Jiro
6mo ago
The history is too recent. It is like expecting Latvians or Poles to not want to destroy statues of Lenin.
I don't buy this. I'm not going to go to Italy and demand that the Arch of Titus be destroyed as an affront to the Jews. Past a certain amount of time, these monuments are historical and should stay. It's been over fifty years since the civil rights era when black people had enough political power that they could reasonably make a move to destroy monuments to their oppressors. At this point any monuments that are left should be off limits.
Jiro
7mo ago
This is little more than a suggestion that the index would be more accurate if it discounted a woman's earned income somewhat in order to account for the possibility that a woman with no earned income might recover from her husband.
You keep talking about how any problems with the index are just inaccuracies. I wonder if you'd accept that excuse for something on the other political side. "Yes, we're exaggerating the number of third trimester abortions, but that's just inaccurate". This kind of inaccuracy is deceptive. It's not excusable just because it's an inaccuracy that doesn't call the whole thing into question--at some point, inaccuracy does call the whole thing into question.
But I am often surprised that people are surprised that yes, orthodox Christians do in fact believe you (yes, you) are going to go to hell if you do not accept Jesus Christ. Yes, that means they literally believe every last atheist and Muslim and Jew and pagan and Hindu and Buddhist is going to burn in hell forever. (And a lot of the Protestant denominations include Catholics, Mormons, and JWs in that bucket.)
Publically stating such things is an applause light often meant to express contempt or condescension towards people of other religions, even when rationalists ignore that and treat such claims as logical propositions. It's like going on record in public saying that your opponent's children are ugly and his toupee looks fake. The fact that you actually believe these things is not why you said it.
Jiro
7mo ago
That's the equivalent of "I met a poor person who genuinely needed a car, and the US budget is obviously able to handle giving out a car, so we should buy cars for every poor person who needs a car."
Even if the immigrant isn't a criminal and can get a job at a reasonable salary, the problem is the country only has resources for a limited number of immigrants. Because the drain on resources is distributed as a zillion dust specks, if you peer at any specific example it will always seem like that particular example couldn't possibly drain enough resources to matter, no matter where you put the limit. But cumulatively, doing that ends up meaning completely open borders and no limit at all.
Or in other words, the sympathy for the individual immigrant is a concentrated benefit, while the drain on resources is a distributed harm, so it's always going to look like we should add just one more immigrant because we don't balance concentrated benefits and distributed harms very well.
Jiro
3mo ago
But other Christians are willing to say "the Westboro Baptist Church is crazy and we don't believe what they are saying is true". This doesn't happen for trans issues.
Jiro
9mo ago
Except Narnia isn't just a children's tale. It's about faith all right--it's a metaphor about religion and God. "People have actually been to Narnia, but they reject it anyway" is a close match to a common Christian strawman of atheists: that atheists have enough evidence to believe and they just refuse out of sinful arrogance.
And Lewis is too smart a person to not recognize that "people have been to Narnia but they still don't believe" matches this Christian strawman. If it's there, Lewis put it there on purpose.
Jiro
8mo ago
Except that the "approval" part is only half of it.
In the real world, proclaiming that nonbelievers go to Hell is hostile to nonbelievers. Yes, they want other believers to approve of the hostility, but describing that as wanting to garner approval leaves out the important part.
There are also tens of thousands of pieces of Star Wars fanfiction on archiveofourown.org and I think probably 80% of it is written by women and girls.
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This is distorted by the fact that most fanfiction period is written by women and girls, so it's not evidence of the gender ratio for the fandom itself.
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I wouldn't count "Anakin thinks it's a great idea to spend the day at an amusement park, also having something else up his sleeve. Confessing his love to Obi-Wan!" as being genuinely a fan of the series.
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The woke trend is clearly not what appeals to them about Star Wars. Look how few of them have Rey as a main character, for instance.
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Since many of the writers are kids, "I watched it as a kid" isn't ruled out. Are they still going to be fans come next year?
Jiro
9mo ago
Firstly, they're the SOTA today, anyone wanting to bet that GPT-5 won't be another leap ahead within a couple years is welcome to take it up with me, I could use the money.
I don't bet. And actually, someone independently posted pointing out that most LW-style bets are irrational from the point of view of profit motive and are signalling.
Also, they said the same thing about self-driving cars. It turns out that the last bit is a lot harder to get right than the first bit.
Jiro
8mo ago
The sentiment is hostile. You don't need to believe Hell exists in order to understand that someone louldy proclaiming that you're going to go there probably doesn't like you very much.
Jiro
2mo ago
By that reasoning it's fine to bar him from taking part in any job whose name starts with the letters Q through Z. After all, even with that restriction there are many jobs he could take.
But it's totally arbitrary. Why do we have an interest in preventing someone from taking some jobs just because they refuse to put themselves in physical danger by going to Russia?
Jiro
8mo ago
"Living well is the best revenge", "don't let them live rent-free in your head", "you're just letting them hurt you even more", etc.
If your enemies tell you that you should do something for your own good that straightforwardly helps them and harms you, that's probably motivated reasoning or concern trolling. Some of the biggest proponents of getting rid of grudges are the people who are targets of grudges, who should be ignored for this reason. Someone who you have a grudge against probably isn't very interested in your mental health overall; why should you listen to them on the one subject where they have something to gain?
And combine this with sour grapes--when you can't have something (in this case, defeating the group you have a grudge against), you tell yourself that the thing you can't have really isn't all that great. Sour grapes is a form of bias, and it may be a coping mechanism, but it isn't rationality.
Jiro
10mo ago
Future victories are vastly easier now than they were in Dec 2021.
Seriously? Do you think that next time the Canadian government tries this, it will be ruled unconstitutional and lead to no serious penalties for the protestors?
Jiro
4mo ago
Presumably those schools have fewer people trying to push the limits of the policy.
You can't assume that teachers are going to follow these policies in good faith, which is why we can't have nice things.
Jiro
8mo ago
The proper conclusion is "Jefferson was a racist, but not all racism is as bad as you think it is". But "racism isn't as bad as you think it is" is a taboo position, regardless of its truth. Robinson knows this, which is why he built the questioning around racism in the first place, and which makes it fundamentally dishonest.
Jiro
2mo ago
The obvious reply to that is "why do Asians do well?" Shouldn't it take hundreds of years for them to catch up too? (Of course, Asians weren't quite as disadvantaged, but I wouldn't say they had a hundred year head start either.)
Jiro
5mo ago
Incidentally, I still repeatedly see the bug where trying to post something at a level that would produce a more comments prompt results in the post actually being accepted, but seeming to hang and never refreshing the screen.
Also, we don't seem to have a thread for forum bugs.
I'd expect the typical reasoning of 'Only do it to the smallest of outgroups', but given how demonstrable it is now that such reasoning does not hold when we are trying to uphold broad principles for big populations...
I'm surprised that you think "only do it to the smallest of outgroups" would be a useful description even when that's sort of what Google did.
Search is at least partly supposed to be a popularity contest. If the group that says something is small, what they say should be underemphasized. If the group that thinks it's true is small, that's another reason to underemphasize it because if there's 99% agreement that it isn't true, Google should be treating it as false and people don't want to search and find false information.
There are plenty of conservatives out there, and the truth of conservative beliefs is an active dispute, not something 99% of people take the same side on. But Holocaust denial? There are few Holocaust deniers, and no truth to Holocaust denial. Not returning results because Holocaust deniers are the "smallest of outgroups" is the proper thing to do here.
Jiro
2mo ago
It's not a thing you can change by just modifying a few conditions. The only meaningful way to get rid of the advantage of being a trained lawyer is to find an opponent who's also a trained lawyer or equivalent.
This incessant insistence on "if you REALLY were serious, you'd do it at a time and place and under circumstances of my choosing" is as annoying as rationalists insisting "if you REALLY were serious, you'd bet money".
Jiro
9mo ago
Applicants are advised that essays about niche topics unfamiliar to admissions officers are strongly preferred.
How could this ever be possible?
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).
Would you demand that someone not rent to gay people, or otherwise profit off of gays, if they can't bear to watch gay sex? If they can't bear to watch an operation, do we forbid them from being operated on?
Squeamishness is not a source of morality.
Jiro
8mo ago
Only a certain kind of literalist on the Internet thinks being wrong "about everything" means literally every single thing, rather than being wrong about major implications in typical cases.
"They are literally right that Jefferson is racist, but they are wrong in what this implies about how we should treat Jefferson" is, by normie standards, being wrong about Jefferson.
Holocaust denial got the most clicks. But centrists don't like that so they want it banned. So screw any principle or fairness, I should just have my way because 'reasons'.
Right now Google is infested by SEO spam and SEO spam, of course, gets the most clicks. By your reasoning, Google should be sending people to the SEO spam and should not try to get rid of it in search results. It "gets the most clicks" because Google promotes it, you cannot use the clicks as a reason to say why Google should promote it--that's circular reasoning.
Holocaust denial is neither something that many people want (since they want truthful things and it's false) nor something that many people produce (since it comes from an extreme minority). So Google should in fact be not showing it prominently in search results that don't specifically ask for it.
Funnily enough, that's how the people banning 'conservative' stuff think. They see a tiny portion of the population.
"It's a tiny percentage" is false for conservatives and true for Holocaust deniers. That's a big difference; being true or false actually matters.
Jews are intelligent. As such, HBD provides no reason to be against them.
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