ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I don't think you're right; I don't think you've made a claim at all. You're just acting smug while simultaneously acting like you can't understand anything.
You can take "hard" to be shorthand for "not compatibilism".
Please say something relevant.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Typically, 'determinism' is short-hand for the opposite position of 'free will'.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I have no idea what you're talking about.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Schrödinger equation's equation is deterministic, but the output concerning physical observables includes randomness. So, your distinction concerning randomness isn't really relevant. Nor is dualism the only mechanism by which the ability to choose could be said to exist. Typically, 'determinism' is short-hand for the opposite position of 'free will'.
But yeah, as I suspected, you pretty much commit yourself to hard determinism... at least until this discussion is finished.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I wager if you asked the person from MLive Media who wrote that statement to choose to become a Nazi right now, in the sense that he truly, in his heart of hearts, believed that Jews were sub-humans who ought to be exterminated, he couldn't do it, even under threat of death or torture. The best he could do is to play-act the role.
I've never been convinced by this line of reasoning. Like, the conclusion is supposed to be, "...and, therefore, one's beliefs aren't a choice," but I just don't see how that follows. Instead, the only conclusion I see is, "Some beliefs are held strongly enough that asking for them to change (perhaps even under threat of death or torture) will not result in said change." It doesn't seem to imply anything about whether the strong belief is chosen or not.
I suppose, can you give me an example of a thing that a person can choose? I think, at bottom, the above argument is a facile face on what is really just hard determinism at its core (from people who can't bear to "choose" to live with the consequences of real hard determinism).
it was that the qualifications that the gunners were agonizing over for years before applying didn't mean shit once you got in, they had no really useful predictive value.
I mean, this really depends on the program in question. I agree that there are tons of programs for which these tests are not terribly predictive; even moreso when we consider individual components of such tests. My graduate program was pretty math-heavy. I spoke to multiple prospective departments, and they pretty much all didn't give a shit about the non-math parts of the GRE. And even then, it's hard to say that the math section was predictive of how you'd do once you got in, but this is because of how the math score was used. Basically everyone who was admitted had off-the-charts math scores; they only used the math score as a quick check, "Is there something off about this guy? Like, did they manage to get through some random university's undergrad program while avoiding math stuff or cheating their way through or something?" I wasn't actually part of those decision processes, so I'm not going to say that it would be impossible to get in if you only had a 700-or-whatever, but my sense was that if you only had a 700-or-whatever, they were going to go through extra steps to make sure that there wasn't something wrong and to ensure that you had some hope of actually being capable enough to succeed (and you better have a patron on the faculty who wanted you there).
In such cases, I would be shocked to see a department like that start admitting a bunch of, say, ~600 GRE math score students, of any race, for whatever weird political/non-political reason... and not have a meaningful, visible reduction in student quality that either leads to reduction of standards or significant failure rate. At the same time, I would be willing to bet that the non-math part of the GRE would be near useless in predicting how students perform in the program.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Murders, rapists, and big tobacco are the far group, not the out group. In any event, I would have agreed with you ~5yrs ago; the zeitgeist that legal representation /= condoning the perspectives/actions of others used to be quite strong. It has been gradually weakening, and it's gradually being viewed more as material support.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Even if individual lawyers want to take these cases, they have to convince their firms to let them, and those firms almost certainly have DIE policies that favor certain races/genders. Given that partners at law firms have already been shown the door just for privately "harboring evil thoughts" like being pro-life, I can't imagine firms are going to be encouraging this sort of thing.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Comments below describe some concrete ways you could actually do it, but this quote really stood out to me:
“It’s not race, it’s racism,” said Tiffany L. Green, an economist focused on public health and obstetrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The data are quite clear that this isn’t about biology. This is about the environments where we live, where we work, where we play, where we sleep.”
If that's the case, then why is the NYT simply refusing to describe or cite any of those data which controlled for biological factors? Instead, every piece of data the NYT shows is controlling for SES or particular hospital. This is absurd to the point of literally being evidence for the opposite of their quote. Controlling for SES probably mostly correlates with things like "the environments where we live, where we work, where we play, where we sleep". Controlling for particular hospital likely eliminates much room for outright racism in medical treatment. (It is stupidly unlikely that every hospital, or even a large majority, considering the political make-up of their employees, are just blatantly racist. If you look at specific hospitals and some are just atrocious on this score, while others do mostly fine, you can maybe go look to see if there is some racism there, but if everyone basically has similar gaps, it seems implausible.)
They're not even trying to bring data which shows the thing they're claiming it shows. (Obvious disclaimer that a genuine attempt to do this very well may show that racism is a likely explanation. I'm only claiming that this isn't even a genuine attempt.)
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Saw this linked by MR. Hadn't read the original, but started skimming this, and saw:
Early in Hersh’s article, he states that the secrecy of mission to destroy the pipelines was the top priority of the Biden Administration. This he states is the reason why diver graduates from the United States Navy Experimental Diving Unit were chosen instead of SEALs or other SOCOM units. Doing this Hersh states would bypass reporting of the operation to members of Congress or the “Gang of Eight”. In Hersh’s initial story, it appears that every precaution is being taken to avoid any leaks or bringing any unnecessary actors in on the mission.
Checked Hersh, and this portrayal checks out. Color me skeptical. My first reaction was, "Even if the try to push it through under Title 10 rather than Title 50, there's no way they could avoid a notification requirement." Doublechecked. h-Yup. Very skeptical. They'd almost certainly have to report.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
That sounds like a lot of fun!
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Nah, I think there's a plenty-accessible frame in which someone believes that the US did it and believes that doing it was an affirmative good in the world. I mean, the entire concept of the US funneling arms/money to Ukraine could be viewed in the frame of, "Intervening in wars abroad is bad, so the US meddling in Ukraine is bad, which means America isn't the Good Guys," but there's also a frame of, "Actually, intervening in Ukraine is good for [reasons], so the US meddling in Ukraine means that America is the Good Guys."
Now, which set of these frames is actually right is more difficult, and I won't take a position at present. But there are far far far more obvious historical examples of the US very clearly not being the Good Guys that this particular action is highly unlikely to tip anyone's scales on that score.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
When you're just starting? Mostly just make sure you're not eating total garbage, honestly. Both lifting and eating requires lots of little improvements over a long time. It's way too easy to get frustrated if you feel like you need to dive in and get 100,000 things exactly right otherwise all your gainz will be for naught. Most of the advice/debate out there is focused on how to take a 1% elite athlete and turn them into a 0.1% elite athlete, and you'll hear tons of people spouting their very particular system for trying to do such. You can probably ignore most of it.
Just start with the little things, which is probably just cutting out some garbage. Don't eat piles of dessert food. Don't drink alcohol to excess. Try to get decently regular sleep. Just keep going to the gym, even if you "don't wanna". If you don't have this base, biting off a bigger to-do list is just a recipe for frustration and failure.
If you have this good base and have consistently had this good base for a few months, then, the next typical recommendations are to try to get enough protein and get a decent approximation for how many total calories you're eating. Even this is kind of hard, takes some effort, and is slow-going. Finding a calorie tracker (or making your own) that isn't so frustrating that you quit is a task. Don't expect to settle it on day one.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Those are insanely tight pockets. I had to look it up to learn that the scoring is just "first to eight balls wins the rack", which makes sense since the balls are otherwise undifferentiated. It seems like the vast increase in technical skill required is partially offset by some amount of decrease in cognitive skill required. You still need to think things through a bit, but probably not to the same extent of other billiards games. I'm just thinking about that, because back in the day, I was known to come up with my own billiards variants that went in the other direction, trying to push the cognitive aspect to be harder and harder.
IIRC, Caplan has a claim that there is evidence that one method works (at least better than others). What I vaguely recall hearing is that the method is just very straightforward and mechanical, like, there's a book that the teacher reads from, basically word-for-word, asking for responses at certain points and such. The problem is that teachers hate it, because they have the idea in their head that their job must be intensely personalized and creative ("We're artists!").
This is very vague recollection, so it could be someone other than Caplan, but I remember the gist of the story. I never dug into it to see if there actually is good experimental support for such a proposition. Lots of education research that goes against the narrative of teachers unions and other lefties gets super buried (see also: Roland Fryer).
EDIT: Below, sarker got at least the name of the thing: Direct instruction.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Everything about the way his "thought experiment" (which in itself would have been fine)
This is the most annoying part and why I would support a ban. It poisons what would otherwise have been an interesting hypothetical with some promise to shed actual light on things. Worse, it poisons coming up with even more interesting hypotheticals that even lightly pattern match this sort of thing.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
a flawed model of how humans operate. That are humans view of the world is hopelessly tied to cultural consumption, media and so on. So our inputs from culture and media needs to be controlled at all costs so we don't end up making the world worse by being exposed to dangerous ideas cultural and/or media content. This is the quintessential post-modernistic thought process that if they stuff the "the message" in everything it will create a better world. But we already did this experiment with the totalitarian states of the 20th century and people still thought differently even when they were force fed with their culture and media with the right way of thinking. It didn't work and it is not going to work this time either even if we have more powerful tools.
I'm thinking of the line that is something like, "Cultural consensus can stay irrational longer than you can stay alive." Kolmogorov can have a hope, belief, or dream that one day the absurdist influence of Pravda comes crashing down while he ducks his head and quietly works on math. Kolmogorov also died almost exactly two years before the Berlin Wall fell. In the meantime, the death grip of force cultural conformity will continue to run amok.
In some ways, it's sort of difficult to believe until you've personally experienced it. I remember back in the slightly-pre-Obergefell days, one night out at the bar, the topic came up. I expressed the slightest amount of, "Well, just looking at the science, especially when comparing it to the standards of biological science that I'm seeing in the classroom about other behavior neuroscience topics, I'm not quite sure it's slam-dunk settled that sexual orientation is purely biological, that people are 'born that way'." What was shocking to me was that it was almost as if no one had even considered the possibility! Like, it was clearly so obviously true... who would even go about trying to gather regular scientific evidence in order to justify what was supposed to be a scientific conclusion? It's frankly striking to see how strong a social consensus can be even when it's primarily been pushed by particular policy advocates with access to strong media tools. Now that the prior policy fight is dead and buried, even the existence of such a forced consensus has been memory holed, as the cultural forces are geared toward a new policy fight. Irrationality builds upon irrationality, and even if it eventually all comes crashing down, it may be too late for many of us... and it may come crashing down violently and painfully.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Observe the uncanny uniformity of ideological positions on pretty much all social issues in most large newspapers, most top universities, most large corporations.
I've loved Peter Thiel's most recent line on this: "What's the opposite of diversity? University."
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I could buy that, but then I think we're sort of contradicting the original premise:
What we're seeing with NARA is not the deep state continuing its politics by other means. It's the visceral panic of a bureaucracy realizing it has a blind spot.
The way you're describing the response now does not seem like "visceral panic". If there is an actual visceral panic upon discovering a blind spot, wouldn't that be oriented toward at least some real, meaningful policy changes? Why wasn't that visceral panic triggered back when it was discovered that there was a blind spot in, "My God, we just trusted people like the Secretary of State?" I've read the culmination of the bureaucracy's response upon learning about such a blind spot - it's the IG's report (IGs are basically always supposed to take scalps; they are the sine qua non of the bureacracy's "visceral panic"). It's incredibly difficult for me to characterize it as "visceral panic".
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
It's been a long time since I've done stats, but those p values look really suspicious. Is there some sort of other meaning in this context or some reason in the problem set-up to think that these numbers are reasonable?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
people making $10m+ are a tiny fraction of
...people. There is nearly no system imaginable that wouldn't result in them being a tiny fraction of those being audited, unless we're willing to let large quantities of even the most obvious errors/frauds go without audit in every other income range.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
All of this can be true, but with the conclusion reversed. Nearly every time a "scandal" came up during the Trump administration, I chuckled and said, "...so today is the day that people are going to learn how X works, eh?" And when my left-leaning buddies would get into why it was a scandal, we'd discuss how X actually works, with the clinching question being, "So, what are you willing to do about the problem of X? The only constraint on your answer is that you need to be willing to apply the same standard to politicians you like as you do for politicians that you don't like." That's when it became clear that they didn't have any "solution" to the "blind spot" that they could embrace. Their initial reaction was not, "Oh my, this is a blind spot that is a problem with the system in general, and it would be nice if we could fix the system." It was always, from the first moment, motivated by and embraced specifically for its ability to get Trump, because he's obviously crooked and only someone so crooked could do such a thing.
We can check this in hindsight, too. If and when this mostly blows over, because people realize they can't take Trump's scalp on it without taking too many other scalps, how much energy do you think there will be to 'fix the blind spot'? What's an example policy fix that you expect is likely to be adopted in order to bring about changes to the system and then applied evenly to politicians on both sides?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
"anti-communists"
Unlike the Nazis, who are essentially all dead and gone, the world still has e.g., North Korea.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Because no one actually believes in a consent-only sexual ethic. That's mostly a lie in order to gather political support for various deviancies. The constant haranguing over what exactly is actually actually ackshually consent is indicative of the keyhole by which every other aspect of their preferred sexual ethic is smuggled in.
The easiest way to internalize this, to know it in your bones, is to go to the professional ethicists who write serious scholarly works on the topic, like Westen/Wortheimer. If you are looking for it while you read them, you can see it plain as day, and then it becomes nearly impossible to not see it anymore.
As the late great Antonin Scalia wrote:
Scalia's commitment to the idea that the text means what it pretty obviously just means, and not some twisted thing to allow all sorts of absurd results, was a large part of the 'judicial power grab' that is the Major Questions Doctrine.
EDIT: Basically right on cue.
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