ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
I oppose the position of banning difficult-to-crack encryption for government convenience
Even to get at the wokies?! I oppose ridding ourselves of all research, even to get at the wokies.
I do think that's a lot of what's going on with the objections to the science stuff
Please speak to me as a person.
it's not indiscriminate
From what I've heard through the grapevine from people at funding agencies, it's absolutely wild right now. And people here are literally calling for it to be indiscriminate. If you disagree with them, then you agree with me.
ControlsFreak
9mo ago
Oh goody! I know you won't want anything that could be cast as "more of the same, which had absolutely terrible results", so I'm sure you'll be very forthcoming with your incredible, innovative solutions to current problems, solutions which don't look anything like what has come before. I so look forward to that little red bell icon.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
Yes, I would oppose banning difficult-to-crack encryption even if that made it harder to get at the wokies.
That's how we know that we need to kill you and yours indiscriminately. You're not celebrating or showing any relief. Obviously, you have pledged fealty to the wokies.
From what I've heard through the grapevine from people at funding agencies, it's absolutely wild right now.
But they'd probably act that way if $1 was being cut, or they weren't getting an accustomed-to increase.
No, that is not at all what I've been hearing. Do you think the reality of the situation is that $1 is being cut or that they're just not getting an accustomed-to increase?
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
If you want to fail to recognize real distinctions, there's not much I can do about it.
Then by all means, make a real distinction.
But my point is that it is impossible to tell from the funding agency reaction whether the cuts are not enough, enough, or too much.
Perhaps from your position. I have a bit more of an inside scoop. A bit of a grapevine, yes, but more specifics rather than just general complaints. In any event, I'm glad that you seem to be in agreement that just complete, indiscriminate, chemotherapy shutting down of everything would be bad; at this point, it sort of boils down to an estimation problem, which sort of boils down to one's sources of data signals.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
I don't think you know who my "ilk" is.
Nor do you know who the hard sciencers are.
If you mean things like the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative
Way beyond that. Let's go with an analogy. Instead of it being the UK gov't coming in and telling Apple that they've gotta shut down ADP, suppose that was one of the Trump administration's first moves. (It might still happen!) They've gotta get at those horrible wokies who are now using encryption to #resist against the true and proper administration. They just start slashing out at everything. Signal, Telegram, etc. It's all gotta go. Are you going to be first in line to celebrate... or at least show some relief? Glad that the President is taking the chemotherapy approach, so his FBI can go after all the wokies tryna hide their nefarious #resistance?
If the US is to fund telescopes in Chile, that money needs to go to telescopes in Chile.
I haven't looked at that grant, but I'm pretty confident that the vastly most probable reality is that it did exactly that. Again, look, I'm on board with taking away stupid throwaway sentences; I'm on board with way way way more than that! I'd be perfectly happy with what I mentioned in my previously-linked comment; you could conditional all federal funding on them not discriminating on the basis of race/gender... at the institutional level. This would be a huge huge thing, and it would hit everything that universities do, not even just what they put as a throwaway sentence in a grant application. This would actually be focused on the problem. Not just stopping everything, slashing all the funding agencies indiscriminately, and giving the chemo treatment. The prevailing opinion here is that it should all just be shut down, because "universities bad". And, frankly, I am super sympathetic, because there is so much of the universities that I hate. Not even just the wokeness; I complain about their gov't-enforced perfect price discrimination and their stranglehold on accreditation/certification and more. I would love to have so many things change in the intersection between gov't/academia. But, "We can't tell what's good encrypted communication research and bad encrypted communication research, so maybe we just shouldn't have any encrypted communication research," is not the way, in my opinion.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
Oh, well then this is just the standard, all-too-common, strawman. You're responding to a figment of your imagination, not anything I've written.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
Ok, so you don't. Got it. Sounds like there are all sorts of things that NSA does that could conceivably be used in a military operation on foreign soil that cannot be used against domestic drug dealers.
ControlsFreak
9mo ago
there are revisionist interpretations pushed by those who want to do it again
Nah. I think a lot of the data requires a pretty significant revision on the standard narrative, but I also don't want to do it again.
And the US drug prohibition has not, regardless of your protestations, covered itself in glory.
The good news here is that we now have memorialized that this is your standard. Not covered in glory. Oof, you are a pure child of light, and I'm sure this standard will never come back to bite you ever.
ControlsFreak
5d ago
So, in this sentence, what is the "problem" that is in need of a solution? Is it, like, "the problem of trying to decide what to tell people"? Or what?
ControlsFreak
5d ago
Compare what I wrote:
There are a bunch of reasons why they don't do it, and that's okay.
I don't know to what extent a clustering can be identified that can be simply labeled "not wanting to put in the effort".
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
I indeed read very carefully. I want to know a single example of a "real solution". Give me one. Provide evidence that this "real solution" meets the same standard that you're holding "CICO" to. Show me an example.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
I think you're doing the thing where you haven't internalized "the thing". From Scott:
Consider weight-lifting. Your success in weight-lifting seems like a pretty straightforward combination of your biology and your training. Weight-lifting retains its excitement because we don’t fully understand either. There’s still a chance that any random guy could turn out to have a hidden weight-lifting talent. Or that you could discover the perfect regimen that lets you make gains beyond what the rest of the world thinks possible.
Suppose we truly understood both of these factors. You could send your genes to 23andMe and receive a perfectly-accurate estimate of your weightlifting potential. And scientists had long since discovered the perfect training regimen (including the perfect training regimen for people with your exact genes/lifestyle/limitations). Then you could plug your genotype and training regimen into a computer and get the exact amount you’d be able to lift after one year, two years, etc. The computer is never wrong. Would weightlifting really be a sport anymore? A few people whose genes put them in the 99.999th percentile for potential would compete to see who could follow the training regimen most perfectly. One of them would miss a session for their mother’s funeral and drop out of the running; the other guy would win gold at whatever passed for this society’s Olympics. Doesn’t sound too exciting.
A team sport like baseball or soccer would be harder to solve. Maybe you’d have to resort to probabilistic estimates; given these two teams at this stadium, the chance of the Red Sox winning is 78.6%, because the model can’t predict which direction some random air gusts will go. I guess this is no worse than having Nate Silver making a betting model. But on the individual level, it’s still a combination of your (well understood) genes and (well understood) training regimen.
Hedge funds already have some of the best weather models in the world. There's alpha there right now. Or at least there was; I don't know how much has been anti-inducted away. The god AI will certainly be able to do at least as well. It will probably make our current best models look like a mere Magnus Carlsen. And if there's alpha in taking a more minute view, scoping the model in to a particular stadium, why can't it do that? Where there is alpha in the AI getting information, the AI will go there and get the information. It will be able to massively reduce the error bars. And all you need to get rid of war is reduce the error bars enough to get to a negotiated agreement. There's tons of alpha there, so there they will go. Until that alpha has been anti-inducted away, and we're right back in the paradox.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
So, you have some other cite that demonstrates that they were using NSA data? Or is this just baseless speculation?
ControlsFreak
5d ago
So educate me, then. Because the phrase 'Changing your lifestyle does actually work; it's just that many people don't do it.' falls pretty well in line with what my attitude would have been a year or more ago.
You went wrong a single sentence later:
Like you, I felt the majority of weight-gain and weight-loss issues was a matter of people simply not wanting to put in the effort.
'lifestyle changes can sometimes only work to a point'
Possibly so. I'd need to see some high quality research on this question to know much either way, where those points might be, whether they can be predicted, etc.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
Like you, I was of a similar attitude.
I don't think you have accurately captured my attitude. In fact, I think you have gotten it completely wrong.
And as time has gone by, I'm becoming more and more convinced that our modern diet has done extreme damage to our bodies
Perhaps so. Biological processes in general do not seem to be fully-reversible, especially when you include the effects of aging. Nevertheless, that is not an argument against the measurable physiological benefits of certain lifestyle changes.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
telling them that they are stupid failures
Sorry, what? You're just off the mark. Aside from the inherent differences between adversarial processes and other dynamic processes.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
In the same way, I believe that the usefulness of knowledge about the biology, chemistry, physics, and dynamics of body weight probably doesn't depend on whether some group of people seems to actually "use" it or not.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
If you pit two top engines against each other, you won't have any idea who will win. You know it'll be a coin toss but you won't know who will win.
Emphasis added. I don't need to know in order for the AI to tell me that the best outcome is a negotiated settlement within certain parameters.
the opponent's moves are still unknown.
Agreed, but sort of irrelevant. The chess engine is still executing perfectly, even though it doesn't actually know what moves the opponent will ultimately make.
Playing a game well is one thing, but solving a game (determining if a player can force a win) is entirely harder. Checkers, tic-tac-toe, and connect four are solved, while chess is not.
I think the answer here is again that it is ultimately irrelevant. We didn't need to solve chess or diplomacy to have an engine become a nearly perfect executor or to narrow the range of outcomes significantly (>90% draws unless you extremely bias the starting positions, for example).
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
I think the response would be that you don't need arbitrary precision. You just need enough to get within a pretty wide range of bargaining solutions. That may be doable at a higher level of abstraction, and a perfect executing AI can find that proper level of abstraction.
Of course, this process might not even look like finding the right level of abstraction to our eyes. In chess, grandmasters sometimes look at computer moves, and they struggle to contextualize it within a level of abstraction that makes sense to them. Sometimes, they're able to, and they have an, "OHHHHHHHH, now I see what it's saying," even though it's not "saying".
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
Computer science is mathematics
Not the way most of your ilk view it. It's about information, use/transfer thereof. They claim to be in charge of information, so of course, they're extremely susceptible to politics. Basically every part of it. Even the politics that you like (the libertarian-bent crypto folks, for example). It's all politics, through and through. Not so with the hard sciences.
we have not seen some upswelling of support or even relief.
I was all sorts of ready for relief, until approximately day one of when that relief was supposed to come, and instead, all and any hard science was suddenly on the chopping block. "Cut it all, indiscriminately," I keep hearing over and over again. I would have loved to have some relief. I would have loved to cheer on the clean-up of any problems. I was genuinely excited. But those hopes were swiftly crushed. We got chemotherapy instead. I don't know how much you know about chemotherapy, but ya don't actually feel relief when you get the first dose. Like, maybe it'll work in the long run; I don't actually know yet. But it would be pretty dumb to unilaterally decide that someone needed chemo, force the drugs into them, then turn around and say that you're actually justified in just killing them entirely because they're not showing relief yet.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
I believed that the government was monitoring all domestic communications - and then Mark Klein reported on it, which was also considered a conspiracy theory until Edward Snowden just released the details.
...but that's like... not at all what the documents Edward Snowden released said?
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
With the same reasoning, we can conclude that the CIA and other military agencies already routinely assassinate domestic drug dealers. Ya know, if that's the kind of epistemics we're going with. Hell, I'm pretty sure we can conclude that you already routinely assassinate domestic drug dealers. Why do you do that, and why aren't more people outraged about your obscene behavior? (...not to mention your wife beating...)
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
From your link:
Officials have stressed that the NSA and DEA telephone databases are distinct. The NSA database, disclosed by Snowden, includes data about every telephone call placed inside the United States. An NSA official said that database is not used for domestic criminal law enforcement.
The DEA database, called DICE, consists largely of phone log and Internet data gathered legally by the DEA through subpoenas, arrests and search warrants nationwide. DICE includes about 1 billion records, and they are kept for about a year and then purged, DEA officials said.
Regardless of controversies about parallel construction (which is already illegal), your own cite doesn't even purport to show what you claim it shows.
ControlsFreak
5d ago
Then by all means, please elaborate on how you intended the following sentence to be interpreted:
I'm a doctor for many reasons, but ranking highly among them is that I have an urge to find solutions to problems that actually work.
I'm going to shamelessly pull the "computer science isn't hard science" card and claim that you probably don't have actual knowledge of this.
That's still not all that it is.
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