ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Because the above commenters said "cannot". They made a claim. An impossibility theorem. Only, they actually didn't say anything about how it's supposed to work. How's this impossibility theorem supposed to work?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Not a goalpost shift at all. Instead, I'm just trying to fill in the details of the argument and trying to figure out where his goalposts are. There could be other things in the middle. Like, perhaps you're proposing:
- Ichthyosis vulgaris exists.
- ??? [something coming from reality]
- Such a Creator could not create a physical universe where "real bad non-fundamental shit" exists, however that term in quotes is defined in the previous premises.
- Therefore, the person allowing it to exist isn't omnibenevolent or at least not that and capable of doing anything about it.
I think you still have some question marks to fill in. But thanks for starting to specify where you think the goalposts should be. We didn't even have that before.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
With Matt Cooke, there is at least a plausible explanation that it was a typical attempt at a typical play that ended up being screwed up as a huge outlier. Going into the boards like that, it's extremely common to "ride" the opponent into the boards. You're not trying to lay a huge hit on their upper body; that would be boarding and illegal. Your main decision is, do you 1) Hold back, not really make contact at all, and then try to read whether they break left/right so that you can follow them, or 2) Ride them into the boards and try to control their body so that they can't break left/right in an attempt to get around you. (2) happens all the time, and usually without incident. The typical thing to do when you have someone against the boards and don't want to let them escape in either direction is to pin your knee hard against the boards, right between their legs. You raise it up a little bit; it's like up in their crotch. Your plant foot is literally pushing your knee hard into the boards. To explain why this is effective, imagine being the offensive player. You can't cross your feet over to turn in either direction. You can't push off hard in either direction. They're literally preventing your legs from being effective at moving your body laterally. Typically, the goal of the offensive player is to use their arms to push as hard as they can against the boards, moving the defender a foot or two away from the boards, so that you again have room to maneuver. I have personally played this exact situation hundreds of times, and as a defenseman, I was usually in the role of trying to control the offensive player's body, but I have definitely done both sides in drills. I've done it as the offensive player against guys who are much larger than me, and can viscerally tell you how hard you have to push against the boards to get them to move a few inches in order to give you room to make a break in one direction or the other (or even just room to get your stick/foot on the puck to slip it out to one side or the other to your teammate).
Matt Cooke's knee may have been a little bit of an outlier high as he was trying to ride, and he obviously got his skate not directly between Karlsson's legs, up above the tendon guard and off to the side too much. Was it in part because Karlsson was already trying to change directions, and Cooke didn't read it/couldn't follow in time? Was it that Cooke is a criminal who found a way to cleverly disguise his criminal intent? Who flippin' knows. But the whole thing is actually so close to a legit hockey play that I would be likely to believe the result of the league's investigation, especially considering Cooke's reputation and Karlsson's value to the league. All the pressure would be to finding guilt of intentionality if at all possible.
I didn't look super long, but I didn't find a video that showed this whole thing in its entirety. They were all cut to miss a lot of the critical portion. However, skates almost never come up anywhere near that high unless someone completely blows a tire and completely loses control of their body. Would a better video show me that dude actually was just trying super hard to change directions, blew a tire, completely lost his balance/control of his body, and went flying head over heels? Possibly. But you almost never see anything that looks remotely like that in any regular play, not even examples of guys who look silly because they get juked out of their shorts and completely topple (away from any necks). I would expect an investigation would look into all of this, including questions like, "Did he play an outsided number of minutes so far in the game; was he super late on a shift?" If dude was just extra gassed, it's possible that he really did just completely lose it, trying to change directions in a way that he would normally be able to do, but just wasn't capable of at that time, and completely sillyfied himself. Who knows.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I said that your argument was a non sequitur, not someone else's argument. I'm well aware that there are well-formed "problems of evil". You haven't got one here yet. You have:
- Ichthyosis vulgaris exists.
- ??? [something coming from reality]
- Therefore, the person allowing it to exist isn't omnibenevolent or at least not that and capable of doing anything about it.
At the very least, maybe you could check out wikipedia and see if they can help you fill in the question marks. Otherwise, I can only shrug, and say you're potentially being obtuse or simply can't construct a clear argument.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
If my concern is genuinely new to you, it's the problem of non sequitur if one wants to use complex terminology for no good reason. But yeah, sorry Ugg. We have developed thousands of years of knowledge in how reasoning works, and your argument simply isn't persuasive. It's hardly even an argument. It's just mood affiliation. Ugg's going to have to catch up with the times and figure out how to make a proper argument.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
That the person allowing it to exist isn't omnibenevolent or at least not that and capable of doing anything about it?
How does that follow from something in reality? Like, fill in the details for me.
- Ichthyosis vulgaris exists.
- ??? [something coming from reality]
- Therefore, the person allowing it to exist isn't omnibenevolent or at least not that and capable of doing anything about it.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I did not ask whether it confirmed that materialism and rationalism are correct. I asked which part of your materialism and rationalism the conclusion that an Omnibenevolent loving Creator could not create a physical universe where even a single bad thing happens came from.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
reality demonstrates
What part of reality demonstrates it? Existence of ichthyosis vulgaris is a brute fact, sure. But then what? What is the next piece of reasoning? Reality provides some standard or something that somehow says that this brute fact has some implication? How are you getting to your conclusion?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
if I ever meet the Omnibenevolent loving Creator who created ichthyosis vulgaris, I'll kick them in the Holy Nuts. Until then, my sheer disdain for Him
Do you hold it as a general belief that such a Creator could not create a physical universe where even a single bad thing happens? Which part of your materialism or rationalism does that belief come from?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Interesting, I sort of grudgingly pay Google for infrastructure services (like fiber). I like their services there, and I'd be happy to pay that amount to most companies; it's that it's Google that bothers me, because I'm bothered by much of the rest of their business and politics.
I wonder if there are themes that we can connect to other topics. Maybe it's really the "middleman" role that people don't like. Though, I imagine this is connected to the general concern that, on the internet, middlemen tend to be successful due to network effects rather than making better products. Everyone goes to YouTube, because all the content is on YouTube, not necessarily because they built a better platform for distributing video. (Though, their platform is quite good at distributing video... save for all the ad annoyances.)
So, perhaps this is a bit of a hangover of the FOSS movement. If it's just a thing that performs a middleman function, people think that it could be mostly provided by a FOSS solution. I suspect that this intuition is mostly not wrong; it would be easy to have a FOSS solution that replaces YouTube. Wikipedia is similar here. One salient difference is that storing/hosting all that video is much more costly than storing/hosting Wikipedia. We just had the Elon-inspired hullabaloo about how much money is going to Wikipedia, so perhaps it's the same intuition.
Perhaps, then, setting aside one of the primary problems with FOSS (that the proprietary folks try super hard to make their products incompatible with FOSS solutions; see Microsoft trying desperately to "update" their file types to break Linux software), we could think about what "ideal" solutions to this problem could look like that comport with people's intuition.
I think everyone's happy to pay content providers in some way. And everyone is happy to pay for the storing/hosting costs in some way. The question is, "What is the right mechanism to get these prices paid without succumbing to huge monopoly rents of a network-entrenched middleman?"
One idea would be to break the trust into two different components. One component is only responsible for the base hosting of things, and the other is responsible for attaching ads to content. That is, all of the ad revenue would go to the creators and Company A, who selects which ads to show for which videos. Then, Company B would be responsible just for deliverying the content provided by Company A/creators to the end user. This would still leave the question of how to pay for Company B. Long ago, back in 2009 when YouTube was bleeding money, Slate estimated, YouTube's badwidth costs at about $360M/yr. Ignoring the licensing fees they cite (because hypothetical Company B won't have those), their top number was about $450M/yr. Back in 2009. It's certaintly more expensive now. Let's just say it's $500M-1B/yr, just for data storage/distribution. How do we actually figure out how to pay for that without stuffing Company B right back into the ad chain? Even the bloated amount of donations that go to Wikipedia wouldn't scratch the surface of that price tag.
For audio podcasts, competition can work really well and easily. The cost of storing/distributing just audio is far cheaper, so creators/folks like Company A could easily and cheaply be hosted on several different podcast apps. But with video, in order to have multiple competing storing/distribution companies, you'd either need to have all of them simultaneously dumping $500M-$1B/yr into storage/distribution, or more likely, the landscape would fracture into, "We're the storage/distribution company that has exclusive rights to Creators X, Y, and Z," that we're seeing with other streaming services. I'm not sure I'm actually seeing any good options.
As I sort of mentioned above, Google is no stranger to the idea of commoditizing your complement in order to make sure that it's not fucked/annoying to people enough to cause problems for your own business. That's the idea of Google Fiber. They're perfectly happy to run it as a very simple, no bullshit, fee-for-subscription model. They don't inject ads into the general traffic that comes into your house on the fiber. But the only folks with any sort of pull in the matter who would want to commoditize the storing/distributing complement would be the creators. Unfortunately, they're diffuse enough that it is hard to imagine them being able to come together and say, "Enough is enough. YouTube's pushing of ever more ads and taking bigger proportions are cutting into our share, too. We should band together, all contribute some amount to set up a true competitor that either doesn't have a subscription cost or has a minimial one, but which is foundationally committed to not adding ads beyond what the individual creator chooses to add.
This would probably start off looking like a worse proposition than YouTube to most creators. "You want me to handle my own ads and pay to have you host my content? Right now, YouTube automatically does the ad bullshit for me, and I just get a check, not write one." So, I imagine that significant capital would have to be risked to keep prices for them very low while independent ad companies could develop which "handle the ad component" for them. Would be very difficult to get off the ground.
Without, of course, just government anti-trust efforts decreeing that Google split up YouTube hosting/distributing in some way from the broader business. But I'm really not sure how exactly they'd be able to get a decree to work here either.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I'm guessing this has to do with the same tech trend that caused the layoffs this past year. Budgets are tighter, bubbles are popping, and sources of revenue are being more exploited.
"You never know how evil a technology can be until the engineers who designed it fear for their jobs." -Stewart Baker
It will get worse, not just on the internet, but in the tech world as a whole.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I think I was pretty clear in saying that we have no external reference by which to distinguish between pressuring them to lie or tell the truth.
Surely, you understand this possibility in the abstract. Consider a run-of-the-mill police interrogation, trying to garner a confession (either to one's own culpability or as a witness to someone else's). I'm confident that you are completely aware of the bog standard concern that this behavior could be interpreted both as pressure to tell the truth and to lie.
Consider Michael Cohen's plea agreement on a campaign finance charge that called Trump a co-conspirator. One could easily believe that it was a totally bullshit charge that is simply not sustainable under Supreme Court precedent if it were vigorously contested. Others could disagree, perhaps even thinking that this sort of vigorous application of campaign finance laws are necessary for our democracy. Such folks would then disagree on whether pressuring him to plead in that way was for the purpose of being a totally bullshit way to try to get headlines about Trump being a co-conspirator without having to actually make those claims fly in a court of law when contested... or simply pressuring him to plead to his obvious criminal conduct with the biggest criminal in the world.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
As a first principle, sure. But we have another first principle (we have no external reference by which to distinguish between two options) as well. Together, I suppose they make a second principle, which sort of obviates the first principle.
It would be like saying that we could agree to the principle that it would be nice for everyone to get exactly the things they earn/deserve/whatever. Sure, but literally two seconds later, we scrap the entire project due to equally strong first principles cutting against any chance of achieving such a thing.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
it makes sense to distinguish between pressuring the witness to tell the truth, versus to lie...
I think the difficulty starts right about here. We have no external reference by which to distinguish between these two options. Which leads to the difficulty with:
In terms of my own position, pressuring witnesses to tell the truth should always be fair game for everyone (I might endorse exceptions but none come to mind), and pressuring them to lie/withhold should always be punished or discouraged.
If we cannot externally distinguish between the first category and one of the two options in the latter category, we're in trouble. If one party believes that the other is pressuring a witness to lie, then they may reasonably hope to simply cause them to not testify. Since we cannot tell whether the supposition in the last sentence is true, we're in a bit of a pickle.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
This is true in theory, but how true is it in practice for laypeople who are using relatively common software out-of-the-box? My guess is that most common encryption software puts metadata in the clear concerning which algorithm they're using, PBKDF iteration count, and such. I think that's because for most common uses, the model is not that you need an actual blob that is indistinguishable from random. Instead, most uses are more than happy to have it be clear that there is encrypted data, clear which algorithm is encrypting it, and simply relying on the security of the unknown password.
When it comes to government demands to decrypt, generally the State has to go to sufficient lengths to show that there is, in fact, encrypted data and that the individual in question does, in fact, have the means by which to decrypt it. One example argument is, "We've seen this guy unlock his phone. In fact, ten minutes before we arrested him, we have him on video unlocking his phone, then setting it down, appearing to have no cognizance of the fact that we were about to arrest him. Further, he was not able to touch his phone between then and when we scooped it up." I'm not sure whether judges would generally be as, uh, reasonable about this sort of demand when it comes to their inherent contempt power as they are when it comes to requests by the prosecution to compel decryption.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
a rule
I think I was pretty clear that I was pointing out how this case was an exception.
Though, I sort of like Nybbler's point. Would you support a rule prohibiting the prosecution... actually, the State as a whole (including, see Biden v. Missouri, the State pressuring third parties to pressure witnesses)... from pressuring witnesses?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
especially when Trump's attacks are so irrelevant and pointless.
They're also drowned out. Like, in a normal case where John did some crime and wants to intimidate Jim into not testifying, nobody else in the world gives a shit. Jim gets pressure from John, and that's it.
In this case, everybody else in the world gives a shit. Every media outlet; every power broker; every cop with a badge or prosecutor with a half-baked charge in a different jurisdiction; everybody is already pressuring potential witnesses up to eleven. To slightly butcher a line from an evergreen Onion skit, some want them to do one fucking thing; others want to do some other fucking thing. And they're all perfectly legally allowed to do all sorts of shit to pressure them (even if they're not technically allowed by the rules; ain't nobody gon' prosecute them). The only person in the world who is not allowed to pressure them is Trump.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Anglophones when they meet other anglophones with a different accent: "Cool accent bro!"
Francophones when they meet other francophones with a different accent: "Your mockery of our beautiful language is a disgrace to all that is holy."
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I've heard of accusations that the English oppressed the French, but I don't find them convincing.
Are you talking Quebec-only, or does moving east a little change anything? I think by most standards people have for 'ethnic cleansing', this would be that.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
The optimal amount of crime-avoidant advice-giving right after the recipient was just raped is zero.
This quickly gets interpreted into, "The optimal amount of crime-avoidant advice-giving right after anyone is a victim of a crime is zero." Which, of course, means that since crimes happen pretty much every hour of every day, it can be easily rounded off to, "The optimal amount of crime-avoidant advice-giving is actually always zero, due to Rule 2."
Alternatively, we can just ask you to give one example of an acceptable time/place to give crime-avoidant advice. Note that the OP here has literally nothing to do with anyone in particular being raped.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Fair enough. "Preparation" vs. "Planning", with a lot in one word. Sagan knows that even the US has been writhing a bit with its own planning bureaucracy to get it out of a mindset of, "First, we're going to take three months to call up troops and materiel, then we're going to take six months to ship it all to somewhere near theater (and magically not have to fight to get it there), then we'll like hang out and bomb 'em for a month before anything kicks off." Perhaps this will be an object lesson that helps a variety of countries get that out of their system in the same way that it seems to have kicked up their concern with sUAS into overdrive (even above what happened in Nagorno-Karabakh and the ongoing in Ukraine). If you don't have legit ass-kicking plans that can be put into significant motion on a short fuse, you might pay a significant price.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
It's just the parts where men are responsible for everything.
As @PierreMenard says,
As they have always been.
To follow it up slightly differently, the prior equilibrium still had men being responsible for everything, but the rules were much much clearer. She didn't put a ring on your finger? Not acceptable, dude, and you clearly and obviously know it. People decided to destroy these rules and the equilibrium with them. Some would say that a few intentionally destroyed these rules so as to exploit their high status and multiply their own sexual partners. There was a brief window of hope where proponents thought they could formulate a new equilibrium around a different solitary rule: consent. Setting aside a philosophical discussion of whether this actually does the thing we want it to do from a theoretical perspective, it has been tried for a few decades now and found desperately wanting. As @Walterodim points out, this is the last gasp of hope by its proponents to patch over the glaring issues. I think it likely that this will be double and triple downed on, to ever higher levels of absurdity and oppression, but it will eventually topple under the weight of its inherent contradictions. Is it likely that it'll collapse back to the prior equilibrium, which had proven relatively stable for thousands of years? Probably not. But it will likely collapse to some other equilibrium. These sorts of revolutions are a bit unpredictable when they finally come crashing down, so it's too difficult to call whether the new equilibrium will continue trying to retain the feature where men are responsible for everything or whether that feature will actually be weakened for the first time in search of something new.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Insert joke remark about the US having an invasion plan for Canada. Like, sure, it probably existed. Some planners probably wanted to just have reps at moving through the process.
...but if you're Israel, kind of how do you not have a plan on the shelf for invading Gaza? Probably two or three plans with a few different spec'd out scenarios for your goals and other factors. Sure, none are going to exactly match your exact situation, and you'll need a little time to gather the requisite intel in one place (like, e.g., the disposition of other nations in the region) in order to make the necessary adjustments. But I've gotta think you've got an 80% good plan just sitting there, ready to go. Probably updated at least once a year, if not every six months.
I have no position on whether any of these things are good ideas or good plans... just that ISTM that they should have a ready-to-go plan, no less than China almost certainly has one for invading Taiwan whenever the time is right... or Taiwan has one for defending... or South Korea has one for... and so on and so forth. As you trickle out toward less and less likely scenarios, it's less likely to have one that's been updated recently. But Israel with Gaza?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Oh man, that moment when I discovered that the tortilla on a Chipotle burrito was 320 calories... Now, it's just bowls for me, and each one almost always makes two meals!
As @07mk said below, you have absolutely thought about this at least an order of magnitude more in one paragraph than anyone on CNN has in all their lives put together. Society didn't come to their beliefs on this subject via rational scientific exploration and explanation. They did so through pure cultural power and intimidation. "You don't want to be an X-ophobe? Then mouth these words and make sure not to think about them too much." Two examples come to mind.
First, I was in grad school at the time. Hung out with a bunch of other overly-educated folks, but at least we're mostly all technical people who value rigor and stuff, not like those fru-frus on the other side of campus. Anyway, I had been taking some neuroscience classes, and so I'd been thinking a lot about how good arguments are constructed in this space and had seen a variety of examples. So, when the topic of sexuality comes up at the bar, I ever so gently and ever so carefully express the slightest of possible concerns that I've been seeing all this really interesting work in neuroscience, and I'm just not quite sure I've really actually personally seen all that much conclusive work on sexuality that entirely supports Dogmatic Position. You know, so, surely it's out there, and someone can probably link me to it or something.
I was expecting, or I guess at least just hoping for, some kind of rational response that either brought to light some form of evidence or argument that was relevant. Maybe a, "Huh, I'll have to actually go through the literature, and see what I can find before I make up my mind." Nah. You get stared at like you're an alien. Like they can't possibly believe that you'd even entertain the idea... not even the idea that Dogmatic Position isn't true... but that you'd even entertain the idea that Dogmatic Position isn't trivially true and needs no evidence and why would you even think about trying to gather evidence on this topic.
The second example is the APA's brief in Obergefell. Here, we had the most prestigious group of experts with the opportunity to make the absolute best scientific case for Dogmatic Position. If it were so abundantly clear from mounds of literature, surely they could at least start us down the path of understanding how the argument/evidence works. You know what they brought? An opinion poll. I shit you not. They also took a review that said, "Research into conversion therapy is shit-tier and tells us basically nothing," and converted it into a form of, "Conversion therapy doesn't seem to work," but otherwise that was it. An opinion poll and research that we think is so bad that we can't really get anything out of it. That's their best scientific evidence for Dogmatic Position.
Moving forward to the Year of Our Lord 2023, very few people actually bother defending Dogmatic Position anymore. Fewer still even attempt to bring actual scientific evidence. The vast vast majority still view Dogmatic Position as just unquestionable first truth, and if you're questioning it, it must be because you have evil right wing political ends.
So before any of those people pounce on my comment, I'll leave you with a third example. I also took a queer theory course back when. I was seeing the beginnings of the woke thing, but didn't know what it was about, wondered if there was some real academic core to it, figured I'd have the best chance of finding some interesting academic core if I just went straight to the academics. In any event, when it came to the question of "biological determinism", my prof said flatly that she was agnostic. So, if you're about to rush to accuse me of evil right wing political ends, please instead formulate your comment as accusing her of having evil right wing political ends.
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