ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Do you count getting a correct answer twice "more valuable" than getting it once?
Um, yes? The field of probability arose because Pascal was trying to analyze gambling, where you want to be correct more often in an unpredictable situation. If you're in a situation where you will observe heads 1/3 of the time, either you say the probability is 1/3, or you're wrong.
This is asking a subtly different question. Here, you're asking, "When woken, you will be told, I am going to create an observable by showing you the result of the coin flip. What do you think an appropriate probability for that observable is?"
That is, you have taken one random variable, X, describing the nature of the coin flip, itself, and applied a transformation to get a different observable, Y, describing the random variable that you may see when awoken. This Y has X in it, but it also has the day and whether you're awake in it.
It is not clear to me that the original problem statement clearly identifies which observable we're asking about or betting on.
If the problem statement unambiguously stated, "What is your probability for Y, the coin I am about to show you?" then indeed, you should be a thirder. Forms of the question like what are listed in the Wiki presentation of the 'canonical form', "What is your credence now for the proposition that the coin landed heads?" are far more linguistically ambiguous as to whether we are asking about X or Y. "Landed" is past-tense, which to me indicates that it's simply asking about the thing that happened in the past, which is observable X, rather than the thing that is about to happen in the future, which is observable Y. There's nothing meaningful in there about payoffs or number of answers or anything.
Next, I'd like to join criticism of both the "number of answers" explanation and:
you waking up gives you information that restricts you to three of them.
I think these are both flawed explanations, and I'll use one example alternative to explain.
Suppose you go to a casino. They say that either they have already flipped a coin or will flip a coin after you place a bet (I don't think it matters; you can't see it either way until after you bet). If the coin is heads, your bet will be simply resolved, but if the coin is tails, your bet will be taken as two identical bets. One can obviously compute the probabilities, the utilities, and calculate a correct wager, which would be the thirder wager. But in this case, everyone understands that they are not actually wagering directly on X, the direct probability of the coin flip. Nor are they making multiple separate "answers"; they are giving one answer, pre-computed at the beginning and simply queried in a static fashion. Likewise in the Sleeping Beauty problem; one is giving a single pre-computed answer that is just queried a different number of times depending.
It is also clear from this that there is no additional information from waking up or anything happening in the casino. You had all of the information needed at the initial time, about the Sleeping Beauty experimental set-up or about the structure of the casino's wager, when you pre-computed your one answer that would later be queried.
You just have to be very clear as to whether you're asking about X or Y, or what the actual structure of the casino game is for you to compute a utility. One you have that, it is, indeed, obvious. But I think your current explanations about number of answers or additional information from waking are flawed and that the 'canonical' language is more ambiguous.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Nobody is trying to change the basic principles under which US military operates
I think this is the main and best claim. It is likely true, in my view. That said, the context of this thread is that @MadMonzer presented an opposite view. Your response was, expressly, a "side note" on the general topic of whether it matters where/how money comes to gov't purposes. I was responding to that. It's not really responsive to my comments to just go all the way back, pre-side-note, and have your claim really be that the whole original premise is just false, anyway, as a contingent factual matter.
I'm here to talk about why people would, in general and in theory, care about the topic of your side note. Notice that your side note was not in any way connected to any contingent, on-the-ground, facts about what Trump or his political opponents are currently doing or trying to do.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I understand your perspective, but I don't see how this responded at all to my comment. You may think that the system is "broken" because your political opponents are leveraging their role in it against your preferred politician. Sure. I never contested that. I said something different, which I believe remains unaddressed.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
For a variety of government purposes, I probably wouldn't care all that much. For things like paying the military, it touches bad historical examples. At least part of the mess in Rome is attributable to individual generals slash political figures paying their armies effectively out of their own pocket. This not only breeds loyalty to an individual over the legitimacy of a system, but it also produced plenty of situations where the leader they were loyal to was making promises to pay them, only once they conquered some stuff and extracted loot (and political victory for the leader). It thus ties the military's individual remuneration directly to an individual political figure's political success.
IF one is not a total abolish-the-government libertarian/anarchist type and instead thinks that there is at least some value in having a democratic Constitutional system with civilian control of the military (yes, an extractive gang, but with some structure to try to align it), and CIVMIL relations that try to breed military loyalty primarily to said democratic Constitutional system rather than to the political success of individual political figures, then yeah, it's probably a good thing to have the foot soldiers be paid more by the abstract system and a formal process of the extractive gang as a whole rather than directly by particular extractive gang leaders.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
It says Idaho, so I looked up the Public Employee Retirement System of Idaho. They have a doc on Early Retirement. Looks like the fairly standard 'reductions depending on formula' business. One might quibble with the details, but it seems plausible. The base rate being 2% x [Years of Service] is pretty generous, but it looks like their rates are kinda steep. I don't have historical rates, but that particular awfulness has been a feature of essentially all public and private pension plans over the past century. At least it appears that when they're increasing contribution rates, they're doing it across the board, rather than something like, "You were hired thirty years ago, so you can still continue paying 1%, while everyone else has to pay 8%."
To a first approximation, it's not clear to me that they did better with the pension plan compared to just taking the cash and plowing it into the market. That seems to be pretty typical of most pension plans I've seen. A bit of a hit on return, but lower risk (the biggest risk being actually making it to retirement with them). Actually figuring out whether that tradeoff is a good deal for any particular individual/plan requires some details about the particular plan and, uh, assumptions.
I also did a few calculations concerning the $127k amount reported in the article. Given what's here about the Idaho pension, you again need some, uh, assumptions, but the ballpark numbers I get (including a discount for a woman's pay compared to a man's (not equal work) and a further discount for her having fewer years of working), the ballpark two-income high-3.5 household total seems at least plausible when you look at typical state salary public records. It doesn't appear to be likely that it's one of those situations where they scam out a half-mil of overtime right at the end to juice the pension.
I'm not particularly sad that I haven't done my entire career as an Idaho public employee. It doesn't seem like nearly as good of a scam as a whole host of other stuff. But then again, maybe he was a bad civil engineer and made terrible road designs that were no good for the people of Idaho; who knows?
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Everything in this comment is about the price of housing. The number. The aggregate number. So, we can kinda still discuss whether it should go up or down?
I agree that it can influence pay scales and such. I sort of fail to see how this matters? I don't see why this means that we can't just talk about the price of housing.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Do you think it doesn't make sense to do this for any other product, either? Like, we can't talk about healthcare prices or education prices, or car prices, or apple prices, without discussing every other aspect of the economy? Or maybe it's that we must at least discuss wages to talk about apple prices? I'm really just not sure how I'm supposed to think about this.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Best I can tell, this is just a less specific version of the response that @disk_interested gave, which was followed up by agreeing that if we hold wages constant for a conversation about the price of housing, then it just cashes out as saying that the aggregate number for the price of housing should go down. Should I be interpreting it differently?
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Deadlift is four plates, not yet five. At my size, that's not bad, but yeah, I'm not looking to set world records. In my current gym, at the time that I go, I'm definitely lifting more than everyone else, but that's more of a function of the current gym/time. I've certainly had prior gyms with legitimately huge dudes putting up ridiculous numbers.
It's not that I couldn't manage without them. It's just annoying, and it's not the main point of doing those things. If you're competing, then yeah, it's part of the deal to deal with the annoyance. Apparently, even for top competitors, there's a relatively definable "class" of "grip-limited deadlifters". I remember the Stronger By Science folks talking about this. It's apparently an annoyance to their sensibilities, too. They said that they would like to just have a category for deadlifts with straps; just take the grip out of it and see what people's major muscles can do. Nobody likes a hook grip.
Not sure on hand size. My current gym has one Rogue bar (I can't remember which exact model) that I swear feels noticeably thinner than the others (I haven't yet taken a micrometer to the gym). I prefer it for deadlifting, but anti-prefer it for bench/OHP.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
The thing is, though, I think if you simply reword what they're saying in this way: "So, uh, you want the aggregate number for the price of housing to go down?" you are unlikely to get a simple "yes". They also want other things, don't know how to process it, and likely do not have a coherent position.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
In this case, I think that if we hold wages constant for the conversation about the price of housing, what distinguishes this from what I think the summary of it is: the aggregate number for the price of housing should go down?
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I just use straps for deadlifts, and many other pulling motions, for that matter. Don't at me; I ain't competing. I set up my grip "in the fold", between the bottom pads of the fingers and the palm. The calluses never really get all that bad.
Much words have been said about how people bury incoherence in the phrase "affordable housing". What do you think it means?
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
You may not like the latter, but fear of it is clearly part of the reason for the strategy. Note the very first words from him when he began his justification:
The government funds a good chunk to most of the residency spots
This is hiding that the industry is playing games here. I described the game here:
"We won't train doctors to the regulatory standard unless taxpayers give us bundles of money to do so," is an obvious confluence of terrible interests in the private sector and government, especially when the industry has achieved significant amounts of regulatory capture. Surely, there is a better way.
Imagine this in other industries. Grocery stores get the government to set up a licencing requirement to stock shelves, with some boilerplate reasoning about food safety or something. The thing is, the only way to get licensed is to get a grocery store to give you the mandatory years of experience. And, of course, they refuse to have such positions unless the government pays them for it. I would predict that there would be fewer grocery store employees, their pay would be higher, industry profits would be higher, government outlays would be higher, prices to the consumer would be higher, and service quality would decrease.
The kicker is that the industry gets to choose the regulatory standards to boot. I completely agree that there are going to be some standards. In my follow-up comment, I make comparisons to how we see similar problem when universities control their own accreditation standards and leave a related thought experiment for grocery stores:
Let's put it this way - perhaps there is a "right" level of training for doctors, and perhaps there is a "right" level of training for grocery stores. Maybe the latter is much smaller than the former. Now, imagine we set up the system I described in my last comment for grocery store training. Do you think their incentives would lead to them selecting the "right" level of training?
If they successfully restricted supply, you'd see the same sort of situation where there are desirable/undesirable locales for grocery store workers, and you could imagine the same sort of ignorant-acting pleading that oh it's just not their fault that everyone wants to work in the fancy grocery stores in the cities; I guess your only choice is to raise salaries (please ignore the licensing regime).
You see the exact same self-dealing that you see in other industries that get this sort of sweetheart deal over their own regulatory apparatus, as I described here. In that comment, I was discussing Alex Tabarrock reviewing Rebecca Haw Allensworth's book "The Licensing Racket". I later saw an interview with her and discussed it here. All these industries that control their own regulatory apparatus display the same phenomenon. When it comes to actually enforcing standards on their own, the people who are part of their club, it's, "Meh. Maybe we'll get around to it." (There are horror stories.) But when it comes to shutting out competition, the tone changes entirely, and it's alllll about their supposed standards. (There are horror stories here, too.) Alex describes the phenomenon in the medical industry thus:
No system is perfect, but Ms. Allensworth’s point is that the board system is not designed to protect patients or consumers. She has a lot of circumstantial evidence that signals the same conclusion. The National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), for example, collects data on physician misconduct and potential misconduct as evidenced by medical-malpractice lawsuits. But “when Congress tried to open the database to the public, the [American Medical Association] ‘crushed it like a bug.’”
One of the most infuriating aspects of the system is that the AMA and the boards limit the number of physicians with occupational licensing, artificially scarce residency slots and barriers preventing foreign physicians from practicing in the U.S. Yet when a physician is brought before a board for egregious misconduct, the AMA cites physician shortage as a reason for leniency. When it comes to disciplining bad actors, the mantra seems to be that “any physician is better than no physician,” but when it comes to allowing foreign-trained doctors to practice in the U.S., the claim suddenly becomes something like “patient safety requires American training.”
I'm generally not super high on game-playing with residency slots - or even shutting out foreign doctors - being a huge factor in overall medical costs; they're probably factors, but probably not big ones. I just get annoyed at the games being played and the fractal bad justifications offered. He once offered this data to claim that there is a "surplus" of residency slots. I didn't think the data presented supported the claim, and I think he's refrained from making that exact claim anymore, instead just still demanding (while thinking nothing of it, like it's totally normal) government-funding for all training slots (that they control) and repeating that there are still some unmatched slots. I think the alternate explanation that there will always be frictions and that an increase in slots will probably still result in about the same amount of unfilled slots within some range is probably still at least as plausible.
You do very well to notice that doctors are not special in that economics still holds for them. Don't let him convince you that the same incentive problems we see in every other industry that has similar control over their own regulatory apparatus somehow don't apply to doctors as well. I argue very similar phenomena in other industries, universities, realtors, etc. Each domain does have some unique twists, but many of the basics are similar if you understand economics and incentives.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
It sounds like you're also interested in context long before the modern era. For that, probably the most important thing to check out is the debate over the Apportionment Act of 1842. Before then, plenty of states used "general tickets". I can't describe it any better than here:
Under this system, voters could cast as many votes as there were seats to be filled in each state, while voting for each candidate only once. In practice, this typically led to voters selecting each candidate on a slate provided by a political party. Proponents argued this method led to more cohesive party delegations, and states that used general tickets almost uniformly sent single-party delegations to Congress.
In 1842, Congress mandated that the states create districts for federal congressional representatives sent to the House. Thus almost inherently requiring some form of redistricting. If you don't make adjustments over time, you almost surely end up with "rotten boroughs" over time, not unlike what was described by the Reynolds v. Sims wiki article @Lewis2 linked:
for example, in the Nevada Senate, the smallest district had 568 people, while the largest had approximately 127,000 people.
That's unlikely to be politically tenable really long-term, so the main questions become who does it, how often do they do it, and what rules do they have to follow when doing it. Even if you want to say, "We're just not going to do it and keep the same districts forever," you're likely to still do it eventually, just when it becomes so politically untenable that you end up with a crisis, as in the Historia Civilis video concerning Britain. And of course, since it's so hard to find durable political compromises that extend well over time concerning those three main questions, we also ended up with judicial meddling in the process.
Districting in general is A Hard Problem.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
The vast majority of normies (and probably still a majority of non-normies) lack a coherent answer to the simple question, "Should housing be more expensive or cheaper?" They want too many different competing things from one aggregate number.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Either that what they do is that tradition or is in fact the truer fulfillment of the essence of the faith even if it does violence to a lot of the claims the tradition they're attacking stands by.
The New Atheist claim is that you can have all of the good things about God without God
I don't think this satisfies either prong, accepting the second prong for the moment arguendo.
Sam Harris came up with a hypothetical "worst possible misery for everyone"...
...when a Western atheist basically reinvents hell
I don't think this satisfies basically any of the of the possible prongs. It's more of a superficial resemblance. (Putting aside other quibbles about hell in the Christian tradition.) Consider Roko's Basilisk; is all AI-doomerism somehow just Christian heresy? I sort of doubt so. Plenty of jokes have been made about the people who try to identify different ideologies that have some form of utopia and say that they must, therefore, be actually the same thing. Here, you seem to be doing the same, but swapping dystopia for utopia. I think the reasoning is equally fallacious.
But he ends up in the same place. This isn't ethics as such. It's a particular form of ethics.
I mean, Sam Harris's attempt at ethics has always been laughable, for a variety of reasons. But I would still find it laughable to observe that he's worked hard to try to make it palatable to the modern liberal Westerner, so therefore, he and all other atheists are just Christian heretics.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I'm not sure why we'd assume a continuity of ancient atheism and modern atheism.
I don't know that I would. But I think that's kind of not my point. My point is more that I saw the reasoning as being, "Look at these people, having an Ethics and Politics; that's Christian!" (Yes, that's a simplified caricature.) I don't think that qualifies it as being a "Christian heretical sect".
In general, I should probably make an effort post on what it would be to be a "______ heretical sect". Tentatively, I would expect that one would find some folks in that sect writing within the context of the tradition that they are being heretical from. I think it likely that you would find them claiming that what they are doing is that tradition, while others in that tradition are saying that their work is actually heretical. I highly doubt that if we go look at the folks who developed the frameworks for wokism and the like, we will find them writing, "Jesus Christ is our Lord; we are doing our best to follow Him as we find guidance in the bible. Here are the parts of the bible that support our woke doctrines and guide our sect."
There may be other ways to argue that folks are a "______ heretical sect"; thus the need for a larger effortpost. But that would be, I think, the top-tier type of evidence.
Consider New Atheism: their moral critique of Christianity was that it was a) unnecessary and b) insufficiently universalist
I think you put a lot of stock in the universalist axis, and I don't think it's that load-bearing. Again, it's a bit of a superficial relation. Not quite "Hitler was a vegetarian", but yeah, I think we can find a range of views on the universalist axis across all sorts of traditions.
Criticisms of the morality of the Old Testament God are born of the same impulse that gave us an actual, clear Christian heresy like gnosticism: the god of the Hebrew Bible, at first blush, fails by the standards of the New Testament/NT-inspired modern morality.
Oh boy. This one takes a whole lot more actual theology, but I'm not really sure how it's germane to the question at hand of the provenance of wokism.
The other claim is that science can fill the role religion plays as an arbiter of truth, a moral authority and a source of meaning and the sense of the numinous. I see no reason for these to be basic atheistic assumptions. A lot of our debates are about principles. And truth doesn't have to be numinous.
This is a within-atheists fight between sects, which I wrote about:
I've observed plenty that The Ethics was always a sore spot for Internet Atheism; they just couldn't figure it out, and they ran off in a bunch of different directions with mutually-contradictory sects, some trying to prop up some form of "science-based" "objective" version and others often running headlong into naive meta-ethical relativism. Interestingly, you see both forms in Wokism, depending on how hard you scratch and how far up the priesthood you inquire.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
If I could, I'd like to take a rain check on this. I have an effort post in the works, and I think it's going to include this (at this moment, there is a minor chance that a narrow component of this will get edited out of that one and pushed further, so please remind me if it does).
In the meantime, here are a few comments/chains which contain some elements.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Yeah, it was brought up pretty much immediately in the prior (linked) discussion. I haven't read it, so I don't have much to add besides that it generated a little bit of discussion last time, and I wasn't strongly persuaded either way from what I saw. I'll probably just have to read it sometime to see if I find it or parts of it convincing.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I'm not really following. Sure, "Science" has been the calling card for many a scientismist for quite a long time, core to their being as atheists. One question is whether this is truly "Christian heresy", but all these atheists have, indeed, been around for a long time. Plenty stretching back to antiquity and in non-Christian societies.
Then, within this group of scientism atheists, there are remaining questions. The standard "big four" being epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and politics. I think we're mostly skipping the squabbles on the first two, as I think you're focusing on the latter two (ethics as "correct Just Being A Decent Human Being behavior" and politics is called out by name). These have, indeed, been tough questions for atheist sects for a long time. I've observed plenty that The Ethics was always a sore spot for Internet Atheism; they just couldn't figure it out, and they ran off in a bunch of different directions with mutually-contradictory sects, some trying to prop up some form of "science-based" "objective" version and others often running headlong into naive meta-ethical relativism. Interestingly, you see both forms in Wokism, depending on how hard you scratch and how far up the priesthood you inquire.
Of course, I would be remiss if I didn't note that even more recently, we're seeing the anti-woke atheist Counter Reformation still grasping with these problems, thinking that they're going to get game theory to do their work for them. I've noted before that most of these attempts misunderstand the basics of game theory, and you can see by their actions that the Wokists actually understand some elements of game theory better than their opposing sect.
I think the TL;DR is that you're probably just mistaking what they're doing as replacements for specific Christian things, whereas it's more that the pieces you've described are just versions of Ethics/Politics. They were all already atheists, and then they split sects depending on how they wanted to build Ethics/Politics, where in these topics, Scott points out that hamartiology turns out to be important. This is unsurprising, since so many atheists think that they've grasped the Problem of Evil and think that it's a big deal for them. Hamartiology is pretty naturally paired with it.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
It is all the abstracted christian heretical sect
As I wrote before:
That's [wokism as Christian heresy] 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.
The last time, it seemed like most of the response was to actually entertain the idea that atheism is just Christian heresy rather than contest that Wokism was just atheist heresy. There was some discussion on whether or not that was justifiable, but no real discussion on whether any sort of transitive property could be used to make Wokism a Christian heresy through the intermediary of atheism.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
In theory "we" the stockholders could cut their CEO's pay
This seems like something that "we" the stockholders can do. There are stockholder votes. Moreover, if "we" the stockholders "decide that a CEO is just too expensive", then "we" the stockholders can sell (or even short) the stock. No need to be organized about it, either. It's more likely that you just find yourself in a situation where many other stockholders disagree with you, and so you are not, in fact, a "we" that has "decided". You just "decided" on your own and want to imagine that you have a "we". You might even be upset at the fact that you don't have a "we", and so come up with things like....
or "we" as voters could pass a law limiting all CEO pay
And here is the rub that I figured you were getting at. What does the general population of voters have to do with it? Should the general population vote to "decide" that some company's investments in AI are "just too expensive"? How about the bill they pay for janitorial services? "Just too expensive". Or anything else? Why should it be across the board? A CEO could be massively "just too expensive" for Starbucks, but downright cheap for another company. You'll probably screw up both cases with a naive law like this.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Surely there should be some limit where we decide that a CEO is just too expensive, but there doesn't seem to be any mechanism in corporate America to limit it.
Who's "we"? What does this "we" have to do with it? What would it mean for this "we" to "decide"?
I can certainly think of mechanisms in corporate America by which individuals can "decide" that they think a company is wasting money on a CEO and take actions based on that decision. If enough of them do, then I guess maybe one could call that group a "we", and the results can range from simply insulating that "we" from any negative consequences to providing a signal to directly causing a change.
Are you estimating observable X or observable Y? Just state this outright.
Are you learning something about observable X? Or are you simply providing a proper estimator for observable Y? I notice that you have now dropped any talk of "number of answers", which would have had, uh, implications here.
Obviously, there are ways to gain information about an observable. In this case, we can clearly state that we are talking about P(X|I), where I is the information from you telling me. Be serious. Tell me if you think we're saying something about X or Y.
No one has told you anything, no information has been acquired, when your pre-computed policy is queried. Where are you getting the information from? It's coming entirely from the pre-defined problem set-up, which went into your pre-computation, just like in my casino example.
Stated without any justification.
I will say that this is not analogous with the same justification you gave for mine.
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