Felagund
29d ago
Huh, I'm not sure how. (No need to reveal.)
Here I was, thinking the same.
Felagund
29d ago
I think one of the better arguments against geoengineering is that I don't trust the geoengineers to remain aligned with what works out best, but will likely end up with internal incentives which could possibly lead to a dramatically messed up climate. You could easily imagine people spending too much to cool the earth, if the incentives were such that that were high-status or otherwise rewarded behavior.
That said, it's probably worth attempting anyway, if we're going to be trying to mitigate anthropogenic climate change (assuming the article here is wrong and that's a thing), as it's so much cheaper. Just, it'll require care in how it's set up.
Felagund
29d ago
Ah, good point that it'd go away before long.
My concern, I guess, would be that people wouldn't stop.
It's not exactly like the goals of climate activists is to achieve some socially and environmentally optimal level of fossil fuel usage, so I see no reason why we'd expect people to self-regulate here.
That said, you're right that it going away makes this unlikely to be too much of a problem.
Felagund
25d ago
But...are you sure you're in the top 1%?
Top 1% is good, but it's something you see all the time.
If you imagine a typical 100 people in whatever school you went to, take a random 100, and on average, one of them is in the top 1%. That's over 3 million people in the US!
I expect a website that filters for willingness to write longform text might easily get to the point where top 1% IQ is far more commonly represented than among the general population. I'd also expect people with the username "@lagrangian" to have higher IQ.
That said, I'm slightly less willing to trust the 145 IQ, though it's still very possible. Looking it up, 0.1% of people are at 145 or higher. But I don't know how lagrangian evaluated his own, as I wouldn't trust random internet IQ tests, especially on the tails.
It's also worth keeping in mind that each unit of IQ might not be the same (whatever that means), as it's just forced into a bell curve.
Felagund
25d ago
That being said, on an unrelated note, I did appreciate your arguments against sexual intercourse with black out drunk women and I agree that is a bad thing. Unlike a lot of people in that thread.
Thank you, shit, that was not the proudest of themotte I've ever been. OTOH, it's nice to know I don't quite fit every stereotype here, and to have something to point to as foil to when I explain to someone "look I'm really not that conservative, it just sounds that way sometimes".
Wait, where was that?
Felagund
25d ago
They are interested in the climate, but they're interested not in terms of what concrete benefits or harms will it produce, but in whether we're doing a set of things that would be considered bad. Nuclear energy has disasters and waste, so therefore they think it's bad. They don't do a cost-benefit analysis, they just do a cost analysis (for things they don't like) and a benefit analysis (for things they do).
They do genuinely care about the climate, but usually in a scattered rather than coherent way, I suppose.
(Of course, not all climate activists, etc.)
Felagund
25d ago
Looking around a little online, I found some people arguing online that of course temperature and pressure make sense together, by the ideal gas law. But they were saying that this doesn't suffice to say that pressure suffices to explain the temperature, as it could be (for example) that temperature affects pressure, rather than the other way around.
What is your evaluation of that argument?
Felagund
24d ago
Why is it always choose them only if they're better than the best up to that point? At some point wouldn't point, wouldn't it become better to settle for gradually worse partners? (obvious case: in a uniform distribution, only two people left, and you get someone who's at the 75th percentile)
Felagund
24d ago
There shouldn't be able to be an innate "simple desire to become a woman," unless you think we come with innate, from the womb, knowledge of what the two genders are. At some point we figure out what genders are, and such desires would only make sense at that point.
Of course, at that point, we could have innate tendencies that predispose us to manifest certain desires or identities.
Felagund
24d ago
If a few different environmental factors had gone differently, if I had started down that path and been affirmed, I can see it and that terrifies me.
What terrifies me more is how often I've heard this.
Felagund
24d ago
Thomas is great.
Why do you prefer Sotomayor to those judges? She's the one who's most obviously motivated by politics, usually, I think.
Felagund
24d ago
Wow, that's bad. Some of that's probably attributable to the thread starting with "what's rape?", meaning that some people certainly thought "that's immoral, but it's not rape, properly speaking" but yeah, that's worse than I was expecting.
Felagund
24d ago
You're right, he is ScottA. It looks like he only commented in that one thread.
Felagund
24d ago
Not to be rude, but this feels like an ad, with that last sentence an attempt to make it fit this thread.
Felagund
19d ago
I would assume taste is much easier than smell, as there is only a handful of things tastebuds can detect. But then you need to combine that with smell…
I would guess that smell would have to be embedded within a higher-dimensional space than sight or sound? But I'm not certain.
There are languages that have fairly developed abilities to describe smell, just English isn't one of them.
we have pretty clear data that when Europe was Christian (and America), there was almost 0 non-white immigration to Europe.
I assume Mongols, Magyars, Turks, and so on don't count?
Anyway, the New Testament does speak against racial divisions.
Felagund
19d ago
"Here there is not Jew and Greek, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all."
I don't think Christianity has anything to say about racial differences, but it definitely does seem like it has something to say about racial barriers.
I can't comment on most of this, except the following:
Wouldn't the existence of Venus be pretty definitive proof that such a thing is possible?
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