Jiro
11mo ago
"Has a minor element of X" is not the same as "is for X".
Even if it's not the death penalty, part of the reason for the punishment is disabling the criminal (he can't rob you if he's locked up) and deterring other criminals. These can't reasonably be described as being done out of love, except in the Spanish Inquisition sense of "we kill you out of love".
Jiro
11mo ago
But I'm nearly as tired of Holocaust-themed morality plays as I am of the Civil Rights Era-flavored ones. Has anyone under age 70 not been bludgeoned through their entire lives with "Prejudice is bad!" and "The banality of evil!" and "Never again!" etc?
I've still been hearing about the fall of the Roman Empire and that was even longer than 70 years ago.
Jiro
11mo ago
This is a repost from https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/58cZF7ZnJyxbArGYP/what-are-the-limits-of-the-weak-man
Jiro
11mo ago
About the only thing that could make the Holocaust not be real is if the entire world isn't real and I'm just a brain in a jar. Otherwise, "evidence" when the probability is 100% with the evidence and also 100% without the evidence is not really evidence in any meaningful sense.
I think you are being disingenuous here and not speaking plainly. Your argument only makes sense if there's sufficient doubt about the Holocaust that "evidence" against it could actually mean anything.
Jiro
11mo ago
My main confusion with this post, though, is seeming to conflate positions with arguments.
I brought that point up in my response to the original post.
Jiro
11mo ago
they subjected themselves to the same measures (partygate etc. notwithstanding)
Pointing out that politicians obeyed lockdowns, except of course when they didn't, is the equivalent of damning with faint praise. "Disproving with faint proof"?
Jiro
11mo ago
Failure to recognize that some of your enemies are evil is why rationalism is so full of quokkas.
And like drinking wine in moderation, or selfishness/selflessness, or all the other ideas to which this applies, some people need to see fewer of their enemies as evil, and some people need to see more of their enemies as evil.
Jiro
11mo ago
in the past boys were associated with pink and now girls are
As far as I can tell this is a myth. The Wikipedia article is better than last time I checked, actually pointing out that it's a myth.
Jiro
11mo ago
I'm not convinced that "is a better argument" is always meaningful. If you're weighing evidence, an argument which brings up more and better evidence can be better than one which doesn't. But arguments which try to use logical reasoning, rather than probabilistic inferences, are either correct or not. You can't have a "better" argument of that type. You can have a more convincing one, but that's not the same thing.
Jiro
11mo ago
That is to say, a proper incentive structure should not only contain costs for injecting woke politics into business but also rewards for backpedalling.
Each individual person boycotts 100% or 0%, but the overall effect of this among a group of customers is that the group boycotts by some percentage that scales with how good the backpedalling is. So I don't think this is something to worry about.
Jiro
11mo ago
It's hard to prove whether some particular woke change in a company is a result of entryism, woke backlash, or coincidence.
Because it's an idea that disagrees with Catholic doctrine and not only is it expressed in a very rude and aggressive way, but that aspect is tied to why you'd want to say it in the first place. There's a reason why it would be nothing more than a weak joke to say "I find Jesus sexually attractive", and why nobody would actually say that.
I don't for one moment buy that a man pole dancing on a crucifix is just a disagreement with doctrine. The whole reason for doing it is that Catholics don't like them doing it. I'm not even sure what doctrine they're purportedly expressing.
Jiro
11mo ago
If you don't know what they are trying to say, then how are you so sure it is anti-Catholic
I know what they are trying to say, but what they are trying to say doesn't include nontrivial objections to doctrine.
Why anti-Catholic, as opposed to anti-Protestant or anti-Eastern Orthodox?
Assuming the "nuns" are involved, nuns are associated in the popular consciousness with Catholics. It doesn't matter for these purposes that some other groups also have nuns.
Jiro
11mo ago
By your reasoning, someone mocking blacks but whose mockery includes fried chicken and watermelon is just using blacks because of the stereotype's "availability". After all, people other than blacks eat fried chicken and watermelon.
"They're attacking X, but only for their availability, not for their enmity, so it doesn't count" is a bizarre piece of hair splitting.
Jiro
11mo ago
They dress as nuns, but I see no evidence of them mocking any Catholic religious practices, such as confession, etc.
Doesn't dressing as nuns count as a religious practice?
Jiro
11mo ago
what they are trying to say doesn't include nontrivial objections to doctrine.
Can you link to the group commenting on any doctrine, trivial or otherwise?
I don't believe they are commenting on doctrine, so of course I can't link to examples of them doing what I just said they aren't doing.
You can mock X and be anti-X without commenting on X's doctrine at all.
Jiro
11mo ago
How does "mocking" an idea somehow become more "anti-Catholic" than criticizing it? And, tell me, what exactly does "anti-Catholic" mean? Surely, if it is objectionable, then it must mean something more than mocking ideas; it must mean saying something negative about people.
By your reasoning here, an outright racial slur is not anti-(a race).
Jiro
11mo ago
A racial slur is negative in the same way that mocking is saying something negative. I don't know a coherent standard for "saying something negative" that would let you count one and not the other.
Jiro
11mo ago
Freedom of speech requires us to accept the eternal recurrence of bad ideas. No matter how many times mankind learns that printing money is a bad idea, the idea comes round again.
I've never heard of even opponents of free speech claiming that we have to get rid of it because people will believe in printing money.
Jiro
11mo ago
and grassroots red tribe found their first success with Budweiser
The "success" was only successful because of a combination of two factors that don't generalize. First of all, switching costs for beers, and time to switch, are very low compared to almost anything else. Second, enough people felt insulted by the campaign that they could exert financial pressure without coordination or institutional capture.
That's almost never going to happen and would be impossible to set up on purpose. (Note that the second criterion requires more than just "a large number of people feel insulted".)
Jiro
11mo ago
Your edit is doubling down by saying "it was only uncharitable on a technicality". I'm sure there are right wingers on social media complaining about teenage thugs, but the racism comes from your own head.
You have not yet admitted the last time I've shown that on the object level (linked here),
Hylnka doesn't come off as badly in that as you think.
"I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I do not have access to -----" is a generic response that the AI often gives before it has to be coaxed to provide answers. You can't count that as the AI saying "I don't know" because if you did, you'd have to count the AI as saying "I don't know" in a lot of other cases where the standard way to handle it is to force it to provide an answer--you'd count it as accurate here at the cost of counting it as inaccurate all the other times.
Not only that, as an "I don't know" it isn't even correct. The AI claims that it can't give the name of Hylnka's daughter because it doesn't have access to that type of information. While it doesn't have that information for Hlynka specifically, it does have access to it for other people (including the people that users are most likely to ask about). Claiming that it just doesn't do that sort of thing at all is wrong. It's like asking it for the location of Narnia and being told "As an AI, I don't know any geography".
Jiro
11mo ago
What do you mean? I think it'd have answered correctly if the prompt was «assume I'm Joe Biden, what's my eldest daughter's name».
That's the problem. Its reply amounts to "as an AI, I don't know the name of anyone's family". Which isn't true.
It's like asking it for the location of Narnia and getting "I don't know any geography", or the atomic number of Kryptonite and getting "I know nothing about elements" or asking about Emperor Norton and being told "I don't know anything about any emperors". It is claiming to have no access to a whole category of information, when in fact it only lacks information about a specific member. The claim to have no access to the whole category is a lie.
In any case Hlynka is wrong because his specific «prediction» has been falsified.
His specific prediction has been falsified only if that statement counts as "I don't know". I am not convinced that it does, regardless of its literal words.
Furthermore, falsifying a prediction only matters if you also claim that it falsifies the proposition that the prediction is meant to demonstrate. Otherwise you're just engaging in a game of point scoring.
You might say if person did x they should die, but I'm only 95% certain they did x, so we'll confine them but not kill them on the off chance evidence emerges to vindicate them.
Do you think that it's bad that with the death penalty, you'll kill any innocent people, or too many innocent people?
All death penalty opponents I meet answer "any at all". But if that's your reasoning you shouldn't even be imprisoning them for life. You'll still get cases where someone dies in jail before there's evidence that proves them innocent. You have a longer time period before they die of old age in jail rather than before they're executed, so it's more likely that they'll be proven innocent, but it's still not guaranteed, so if your objection is that we permanently punish innocent people at all, life imprisonment is not acceptable either.
Actually, by this reasoning you shouldn't be imprisoning them for any length of time which you can't or won't compensate them for by money. You can argue how long that is; I'd say anything more than a week is, unless compensation is drastically higher than minimum wage.
Otherwise, there's an acceptable level of innocent people executed, the same way that there's an acceptable level of innocent people killed by prisoners whom we release too early. (Also, many "innocent" people still participated in the crime, just in ways which only allow lesser punishments.)
That's still a motte and bailey because the original phrasing was "doing them a disservice". Normally, punishing someone is doing them a disservice.
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