Lost_Geometer
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User ID: 1246
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
I guess this is part of why I hated teaching. My viewpoint would have been that (ethically) maximizing the students' chances of passing the test should be heavily prioritized. Even if the fun stuff is better for their psyches, they're paying for a leg up on the competition.
So the worry is that -- if one prioritizes passing the test at all -- the bare facts being tested militate strongly towards certain ideas, and that ethical use of class time does not allow room to introduce complementary material. This is compounded by the fact that so much of the test seems to be free response, and teachers need to be convinced that these would be rubric-ed tightly enough so as to not be graded on ideological parroting. Professionally, I've only seen how the AP grades calculus, so maybe you can tell if such a thing is even possible? My own high school experience was that one wants to approximate ChatGPT's response as well as possible, which is what we'd like to avoid here.
Finally, I found the sample questions to be interesting and challenging (IANA historian). Students would presumably find the course valuable, but (IMO) Florida would be right to claim that the Black experience is better understood with every bell hooks reading replaced by Tupac Shakur.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
When someone says they "feared for their life" I expect there to have been a reasonable chance that they would die. Now I'm at best a middle-of-the-road martial artist, but I'm not a malnourished psychotic either. Compared to Neely I'm a force of nature. In a train car with a dozen people I doubt I could do enough damage to kill someone before being stopped. Maybe? Call it under 10%, fixating on one person with the sole goal of killing.
Now one might contort the phrase to mean "needed to do something to reliably avoid a lethal threat". That might well be the case here, but it's a dangerous equivocation: after all, by that standard one "fears for their life" constantly while driving a car.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
[ @The_Nybbler makes similar points ]
To clarify, can you answer 2 questions?
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How common are killings in similar circumstances -- a single, unarmed individual kills complete strangers on a modestly crowded bus/train after exhibiting unfocussed threatening behaviour?
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In light of your answer to (1), and the unfortunate common presence of disturbed individuals on public transit, how do you estimate the probability that any given passenger (other than Neely) would have died on that trip?
From this side of the screen:
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I was unable to find any examples in a brief search -- plenty of cases of group violence, armed killings, or direct person-to-person conflicts, but none resembling the facts at hand. Presumably it's happened -- just due to the huge numbers of encounters.
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Given that I can't find any examples, and that this type of thing must happen thousands of times a year, I'll put the individual death probability at < 0.01%.
If you can get a better handle on (1), then I'm happy to update.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
I'm pretty far left, but the author doesn't really give much of a reason to think much of anything. He opens with a weakman, demolishes it, and then proceeds to loosely related speculation. In particular, he doesn't do anything to establish that rape behaves differently than other violent interpersonal crimes. Pretty much everyone knows that blacks victimize whites at far higher rates than vice versa across the board, a fact that is much more reliably established using better reported, less heterogeneous types of crime.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
That the risk is small doesn't matter when there is no reason why anyone should tolerate being exposed to it in the first place
Agreed. My issue is with the casual use of "fearing for ones life", which cheapens and reduces our ability to del with what should be very serious issues. In the case at hand, it seems reasonable for the passengers to have restrained Neely, as some violence was arguably reasonably anticipated from him. Shooting him, for example, would not have been justified though, and we should, IMO, calibrate our language to maintain respect for human life.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
OK, I'll bite. I'm not anti-nuclear, but hardly pro either. 20 years ago I was enthusiastic, but overall now I think that nuclear has only a modest role to play.
Nuclear never has never been particularly economically attractive -- successful programs have needed to be subsidized by states for national security reasons. The predictable costs are huge and mostly occurred before the plants even come online. The unpredictable costs of accidents, attacks, and proliferation are really hard to value, and require large states or as yet imperfect international control systems. The technologies needed for nuclear to be perform at its best (small safe thorium reactors and the associated reprocessing networks) aren't yet developed. Overall nuclear wins only if you want a to build a power source 15 years from now, to deliver stably priced energy in a stable environment for the next 70 years.
But that's not what we want. We want power sources that can be built in 1 year, that and are priced for a lifetime of 20. We need technologies that can be deployed at a local scale and are immune to political disruption.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
Ain't nothing wrong with Dummit and Foote, but as usual you pay through the nose. (I'm too cheap to own D+F, but it was the text in grad school. Ash is 1/4 the price, and has some cool algorithmic style stuff.)
Lost_Geometer
21d ago
Could you share some details? From where I sit it's hard to estimate the land requirements for electrochemical storage because there is so little market for multi-day systems. In particular, long term storage should depend on available volume, not area.
Lost_Geometer
8mo ago
Judging just by the quotes I don't find the Destiny/Murphy example convincing. In particular it's not clear who's employing pretextual arguments (both?).
Murphy gives an example of an (alleged) harm that she claims accompanies the sex industry. Destiny responds by proposing a situation where the harm does not occur. But that does not address the argument against prostitution as a whole -- if the industry is necessarily accompanied by harm, you can be against it as a whole, and if you're against it as a whole then it's common to be against it in every case, if only because blanket rules are less corruptible than arbitrarily large decision trees. After all, almost every "unethical" behavior has some corner case where it's actually a good choice, does that invalidate the concept? Destiny's argument reminds me of politicians who talk endlessly about the advantages of clean coal, only to build more of the dirty kind.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
As far as I can tell the semi-strong EMH (the only one worth using) says that insofar as markets are zero sum games, they have no winning strategy for average players. This is the type of insight only an economist could consider insightful. You can sometimes "beat" the market when
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You're playing a different game - for example certain risk profiles are much more valuable to you relative to others.
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You have privately acquired information (either by circumstance or hard work)
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You're lucky
The market does sometimes generate what seem like blunderous mis-valuations, but they're hard to mine in advance.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
Many renewables, and some fossil fuels if you ignore fuel supply, satisfy those requirements. Pretty much everything meets them better than nuclear.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
I'm not convinced the evidence for superiority of phonics over all other methods is as strong as you suggest it is. Even if that was the case, however, that fact by itself would not necessarily imply anything about how schools should operate.
Here's where I'm coming from. When I was young I transferred from a nontraditional school with relaxed reading expectations to a more normal one, so I ended up going to a remedial reading program for a few months. I don't recall anything phonics based, though this was a while ago. Either way, as far as I recall, I was reasonably literate within a year. As in I was rapidly able to read anything I wanted, though of course subtle literary senses took longer. What I do remember quite vividly is hating English class for the next two years, because as often as not it was just hours of identifying sounds in words I could already read just fine, followed by homework of more of the same, all while I would rather just be reading a book.
Lost_Geometer
11d ago
As far as I've seen commercial storage targets shorter duration, less than a day, so I don't really have a source for how the duration scaling works. The limit is where the footprint is dictated by the storage of redox active material. Large tanks are a bit squat, but still contain enormous volumes reasonably compactly.
Lost_Geometer
3mo ago
I hardly ever have the resources to participate here, so one can rightly criticize for lack of standing. That said, as a regular lurker I'm pleased overall with the moderation -- it's the best I've seen.
On the topic of bans for longstanding posters, though, I agree that long duration (> 2d) bans should be reserved for those who act primarily in bad faith. I don't mind @HlynkaCG being sent to the kennel for a day, but I'd be sad to see him forced out.
Lost_Geometer
6mo ago
Damn, finally somewhere I belong.
Lost_Geometer
8mo ago
The alcohol example may be illuminating: note that the counterfactuals have different forms. In the alcohol case, the hypotheses apply to alcohol as a whole, whereas in the prostitution one they only apply to a specific worker. If I told you (a teetotaler) that my mate Paul drinks a fifth every day, has the liver of a man half his age, and actually drives better drunk, would that change your mind on the merits of drink? Now, I may well be imputing an argument that Murphy would not support and did not speak to. One can charitably assume that both speakers abbreviate the rigor of their arguments, and attempt to beat steelmen out of the plowshares (?) they provide.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
Exactly. It should be a very powerful argument, because preservation of life is a central social value. Like any powerful tool, it must be guarded against abuse.
Even killing someone, ordinarily one of the most forbidden actions available, is often accepted under such circumstances. But we attempt to prevent abuse by some combination of conditions that the threat be, for example, immanent, articulable, and clear to a reasonable person.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
People have fears disproportionate to actual threats all the time. For example, some people won't go to the beach because they're convinced sharks will eat them. And when they're reported to fear for their life when a wave breaks over their feet, we acknowledge that, but with a footnote that the fear is irrational, and sharks aren't really a danger of much magnitude in that situation.
There is an urgent societal need to (as much as possible) ground such feelings in reality, in part because mortal danger justifies a lot of otherwise forbidden behavior. One's dog phobia, for example, does not justify shooting your neighbor's pet when it barks.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
I think folks should recognize that a crowd trying to restrain someone will end badly a certain percentage of the time, regardless of whether neck restraints are used. Violence is random like that -- people don't die when they should, others die when they shouldn't. Some just drop dead from the stress. Add the extreme exhaustion of fighting for ones life, a person who would otherwise survive might not be able adjust their position to breathe adequately. Like with drowning, the death process and mechanism might not be obvious to observers.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
On a literal level, no -- the fossil record records things that have died in favorable circumstances, not things that have reproduced.
On the evolutionary level, 30_000_000_000_000_000 sterile social insects argue otherwise.
How is any of this relevant to the conversation?
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
Fair point. My hot take is that, of the spectrum of things called the EMH, the correct variations are obvious and the non-obvious variations are incorrect. I'm very happy to be educated to the contrary, however.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
Solar photovoltaic, for example, doesn't need international, state, or even regional stability to function, which nuclear does. Solar installations are trivial to build -- even the largest installation, Noor Abu Dhabi only took 23 months. Onshore wind is similar. Natural gas, AFAIK, has become very quick to construct, though the political coordination required extends across to the extraction area, as you say. The point isn't the precise details -- nothing's perfect -- but rather the huge difference in time and risk profiles with nuclear.
Lost_Geometer
11d ago
I do Python (and could use of job, if you want to get your forum-nepotism on). Python comes with a bunch of footguns, in that you can make the language behave unexpected ways by, for instance, executing arbitrary code at places like member or index accesses, have completely divergent function behavior depending on argument count and type, or change the behavior of existing objects (almost) arbitrarily at runtime. The art of Python programming is to use these features, with documentation, when appropriate but no more. These issues probably play out a bit differently depending on team and codebase size.
All the usual advice about factoring code into small pieces through narrow interfaces stands in any language.
Lost_Geometer
21d ago
Half of the year with the surpluses we could split corundum into al and oxidize, in the winter burn it as thermite.
Not having run the numbers I rather like this solution. We need aluminum anyway, so surplus production isn't as big an issue. Moreover Al is about as ideal a long term energy storage medium as exists -- it's abundant, extraordinarily energy dense by both weight and volume, and safe-ish to handle. Getting power out can likely use existing thermal technology on a large scale, and possibly electrochemical means on a small scale.
No. No reasonable person would be in that situation, and, "survivor" or not, it cheapens our discourse to tolerate such statements with not even gentle push-back.
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