by rephrasing his arguments in such a simplified way it pretty much ceases to describe what he actually believes or claims to believe.
This grants him too much charity. To put it another way, there's a motte and bailey. The "simplified rephrasing" is the motte. Like when he arged that medicine doesn't work, where the motte was that, well, medicine didn't work, and the bailey was a bunch of much less serious criticisms of medicine that are much easier to defend than "medicine doesn't work".
Jiro
1yr ago
That's a bad summary because it doesn't account for how frequent the things are. We haven't banned anyone for murdering their opponent even though that's a worse offense than either low effort or LLMs.
(And the proper comparison isn't LLMs specifically. You ban relatively fewer people for long grammatical, low information posts than you do for standard low effort posts. This creates incentives for long, grammatical, low information posts.)
Jiro
1yr ago
we do not have a revealed preference for length for the sake of length.
...
We use length and effort as proxies for quality
A revealed preference is what shows up in your actions. If your actions are to treat long posts as a proxy for quality, then you do in fact have a revealed preference for length.
Jiro
1yr ago
The laws of physics require that to get fat, you have to eat. If you don't eat enough calories, you won't get fat. No amount of genetics can overcome physics.
Jiro
1yr ago
Being fat is a choice, to the point where excluding it is an unprincipled exception.
Jiro
2yr ago
Let me now go through his claims one by one.
I think you're being too charitable. "Unexceptional idea, therefore absurd idea" shouldn't count as having 50% of his claims right.
Jiro
2yr ago
I'm not interested in going round and round with your whining about why I modded Suzy but I didn't mod Johnny.
There are some things that moderators should be doing regardless of whether they are interested in them or not.
It's like having a restaurant owner who's "not interested" in making sure his food is stored at the right temperature.
Jiro
2yr ago
Fighting fires costs time and money. If he is obliged to fight fires for people who didn't pay him, he'd go broke. It just looks bad because the firefighters are physically standing next to the fire, but standing next to it and not fighting it is no worse than being far away and not fighting it.
Would you quote it the same way if a supermarket was refusing to give away food to someone who couldn't pay?
Jiro
2yr ago
He just told you that denying a green card is not denial of permanent residence.
Jiro
2yr ago
I find it hard to imagine how he could make any relevant statement without saying that the crime had to be worse than something. And anything he used would be a "contour".
Jiro
2yr ago
Anecdote. But Dragoncon last year had a mask policy. Pretty much nobody got Covid. This year they tried a mask policy but it failed because the hotels were not under control of the con and didn't also have a mask policy. Lots of people got Covid.
Jiro
2yr ago
Explain the "apartheid" in Palestine. This is a classic example of a controversial claim made without evidence.
Jiro
3d ago
It's also demonstrably the case that Jews in camps often received high-quality medical treatment and had access to all sorts of pleasant recreational facilities,
This seems to violate "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be."
Jiro
11d ago
I don't like how animals are treated, even on non-factory farms, and I don't like the idea of killing a conscious being for what basically amounts to taste pleasure.
How can you consistently believe this, yet not want to minmax animal suffering? Surely if you are vegan because of animal suffering, it follows that you want to reduce animal suffering as much as possible. And "utilitarian suffering min-maxing" is how you figure out what course of action reduces it as much as possible.
Jiro
2mo ago
The FTL graph included horses and cars. Cars got faster than horses, and planes got faster than cars, but speed eventually reached a limit. Saying "cars can still get faster, so they can go FTL" would be wrong.
If you were at the point where cars were just invented, and you said "cars will get faster, but they will reach a limit", you would have been correct.
Jiro
5mo ago
When the Hebrews do it it's just "Old Testament justice" but when Hitler identifies Jews as adversarial then it's identity politics?
When the Hebrews do it it's "this is something written in a book, secular historians don't think it actually happened, and it's not something to do today".
Jiro
5mo ago
By the way, some British soldiers were lynched and their corpses booby trapped by Israelis. Doesn't sound like a good time.
Google does not seem to find this, and neithjer is it in /r/britain on reddit.
Jiro
1yr ago
In all of these cases, there's the same belief that the Americans being mind-controlled lack their own agency and that an utterly trivial investment on the part of foreign actors can create a completely inorganic belief system within the United States.
They can change the relative size and influence of existing movements even if they can't create movements from scratch.
Jiro
1yr ago
That's just a semantics question over what "bad" means. You can say "hurting someone in self-defense is always bad, but sometimes it is the best option" or you can say "hurting someone in self-defense is not bad" and you're really saying the same thing.
America does for instance have too much gun violence.
The optimal amount of any crime is non-zero, short of lizardman constant situations. This is true for gun violence as much as anything else.
Besides, since some gun violence is self-defense, the optimal amount of it isn't zero anyway.
Jiro
1yr ago
Apparently people gave this 13 upvotes without reading the source. This is taken out of context. The switch is used because of the prohibition against the rules against using electricity on the Sabbath. Your insinuation that Jewish law lets it be used in bombs to kill without anyone being responsible is a lie.
Being visibly Jewish in a place whose inhabitants hate Jews by your reasoning also says something about one's character. Or kissing one's gay partner in front of a homophobe. Or having a bumper sticker proclaiming your political party in a place where people oppose that political party.
If doing X leads to bad reactions, those bad reactions can't be justified with an appeal to "they know it'll have bad reactions".
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