombing, they're often trying to prevent someone from acquiring some of the tools used to create a large bomb, ultimately in the hopes of preventing said hypothetical bomb from being used to kill people and destroy stuff. Whether or not this is practical is not the point here; the point is that this is the point of the effort. Similarly for controls on nuclear material.
Importation controls are somewhat similar in that they may be trying to prevent an event from occurring at all. The funny example I go to sometimes is the ban on Chinese drywall. The intent was to prevent it from even getting into the country, pre-emptively preventing whatever harms it may (or may not) later produce. Or see, for example, the discussion below about possible controls on UAS; I read that conversation to be primarily pondering whether controls can be put in place which pre-emptively prevent a significant number of events, to what extent such controls will be effective or not effective (how hard is it for folks to still "roll their own"?), etc.
Many other bans/controls are post-hoc controls, assigning liability/culpability after a sufficient number of steps have been taken toward an event or after the event has occurred. These are different in type. Probably the majority of controls are like this. I might even say that part of the reason why so many controls are like this is because it is not reasonable to control the inputs that are used to lead up to an event. This may be in part due to "dual use" considerations or other factors.
For a silly example, rope can be used to tie someone up when kidnapping them. Well, basically no one thinks it's reasonable to put heavy controls on possessing rope. But basically no one thinks that kidnapping is "not the kind of thing you can realistically ban", either. That people have widespread access to the tool used is sort of neither here nor there when considering post-hoc controls on the use of those tools for specific events.
What I find strange is that I've really only seen this come up for digital tools. There's this weird perspective that if someone uses specifically a digital tool that is "out there" and accessible, that the "genie is out of the bottle", then it's simply unrealistic to use any sort of law to restrict any type of use of these digital tools that one might perform. That still seems wild to me. Rope is a technology that is "out there". "The genie is out of the bottle." Even the Primitive Technology guy makes his own! ...sorrrrta think that we can still ban kidnapping.
[EDIT: I forgot to add what I had wanted to say about the UAS conversation. Suppose, after consideration, it seems infeasible to use a Type I control to prevent things like killing people with UAS. Can't even manage to stop someone from flying into, say, a crowd at an open sports stadium. I don't see any reason why someone couldn't want a Type II control, still making it illegal to fly a UAS into a stadium or to kill people with a UAS. Sure, maybe you can't prevent it, but to the extent that you have the investigative tools to prove in a court of law who is culpable for doing it, you can still prosecute them.]
Of course, once we're in a Type II ban world instead of a Type I ban world, then there is some amount of "we have to get used to the fact that this type of event will actually happen significantly more often than events that we can control with Type I bans". Frequencies and percentages will depend heavily on specifics. And maybe that's the sentiment you're going for. Sure, we're not going to be able to meaningfully pre-emptively prevent fake AI nudes from being generated, just like we can't really pre-emptively prevent rope-enabled kidnappings. But folks may still want to try a Type II control. The extent to which even a Type II control can be considered effective certainly depends extremely heavily on specifics, including an analysis of post-hoc investigation techniques, surrounding legal frameworks, resource considerations, and even the oft-debated deterrence theory of government sanctions.
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
The politicians in single payer systems often stand up against paying doctors more because they know that if they do they have to pay all public sector workers more
The AMA would probably fight against most versions of single payer, and pretty heavily. If the proposal was "single payer and doctors are now going to be subject to the standard federal pay schedule", I don't think anything could prepare you for the fury that would be unleashed to prevent it from passing. Mayyyybe they could accept "...and we'll make a new, separate, special pay schedule (which can be changed separately from the standard schedule) for doctors, who are special," but there's just absolutely no way that the US government will actually have the political will to bulk force doctors to take a 3-8x pay cut.
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
proximity
And all this time, I've been told that poor people are stuck living in cramped, high-density areas. Now I don't know what to believe!
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
I guess most of this comes down to what one categorizes as "elite", as that was the specific category mentioned.
In any event, yes, love and such. Great things. Though I have heard it flippantly put, "You should marry for love and not for money... but it's just as easy to love a rich man." But that's neither here nor there. I do believe that many folks marry for love, but then the challenge returns to your court. Is the driver of whether or not people fall in love their position on the socioeconomic ladder? I doubt so. When it comes to discussing differentials, or particular categories like "elite", there may be other factors concerning what modern marriage has become which may be relevant.
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
For a lot of people, when you have an utterly destroyed shell of an institution, it doesn't make much sense to even bother with it. It's pointless paperwork that can be undone on a whim, but at the pain of much more paperwork and likely legal wrangling.
Elite women obviously still want to opt in, because they're likely getting a wealthy man on the hook. If you're both poor? Who cares? Religious people still do it, because their religious communities still enforce some amount of social approval for proper use of it and some amount of social sanctions for improper use. It's still a somewhat stronger social contract for them, if not a legal one.
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
As a starter, speak out against the folks who are working to accomplish the opposite. I've covered this before as being a fully-general argument against any sort of minority view. "How do you convince people to sign up for [any view that is a minority view, which by definition is not preferred by most people at the current moment]? Well, you, uh, convince them. Maybe giving reasons, showing them data, making arguments, etc."
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
kitten-caboodle
kit and caboodle
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
Sure, some people will want to think that it's fake in some way. I mean, I guess something like that could be fake? If you asked me a prior probability for a video coming out of any prominent politician committing a violent rape of a 14-year-old, especially in the AI age, I'd have a pretty non-zero chance of it being fake. And these days, normies have had their probability estimates for foreign government disinformation along lines like these jacked up, too.
...but that's basically the only thing that could plausibly have any play for the example given. People might think it's fake, but if there is enough other evidence to support that it's not a total fabrication, nothing else would save him.
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
There's a pretty huge difference between a tape of someone running their mouth and a tape of someone raping a minor. Again, if your model of the world doesn't account for this sort of massive difference, then you might want to reconsider your model. Different models may have different predictions for a tape of someone running their mouth, and one might evaluate said models on what actually happened, but there is obviously no constraint on the set of models forcing them to produce the same output on such extremely different cases.
people would say it's AI
This is plausible today, which is why I mentioned it.
they'd think it was out of context roleplay ... they'd say she lied about her age ... they'd think it was invasion of privacy or propaganda and refuse to watch ... they'd think Trump has let himself down again, but on a national level he's still a force for good etc
None of these are plausible for the example given of a tape of him "violently raping a 14-year-old girl".
Testing one's model as parameters go to infinity is, indeed, a good sanity check. I do this in my daily work. If your model has truly absurd results as the parameters go to infinity, it's more likely that there's a problem with your model than that the world will actually match the model outputs.
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
This is one of those moments where you should probably take honest stock in your model of the world, because it's really far out there. I could imagine some defenses these days along the lines of the video not being real; AI gen has gotten good or whatever. But there is not even a single cultural/theoretical/whathaveyou hook that is remotely likely to take hold as a defense in society if it is widely believed that such a video is real. It's not like Clinton, where the left was already trying to lean hard on "consent of adults is the only thing that matters" in order to help the gays.
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
I did say that I was sure I would link to SMBC doing the philosophy of mathematics joke many times in the future here.
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
If you are definitionally not allowed to observe an empirical difference then the answer to the question is mu, as both answers yield exactly identical predictions about the future and so are the same answer.
This is a fairly common failure in reasoning from STEM people who haven't STEMed enough. You may just be unfamiliar with the concept of observability. That's not even getting into the actual philosophy problem.
The maths fail part of the STEM fail has already been covered decently enough below.
It's all just fancy window dressing over consequentialist reasoning.
This, on the other hand, isn't a STEM fail; it is definitely outside of that. But it does give me yet another chance to share one of my favorite papers on the topic.
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
Do you have a source for that? I tried a few search terms, and I couldn't find anything.
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
Marco Rubio, who is not only the Secretary of State but also Trump's National Security Strategy
Somehow still yes.
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
Okay, show me. Show me where someone else posted something equivalent and wasn't modded.
*Laughs in self-contradiction*
every time I have made this request, what I get is a post that isn't equivalent and a 20-post-deep argument about why it's not.
You have a post that was designed to be as equivalent as possible, specifically for the purposes of this type of request. Yes, we also have a 20-post-deep argument where you persist in claiming that the modding was for other non-specified comments, but the latest is that you've said no, that was all bollocks; the modding was for the completely and totally equivalent post.
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
Yep, sometimes you really can tell exactly what's going on by reversing the valence. We don't have access to the TA here to ask some clarifying questions, but I have little doubt that they would end up a stammering mess and contradicting themself when trying to explain why they gave the grade they gave.
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
Eh, most diffEQ classes are taught at a super introductory level, and if there is much difficulty, it's actually because they're taught at a super introductory level, in the style of, "You just need to memorize these various magic tricks," which is supremely unhelpful to building intuition. There's a more significant jump when going to something like differentiable manifolds, because that's generally only targeted at math grad students, so they often go into the other ditch in terms of rigor.
Understanding diffEQ is nearly essential for the sciences. Honestly, I don't know how one would survive physics for physics majors without it; generally it's the super introductory versions of physics that skip the differential equations and again require you to just memorize a bunch of magical formulas that seem to come from magic. It's the physics for physics majors that show how all the typical super simplified problems are just pretty easy differential equations. It even came up in some neuroscience classes I took (scared the pants off the bio majors, but was unsurprisingly the easiest part of the material for me). One can't hide even in CS, at least not today. I mean, even just the extremely rudimentary concept of gradient descent. Even manifold stuff; I still see manifold learning stuff popping up here and there. I guess if you want CS for web design, sure, but if you're thinking CS for cutting edge tech, you need a pretty large chunk of math these days.
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
What "counts" is a difficult problem, and I don't think almost anyone has meaningfully consistent lines. I recall looking at some work long ago that found a neat correlation between particular physical signals and infidelity behavior (with a nice theoretical mechanism explanation and an animal model to boot). I remembered it mostly because it was a surprising contrast to the complete lack of results that were anywhere near that quality in the raging public discussion concerning sexual orientation. I doubted that any of the people who wanted to take a strong stance on sexual orientation would take a similar stance on infidelity, and well, yeah, I kind of doubt that most people would be willing to compare the types of evidence available for gender dysphoria stuff and have a consistent view on what "counts".
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
You could easily just stop the problem and provide satisfaction. Just resolve the contradiction you created. This is not "my version" of anything. You literally just contradicted yourself! You said that you were wrong! We can just go look at your words and compare them to each other! You tried going silent as soon as this was pointed out, because you know it's true. And I'm guilty of always wanting to futilely talk down the crazy people to see if I can help them resolve obvious contradictions in their thinking.
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
Gotta be at least slightly less crazy than the person who has simply contradicted himself. Sure, you didn't take the strawberries. You probably also took the strawberries. Principle of explosion is a hell of a drug.
But deflect away. It's probably the best you can do if you can't manage to just curl your upper lip and go silent.
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
That may be true, in the technical sense that you have affirmed a contradiction. From the principle of explosion, sure, you can probably show that to be true. Of course, you can also show the opposite to be true. And back in reality, you're not really accusing me of being a one-issue poster. That would be bonkers. You're just deflecting, again.
I'm just observing the phenomenon you've just described in this thread. The context is on point. It was your point!
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
This phenomenon isn't unique to Joo-haters. We just got to the point of you disagreeing with yourself. I don't know if we've gotten an elliptical theory, but we've definitely had cobbled together bits of apocrypha. I think we're at the "upper lip curl, go silent" stage, but I have to imagine that when it comes up again (and it will), you'll probably be repeating the same thing.
Oh man, approximately still gets me every time. I just write it, then when I got to paste it in, I see that it breaks, then I consider whether I want to spend a few minutes re-figuring-out what I want to do. I've given up in some comments not too long ago; pretty sure I just wrote "\approx", not caring. I'll be saving @ToaKraka's comment, and hopefully I remember I have it the next time it happens.
And indeed, at the time I came up with this way of thinking about it (I'd say about a decade ago), I was thinking about the debate on mpg/gpXm. I almost mentioned that here, because, yeah, a lot of people think in terms of having a fixed number of miles they're traveling, but don't intuitively grok 1/x relations. This speeding analysis is at least linear in distance, but it still has a 1/x relation, in a way. Yes, it's actually 1/x^2, but I guess what I'm kinda thinking is that one can lean on the 60min/1hr conversion, you have (d/r)*(60/r), and almost do it in two stages in your mind. If your nominal speed is 70, then you still have a d/r relation, but it's slightly modified by a 60/70, and I at least have a bit of an intuition as to how far off that's going to make my approximation, rather than having to just brute calculate the whole thing, actually thinking about the squared term.
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
You were banned for an uncharitable bad faith post.
I notice a distinct lack of links this time in your false history. Let's go to the tape, where you said:
But fine, you can bring a reverse argument to the table if presented civilly, albeit somewhat disingenuously.
Are you saying that you lied then, when you said it was "fine"... or are you lying now, when you're saying that it was not fine and was the reason why I was banned.
For completeness, the reason you gave for why I was banned was:
However, you've then gone on to argue with people throughout this thread is a condescending and belligerent manner. The queue is filled with reports on your posts. No one post is terrible, but most of them are obnoxious and unnecessarily antagonistic.
I could repeat the rest of the history after that, but we've already done that. The entire premise of your current position is just factually false.
You demanded that I point specifically to the other posts that were bad.
I asked for one specific thing to support your claim.
I declined, because I wasn't going to argue with you about each post in the thread.
I asked for one specific thing to support your claim.
You claimed this was unfair.
I did not claim this.
You still think this is unfair.
I don't even necessarily think this. I'm not sure "fair" has anything to do with it.
Your claim that the mods "Use secret reasons they won't tell you about to ban people they don't like" is false.
I didn't actually claim this.
Since there are claims about numbers relative to the federal general schedule, the 2026 general schedule location with the highest locality pay tops out at 197. That is the max, not the mean or median. If all doctors were forced onto the GS, that means everyone not at the max would have to be shoved somewhere below that.
...or they'd have to make a separate "doctors are special" schedule, meaning that they wouldn't have to raise all federal employee wages alongside raising doctor wages.
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