JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
6hr ago
Can you eat raw chicken without noticing it? My experience with my own culinary experiments shows undercooked chicken has completely different taste and texture than a properly cooked one. Not sure about the pathogen risks but if you didn't notice I suspect it was not raw.
JarJarJedi
7hr ago
How much does it matter? I mean, obviously it matters for passing the exam, but how much a practicing psychiatrist encounters a situation where they need to know statistics on this level and properly set up variables, unless they do academic research? Or, putting it in another way, if I learned psychiatrists are being taught and examined on wrong statistics, how scared should I be?
JarJarJedi
7hr ago
Maybe they are not insane enough for that?
JarJarJedi
7hr ago
Nobody forced Iran to declare US a "Great Satan", build a vast collection of proxy armies, commit terrorist acts and pursue nuclear weapons, while openly declaring they are going to use them to perpetrate genocide. They chose to live this life. Now they are living the life they have chosen. Their choices led them to the situation where the only choices for their opponents would be either live under a permanent threat of nuclear attack or take measures to preclude this threat before it realized. Iranians had multiple opportunities to get off this train, instead they doubled and tripled down - because their apocalyptic ideology and their belief the West is weak and decadent and can be bullied if one is determined enough - mandated this strategy. Of course, the West did a lot to support that assumption, but this is not an excuse.
is the obvious and natural response.
As much obvious and natural response as shooting you is an obvious and natural response of a robber who is caught by you unexpectedly returning home in mid-robbery. Yes, it is obvious, and yes, it is natural for a violent criminal to resort to violence. I am not sure how you get from "obvious and natural" to "commendable and desirable". It is natural for a criminal to do crime. It is natural for a bunch of crazy apocalyptic cultists to behave like crazy apocalyptic cultists. How that "natural" is any good?
Some Americans seem to have got so fed up with being criticised unreasonably that they have lost the capacity to see when they are being criticised reasonably.
That's empty rhetoric. Of course everybody believe their criticism it the most reasonable one. It does not make it so. You have to actually prove it, you can't just state it and then stand and expect everybody to go "oh, how couldn't we see it before, the is the reasonable one, it's all different now!" Just because you call yourself "reasonable", does not score you any points in the actual reasonableness. On the contrary, when you engage in rule lawyering and defend your criticism with arguments like "oh, you just lost the ability to be criticized and that's why you are not agreeing with me" one is tempted to conclude you do not expect your argument to be strong enough to stand on its merits, without supporting it with attacks on the opponent's mental capacity, instead of addressing their arguments.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
IMHO knowing stuff is less important than being quick learner and communicate well and be generally pleasant to work with. My experience with interns (software not networks but I think it's pretty similar) had been that nobody really expects the intern to know everything, or even a lot. But if we see a person who's actively learning and advancing, who can be relied on to deliver on the task that is assigned and maybe even go a little beyond that, and who is generally nice to work with - then people would seriously think about permanent hire. A lot of companies are always looking for good people, and it's a perpetual problem that it's hard to know if somebody is good from a few interviews. If you know somebody already, and know they've got potential, the lack of experience and knowledge can be excused - people learn new things all the time, as long as the person got basic fundamentals and good brains, most of the stuff can be learned. Especially now that you can ask LLMs to do a lot of leg work for you.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
I of course read it, many times, but if you intend to read it in translation, I have no idea about how good they are. This is an example of a good ending btw. The whole setup is kind of standard "weird sci-fi" thing - aliens, artifacts, zombies, everything of that sort - and pretty enjoyable by itself, but then the ending totally kicks it all out of the water and makes you just sit there and scratch your head, wondering.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
You are mixing basic religious dogmas (like "Jesus Christ is a superior being" etc.) with rites ("gather on Sunday", etc.) and with organizational structure ("churches are organized by city, and the city’s church is headed by a bishop"). The latter two of which is in no way shared by all Christian denominations (and we can have a long long talk about the first one but let's leave it aside for now). If you talk about basic dogmas, in Judaism they have not changed. If you talk about rites, they did change a lot (and continue to change - for example, there are prayers for state of Israel and for IDF, as you may imagine, they do not come from Mishnaic times), and so did Christian rites, and different Christian denominations have very different rites. If you talk about the organizational structure, it definitely changed a lot for Judaism - and is also diverse for Christians, some denominations don't have bishops at all, and for those that do, the roles vary greatly.
Thus, I think if we are allowed to say that the modern Christianity, in all its diversity, is the same religion that had been taught by Jesus and Paul, then we should be allowed to say the modern Judaism is the same religion that had been practiced by David and Solomon. And if we say those are different religions, then the question of "what is older" becomes rather arbitrary, because the whole definition of what is being compared eludes us.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
Yesterday's dinner menu: kotlety, vinegret, cabbage-and-bell-pepper salad, hummus, cherry tomatoes, pickled cucumbers. The links are just visual examples, I don't know the exact recipe - my wife makes it, and she varies it all the time. My wife is a great cook, I am truly blessed in this regard (as in many others when it concerns my wife).
Also had a can of stout with that, since it was a busy weekend and I wanted to relax.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
That depends on what you mean by "Orthodox Judaism". As any tradition that is not dead, it changes constantly. Yes, modern Judaism (which is not a singular religion anyway, with all the Reform, Conservative, Hasidim, Misnagdim, Mizrahim, and so on) is not the same Judaism as it were in times of Judges or the times of Mishnah, but Mishnah itself is contrary to the previous tradition - it is written down oral tradition, which is a pretty fundamental change already. Things always change.
one that developed in response to events that were arguably put in motion by Christianity
That is a very questionable proposition, unless you mean it as "in the response to events that involved people, some of whom also been Christians". Rabbinic Judaism came about as a solution to absence of central authority and dispersed nature of Jewish diaspora. The starting point of it would probably be the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, and then it developed with the codification of the Talmud since then. At that point, Christianity did not have much influence on the events. Later, of course, as Christianity became more dominant, it influenced a lot of events, which in turn influenced also the development of Judaism. But I don't think tracing the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism to Christianity in any causal meaning makes a lot of sense.
Also, of course, while Rabbinic Judaism is different than what came before - I don't think it's right to say it's a different religion. I am sure what early Christians practiced would be also different from what we find in modern Vatican or Russian Orthodox Church, but we still call it Christianity, don't we?
Yes, in certain places you could have it. Note that this (Mea Shearim) is in no way typical neighborhood in Israel - it is considered very odd and exceptional by Israeli standards.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
Israel has a mix of cultures, but the overall direction is generally Western, yes. There's of course Judaic part of the culture, which predates what we call modern Western culture by a couple of millennia (of course, it did not stay static for all that time too), so there's that. Even secular Jews are influenced by it. Paradoxically, Reform Jews may be the least influenced here. A comparison I liked about this - it's like being a non-religious person in a Catholic country (say, Italy or Poland) vs being a Protestant. If the former case, you may not be an actively religious person but still you play by the Catholic culture rules, in the latter, it's a different (though related) culture. The culture that Reform trends towards the most is the liberal woke culture. I guess that's part of Western culture too, it can be argued?
JarJarJedi
2d ago
I liked the expedition - it expands the world and shows there has been a lot of stuff going on that the City dwellers have no idea about and are basically beyond their comprehension. But I didn't like the ending too much... Too close to the dreaded "and then he woke up and it all was just a dream".
JarJarJedi
2d ago
Had a long drive on the weekend, so Dresden Files' White Night kept me company. The series keeps to deliver, though this one was a bit lower stakes, comparatively, than the previous ones. The only serious arc advancements were that we now know how Thomas is surviving,
Also finished Howling Dark and Demon in White. Hadrian's transformation
Also, have been re-reading Father Brown stories. They never get old.
JarJarJedi
7d ago
Mass censorship is when fact checked, got it.
Fact checking is fine. However, like many other terms, this term got subverted to mean something that does not follow from its naive meaning. What "fact checking" is now is an industry that delivers plausible deniability to governmental and quasi-governmental bodies to exercise censorship by producing third-party "objective" opinions (always aligning with the Party's needs, miraculously) which are used to censor disfavored opinions for being "misinformation". This has very little to do with facts or checking them, about as much as Democratic People's Republic of Korea has to do with democracy. It's a censorship laundering. And the perpetrators did not hide and do not hide right now that the goal is to deny their political opponents the "platform" - i.e. the ability to express and publicize their political speech. The goal is not having better facts, it's having less opposition.
The knife cuts both ways, if you get to say what you want as a public figure, the public gets to call you a fascist/marxist depending on which direction the yelling is coming from.
Sure thing. The public figure does not get to use the government suppression apparatus to get me to stop saying those things though. And the public figures in the US did a lot of that recently. In fact, they had massive governmental and taxpayer-paid programs to get people to stop saying things that the government does not approve of saying.
The public figure also does not get to apply the laws differently depending on whether or not you say what the public figure wants. That's also what public figures had been doing a lot - like, saying "X is bad" and then some unknown people dressed in black show up and beat up X and destroy their business or set fire to a place where he was supposed to speak, and the public figure just shrugs and says "unfortunately, we do not know who those people are and have no way to find out, but if X says those things again, they have only themselves to blame for what happens".
so, the government should step in and force corporations to do things that the public at the time didn't like?
It should not, but it had been doing it a lot lately. The corporations had been pressed, either overtly - by government contracting rules, EEOC regulations and such, or more covertly - like prioritizing corporations that actively play in ESG and DEI, into doing what the government likes.
then again in 2028, should the Dem congress get to kick down the door to twitter and install sensitivity cops on every corner?
They shouldn't, but they would like to, very much. In fact, in Europe they are openly demanding exactly this. In the US, some pesky and little known legal loopholes, like 1st Amendment, make this harder, thus they need to resort to indirect ways like ones described above. Not that they are too proud to strong-arm too - see all the angry letters the government sent to social media companies under Biden, and the following censorship fast-lanes that were implemented as a result of that. If they take power in 2028, there is absolutely no doubt they would try to do it again.
Cancel culture was fake
That is a lie. Cancel culture was real, and is still real in many places.
it was conservatives getting a taste of their own bullshit
So was it fake, or was it righteous revenge? You can't claim both in the same sentence without having a red nose and a rainbow wig on.
And yes, the conservatives did a lot of censoring and cancelling themselves, when they were in power. That's bad. A lot of people said that it was bad at the time, and they were right. Now the left is doing it. It's still bad. Shame on the people that changed their opinion on freedom when it became their team that is in power and suppressing freedom. Shame on fair-weather freedom lovers.
I didn't read a lot of The Culture, but honestly I have no idea. I mean the society is certainly way post-scarcity, but humans there are basically pets for the Minds, and we don't even know what Minds are about and what do they want, and not supposed to. Is it worse being Hitler's pet than a saint's pet? Is there any moral responsibility on the side of the pet? It doesn't seem like humans even have enough agency there for there being any distinction, really. Materially, it is described as pretty much perfect. Even intellectually, I am sure Minds can find something to occupy any of the pet's needs, whatever they are, including awesome adventures or great battles or whatever. Occasionally, they may even require the services of a human for some task (after all, we have K9 units in the police and the military) and even then, I am sure they would make it as safe and as enjoyable for the human as possible in the circumstances. But is is even a story about humans, that can be analyzed in human terms? I think this setup transcends those terms and makes them meaningless.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
The wokes get their justification by claiming that disparate sentencing alone proves that law enforcement is racist and illegitimate,
Yes, I know, they lie. And it's easy to prove - you just need to establish a principle of "do crime - go to jail" - which is obviously blind to the race, and enforce it diligently without regard to the race. Once you start talking about race, proving that you operate in racially blind framework becomes much harder.
and having wide public agreement for this because HBD arguments are taboo
No, not because of this. You don't need to sell the public that 50 millions of US citizens are subhuman (not sure what you'd do with Ashkenazi Jews btw - does every Jew automatically gets PhD at birth? I mean, if you do the negative side, you have to do the positive side too... if you advocated for somehow suppressing supposedly low-IQ populations, you necessarily would have to advocate to promote high-IQ populations... not sure how that's supposed to work?) to sell them the idea of punishment following the crime. I know a lot of people that agree to the latter while not agreeing to the former, and I do not think HBD is the only way to combat racism. Especially given that it's the same racism, only with variables substituted. I mean "we are both racists, but we think we are actually the good guys, and so do they, but you can trust us!" does not sound as a particularly overwhelming argument.
If HBD became common knowledge, this would stop working.
How? The wokes would just switch from "you can't jail criminals because it's racist" to "you can't jail criminals because life's hard for them anyway, so you can not ask them to not be criminals, it's just cruel". In fact, many already do it anyway right now - the white progressive left is racist as hell, and many of them internalize a version of HBD very deeply, they just make different political conclusions from it. Attacking them on essentially agreeing with them is not going to be very effective. If you want to win over them, you need to reject their racist framework.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
Maybe if you get part of that money. I am paid pretty much the same anyway (at least while I'm employed), whether I do fun new things or dig up old smelly garbage, so I prefer the former. If my salary substantially depended on it, I probably would think differently.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
I am happy to work at a place that has a firm policy of "if your version is more than 2 years old, we love you but if you want any fixes or assistance you're going to need to upgrade. We will help you if you want but we're not gonna dig up a prehistoric version of code and try to figure out what's going on there".
JarJarJedi
10d ago
why does AI all think it's impossible?
My immediate answer would be because AI does not think. It just rearranges known data. And known data says these things are not done, just as you noted. Moreover, somewhere in the RLHF phase they probably beat the tendency to seek unapproved shortcuts out from it, otherwise it'd advice you to rob a bank when asked how to get money easily. So it'd be trained to pretend things that are not allowed do not exist. So I am not surprised - and I have been in this situation many times, btw.
One of the reasons why I am not worried yet about being replaced by LLMs. Sure, they can generate code now. But generating code is the boringest part of the work. Figuring out which code to generate is the trick. Once you figure out what needs to be done - I am just fine letting the LLM to arrange the bits properly.
JarJarJedi
10d ago
I'm not sure how this even computes. OK, I understand you are pissed off at the wokes. I am too. They are totally wrong. But then something bizarre happens. I am saying "yes, we should ignore the wokes and arrest as many black guys as commit crimes. And as many white guys as commit crimes". But you say - no, that's not gonna work. You see, the wokes are in the way, so the only way to solve it is to build this theory that treats black people as low quality humans, and somehow introduce it it into all the society, and obsess about wide-populational statistical differences. And when I am asking - well, how exactly that is going to help with arresting the actual criminals and keeping them in jail? You tell me - but the wokes! The wokes!!! The wokes!!! Yes, I know, the wokes. The wokes are bad. The wokes are racist. They are making everything worse. I got that. The part I didn't get is how exactly HBD is helping you here? I am saying the practical way to solve the crime is to put criminals in jail. You are saying it's impossible because the wokes would interfere and thus we need HBD. But how HBD is helping you? Sure, you could start despising black people for their supposed statistical inferiority... and? How that solves anything?
JarJarJedi
11d ago
Crime does not look like the general population, because criminals aren't general population. That's why we lock them up in jails. If everybody would be equally likely to commit crime, locking people up would be useless. But it's actually very useful, because only a very small number of people, compared to the whole population, does crime, and even smaller one - does crime repeatedly. But again, you do not need to have scientific explanation why every person does crime to lock up criminals, no more than you need to study quantum gravity theory to build a bridge that does not collapse. The practical way is easy.
JarJarJedi
11d ago
You are saying "I must be racist because other people are racist, so I need to be exactly like them, but with different sign". No, you don't. You missed all of my point exactly. The people that would accuse you would be racists, but you do not need to build your own racism to defend against them. I just showed you the correct way, and you treat it as some kind of weird nonsense. That's the problem.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
Was worse. Jim Crow does not exist anymore - in fact, it is so officially banned that a lot of freedoms which were considered absolute before - such as freedom of association, freedom of conducting or refusing business, locality of power, etc. - had been abridged by the government to not let it ever come back. I am not going to argue whether it was worth it - that's not my point is. My point is - DEI is with us right now, right here, and impacts the lives of millions. Something bad that happened in the past may be really bad, but it was the past. We can not influence it, and it can not influence us anymore. But DEI is something that is happening in the present.
JarJarJedi
12d ago
The thing is, reducing violent crime is not that hard. I mean not brining it to zero, but bringing it to a place where it's not an everyday concern to a layperson. It has been done, and it has been undone, and in both cases it not a function of genetics or races or any of that stuff. It's just the question of resources and consistent unyielding enforcement. You just need to catch the criminals and put them in jail and keep them there. You don't need to analyze their genes or skin color to do that. It is true that people who un-do it, very much look at genes and skin color as a justification of why they are not doing the right thing, but there's no reason to uphold their framework and only change the signs. It is possible to toss the whole broken framework altogether and replace it with one that looks at the actual behavior and not genetics. You don't put people in jail for their genes, just for their crimes. If you do that, you don't need any HBD. I mean, you can still do a PhD in theorizing about what causes people to do crime, but practically it doesn't matter - if the criminals are in jail, nobody cares about their biology. Everybody cares that they are in jail.
I didn't taste raw chicken, but I tasted undercooked one (I did it to myself, have to admit) and it was rubbery and unpleasant. Generally it's not good idea at all to eat something like that, of course, but nothing bad happened to me, even though I started to check it more thoroughly on rare occasions I cook chicken (usually my wife does it and she knows how to do it right).
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