MartianNight
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User ID: 1244
MartianNight
2mo ago
See also this thread in the culture war roundup by @SaltCheck.
That picture shows Buck next to Laverne Cox
Yes, but he's still the smallest of the five people, smaller even than the only other female. The point is: most transmen aren't that masculine, even not the ones hand-picked by trans-advocates, not to mention obvious women like Elliot Page.
Anyway, I didn't want to get caught up in discussing individual cases. I'll grant you that some well-passing transmen exist, but I think they're the minority. My argument more broadly is:
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The average transman doesn't truly pass a man, and the average transwoman doesn't truly pass as a woman (arguably less so). So the argument that swapping transmen and transwomen is worse for women because now they suddenly share the bathroom with many more male-looking people isn't true: at best you're replacing male-looking men with male-looking women, which is sort of a wash.
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But the more important argument is that regardless of visual passing, transmen are much less likely to harrass or assault women than transwomen are. That's why it's better for ciswomen to share the bathroom with transmen than with transwomen.
I don't think enumerating exceptions to the rule invalidates this argument.
How are you supposed to enforce sex-segregated bathrooms anyhow?
I often wonder if people raising this question are disingenous. It's phrased as if the idea of sex-segregated spaces is a crazy far-out utopian idea, like universal basic income. In reality, all bathrooms in approximately the entire world worked like this throughout the entire 20th century, using the same mechanisms used to enforce most norms: through a mix of social contral and legal consequences.
Did you see the video of the Wi Spa where a male pervert enters the women-only section of the spa, so one of the women there goes to complain, and the employee at the desk can't do anything about it because in California it's illegal to kick male creeps out of women's spaces, and the only male patron who weighs in on the matter says "How can we know if the fully grown man with a penis isn't a woman?"
In the 90s, this scenario literally would not have happened. If a convicted sex offender entered a woman-only nude space with his dick out, all women present would scream at the top of their lungs for the pervert to get out. Employees would rush in to demand that the offender leave. Men would gather angrily at the door, ready to help escort the man out of the building, but careful enough not to trespass themselves. If necessary, the police would be called to take the man into custody.
Moreover, everyone knew that this is what happened to men who violated this social norm. That's why this type of crime was actually relatively rare.
Should you pepper spray anyone who you think doesn’t belong, like what happened to this tall biological female thinking they were in the presence of a biological male?
No, of course. But first, I don't see how putting transwomen in women's bathrooms solves this problem, since a woman that is willing to pepperspray a masculine looking woman will obviously do the same thing to your average non-passing transwoman.
Second, I think some of this paranoia is actually fueled by genderism. In the past, if you saw a masculine-looking person entering the women's bathroom, you'd assume it was just a masculine-looking woman, because who else would someone use the woman's bathroom? Today, you can no longer assume that because males entering women's spaces is stunning and brave, actually. This puts gender nonconforming women under suspicion in a way they wouldn't be in a society that strictly enforces sex-segregated spaces.
Third and finally, let me explain how this sort of situation should be handled. If you're a woman who sees a man enter the woman's room, you first say “Excuse me sir, this is the woman's bathroom?” In 90% of the cases, he will look shocked and say “Oh, my mistake! I must have entered the wrong door” and leave. If it's actually a woman, then she'll say “Excuse me, but I am a woman!” In the case of someone like Rain Dove you can tell from her voice that she is speaking the truth, so you say “Oh, my mistake!” and that's the end of it. Now imagine you don't believe her because the "woman" is actually Karen White wearing a bad wig who couldn't pass for female in his wildest dreams.
Then you escalate the situation by finding a person responsible for the space, e.g. a security card in a public mall, the bartender, the office manager, etc.. You tell them there is a man in the woman's bathroom. They join you and ask the perpetrator to identify themselves. If they refuse, they are again asked to leave, and if they refuse, the cops are called.
All of this depends on government-issued ID to accurately label a person's biological sex. In the current world, all western countries have removed this label. This should be reverted. My (actually serious!) proposal is to list biological sex and socially desired sex separately, so we can still be polite by addressing transwomen as Ms So-and-so while separating them from women where sex matters.
The sources I’ve looked up show no link between gender inclusive bathroom policies and crime rates, but if you have any that contradict that, feel free to share.
I don't think there are sources that can show this. Not in the current world where:
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Transwomen are a tiny majority, so even if they are significantly more likely to misbehave in bathrooms, you would need a lot of data to show that. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (actually it is, but only to a small degree, hard to get to p<0.05 that way). And that's before accounting for confounders. If a creepy male starts using the women's room and women stop going there, does that show he's not causing any problems?
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You can't use crime statistics because the police is not even allowed to accurately register the biological sex of trans offenders, so while we could collect this information in a systematic way, gender activists ensure this doesn't happen (you might wonder why gender activists oppose this if they believe the results would be favorable to their cause?)
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Academia is heavily politicized and genderism is one of those topics you are not allowed to objectively research. As a result, we cannot use academic sources to prove or disprove anything.
In short, I don't think you've seen compelling evidence that disproves the claim that transwomen are more dangerous to women than women (and transmen) are. I think you've seen a paper that said something like "we compared the number of reported incidents in inclusive bathrooms at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, populated entirely by highly-paid academics who value their jobs, with the numbers from the non-inclusive bathrooms at a Texas truck stop, and we didn't control for the myriad confounding variables that make that comparison meaningless, but we are going to conclude anyway that The Science™ shows inclusive bathrooms benefit women".
If you think I'm wrong, please cite the actual source you are thinking of. I'm sure I can poke one or more holes in it along the above lines.
On a meta-note: I feel a ton of this discussion about transgenderism is getting repetitive. I'm seriously considering putting together a document with the most common arguments pro and con, so instead of spending way too much time poorly reconstructing the same counterarguments, I can just say “you are using argument 69a, please see rebuttals 23a through c.”
It would save me a lot of time but I'm not sure if it would actually change anyone's mind.
MartianNight
4mo ago
If your worry is that seeing male-looking people go into the women's room will make life more dangerous for women
Let me stop you right there. It was never about male-looking people. It was always about males. It just so happens that being male-looking is a pretty good proxy for being male in the real world (despite what the trans lobby wants you to think).
The rationale is that many more males abuse women and girls than females do. Therefore, women and girls are safer in the presence of other females then they are in the presence of males. If you disagree with this fairly obvious statistic, what do you think women-only spaces are for?
Also, you know, the whole claim is mistaken to begin with, because: if trans people must use the bathroom of their birth gender, then Buck Angel has to use the women's room.
Why do people who want to scare women with pictures of trans-identified females always go for the photoshopped ones, and not for a more realistic one that shows that Buck Angel is actually pretty tiny and nonthreatening compared to her male counterparts?
Moving away from anecdotes, I think it's important to realize that for every masculine-looking trans-identified female, there are probably three trans-identified males that are absolutely deranged, like Karen White, Darren Merager, or Michael Pentillä. Would I rather have women share a bathroom with a female porn star, or with a male serial killer and unrepentant rapist of women and young girls, you ask? Wow, what a dilemma you put in front of me! I just don't know how to choose!
No seriously, obviously it's the female porn star. If it were up to me, I'd put a hundred Buck Angels in women's bathrooms before I'd let a single Michael Pentillä in. It seems the obvious choice, if you want to optimize for women's safety rather than maximizing the euphoria of rapist serial killers. Was that really supposed to be some sort of gotcha?
MartianNight
4mo ago
Day 8 is a bit of a bad example, the general solution is the chinese remainder problem which isn't much harder anyway.
Have you tried to solve the general problem yourself? It's absolutely much harder than the version contestants had to solve.
First, the Chinese remainder theorem is genuinely a lot harder than simply calculating the least common multiple. Second, the problem statement allows much more complicated input than that. For example, the problem statement allows loops with multiple end states; I don't even know how you'd deal with that efficiently, I doubt you know on the top off your head, and I certainly wouldn't fault ChatGPT for not knowing it either.
If you post your code I can probably come up with a test case that breaks it.
How could other humans learn how to construct those solutions? They read the same textbooks that are in the training set of ChatGPT (a miniscule fraction of them) and they understand their contents.
No, that's absolutely not how humans learn to code. Or at least it's not how I learned or anyone I know that's good at solving AoC style problems learned to solve them. Reading textbooks is the absolute minimum time investment. The majority of time is spent thinking about the problem, writing code, noticing it doesn't work, trying to find a flaw by reading through it, stepping through the execution with a debugger, or maybe adding printf() statements to get insight in the internal state, and so on.
It's a very interactive process. But the intermediate code, with all the printf() statements for debugging, isn't something that usually gets committed. That's why ChatGPT doesn't know to debug code that way. It has never even seen someone do this. It might have heard about printf() debugging from Wikipedia but it has never done it itself, or if it did (because of user requests), it keeps no memory of it.
You can also look at this as a question of whether ChatGPT Plus is worth it in general: it did better than straight API calls but I spent 2$ of API calls vs 20$ for plus, it isn't 10 times better.
I don't think this comparison makes sense. You're treating it as a comparison of efficiency: as if Model A is solving problems at a rate of X/day and Model B at a rate of 2X/day, so Model B is only twice as valuable as Model A. But that's not what's happening: Model B is solving problems that apparently Model A cannot solve at all. If Einstein can prove only 1% more theorems than the average physics major, does that mean he should be paid only 1% more?
MartianNight
4mo ago
It's likely that I misunderstood something; I'm not very familiar with the various offerings. I was going by OP's own admission that they didn't pay for the top model and their version was only able to solve 7 (sub)problems vs 13(ish) for “Chat GPT Plus” which seemed to imply that the latter is a stronger problem solver.
MartianNight
4mo ago
Nice writeup. Unfortunately not a lot of discussion yet so let me add some random comments:
And since all of the problems are novel the solutions can't come from overfitting.
Depends on what you call “novel”. A lot of the problems are based on well-known algorithms like path finding, Josephus problems, etc. And there is quite a bit of repetition of concepts between years as well. So I think LLMs and humans alike benefit from being having the previous problems in their data set.
There is also something that makes Advent of Code relatively harder for LLMs (and new competitors): on some days, the stated problem is generally much harder than the actual input file. In that case, careful inspection of the input data is required to figure out what the problem is actually asking, which I assume ChatGPT has no way of doing or even asking for.
(This year's Day 8 was an example of this, but this has happened pretty much every year.)
ChatGPT never did this: its debugging skills are completely non-existent. If it encounters an error it will simply rewrite entire functions, or more often the entire program, from scratch.
True, and it's consistent with it being a language model. It mostly sees completed code snippets (of varying quality) written by humans. How could it know how humans construct solutions like this?
It's probably the same reason why ChatGPT does so poorly at writing longform fiction. It has no idea how to construct an overarching narrative because the planning, rewriting and editing necessary is invisible to ChatGPT; it only sees the finished output.
I think coding assistants (like GitHub Copilot) will be able to fill this gap by observing how humans actually develop code.
Difficulty is very hard to gauge objectively. There's scatter plots for leaderboard fill-up time but time-to-complete isn't necessarily equivalent difficulty and the difference between this year and last year isn't big anyway (note: the scatter plots aren't to scale unfortunately).
True, and I agree with your subjective assessment that the problems aren't any harder this year, but I'd add also that the leaderboard is not really representative of the overall participant base. People on the leaderboard are the top 1% of all solvers (let alone participants), and they have their own specific strengths and weaknesses. For example, a problem that requires dynamic programming is easy for them (but hard for most casual programmers), while the top 1% still need more time on problems that require lots of of careful reading, convoluted input parsing, tricky edge cases, etc.
I don't pay for ChatGPT Plus, I only have a paid API key so I used instead a command line client, chatgpt-cli and manually ran the output programs.
Please explain the logic here because this is baffling to me. You were willing to invest the time to solve every single AoC problem this year with ChatGPT and you wrote up this summary of it, which together must have taken hours, but you couldn't fork over the $20 needed for a month-long pro subscription, which would make your results an order of magnitude more interesting? How do you value your time such that this makes sense?
MartianNight
4mo ago
(not really because... well you know)
Speak plainly please.
only Christianity is targeted. Would Atheists ever put up depictions of Muhammad (peace be upon him)?
That's just not true. Maybe in America, where Muslims make up a tiny minority of the population, but in Europe Islam is often criticized and even ridiculed, mostly by atheists. What did you think caused the assassination of Theo van Gogh, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the bombing of the Danish embassy in Pakistan, the attack on the Swedish embassy in Iraq, the 2023 terrorist attacks in Belgium, Türkiye soft-blocking Sweden's ascension to NATO, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.?
MartianNight
5mo ago
I will likely continue to provide updates here until the chips have fallen.
Keep in mind that the previous formation period lasted over nine months. There probably won't be exciting news every week.
MartianNight
5mo ago
These results aren't terribly surprising
I disagree. The enormous victory of Wilders far-right PVV was completely unexpected. A week ago he was not even in the top 3. One day before the election only one poll suggested PVV was tied with VVD for the lead. Now he has a projected 12 seat lead over the labour/green party in second place (37 vs 25, or a 50% lead!) with VVD demoted to third place (24 seats). This is was quite unexpected based on polls and unprecedented for the party itself.
It also has a huge effect on possible coalitions. In my comment two weeks ago I didn't even talk about PVV because I expected them to be ruled out. Now, it seems like including PVV is unavoidable.
In terms of coalition building, it's worth mentioning that there is huge discrepancy between representation in the house (after these elections) and in the senate, partially because Omtzigt's new NSC party has no seats in the senate yet. This means any majority in the house will likely not have a majority in the senate. While technically the government only needs majority support in the house, not having majority support in the senate it is problematic for parties that want to pass radical reforms, since they can't count on automatic support in the senate.
The challenge for Wilders now is not just to form a government, but to actually deliver on his promises. He has gained a lot of popular support with populist rhetoric, and even if not all of it was taken seriously by his voters (like his "head rag tax" which would require Muslim women to purchase a license to wear a head scarf in public), it's clear that voters expect some radical changes from him. If he doesn't manage to move the needle then it seems likely he will lose support from the voters who counted on him to make a real change (the comparison with Donald Trump seems apt).
Ironically, it seems like some of Wilders economically left-wing plans (e.g., lowering the age of retirement, abolishing the deductible on health care insurance) are actually more feasible in that they have broader support and don't contravene national and international law. It would be deeply ironic if a “far right” politician ends up implementing these left-wing policies, when the more moderate VVD probably wouldn't.
From a culture war perspective, it's amusing to see how poorly the left is taking the loss. The main stream media report on the event with a tone that suggests the election results are incredibly disappointing, rather than a legitimate expression of the people's will that is to be celebrated.
In Utrecht (the 4th largest city with a mostly left-leaning population) Antifa organized protests against the election results. First of all, protesting election results seems quite undemocratic. It's easy to compare this to the January 6th protests that the American left condemned, but in this case, protesters aren't even claiming the results are invalid, just that the results are bad, because people voted for the wrong guy. I don't want to overemphasize the scale of these projects though; it seems like only a few thousand people showed up. Still, people protesting election results is not common in the Netherlands.
It's also interesting that those protesters are shouting pro-Palestine slogans. It makes sense since Wilders is a staunch Israel supporter, which fits well with his anti-Islam stance, though he didn't campaign on this topic at all. It's kind of crazy to me that the far-right is now considered to be aligned with Israel, while the far-left opposes Israel, while a few decades ago “far right” was virtually synonymous with “antisemite” and therefore anti-Israel. We live in strange times.
MartianNight
5mo ago
This sounds unsurprising so I'm willing to assume it's broadly correct, but if you're going to cite specific statistics like “5 years after conviction, 14% of offenders have been charged with or convicted of a new sexual offense” could you please explicitly cite the sources behind your claims?
Numbers that are so specific must come from one specific source. There is no way that there are multiple independent sources that investigated this and they all agreed the number was exactly 14%, not 13% or 15%.
MartianNight
6mo ago
For people unfamiliar with Dutch politics, it might be interesting to compare these polls with the political compass (the horizontal axis denotes economic left/right policy, vertical axis socially progressive/conservative policy).
(For the logos: the butterfly represents the Animal Rights Party (PvdD), the seagul Geert Wilders' Freedom Party (PVV), and the Greek building Thierry Baudet's Forum for Democracy (FvD)).
The current elections are interesting because a large number of party leaders stepped down before the elections and have been replaced with “fresh” faces. Meanwhile, the political landscape has not shifted all that much.
As you mentioned, the historically important Christian Democrat party, which was in decline for a while, has now been almost completely replaced by two new parties: New Social Contract (NSC) lead by Pieter Omtzigt (himself a former Christian Democrat) and the Farmer Citizen Movement (BBB) lead by political outsider Caroline van der Plas (whose party was at one time leading in the polls, but has gradually declined almost to insignificance for reasons that aren't quite clear to me).
Meanwhile, the Labour party (PvdA) and Green party (GL) have merged into a single moderately progressive/leftwing party (uninspiringly named PvdA/GL) lead by former Labour-party Foreign Affairs Minister and European Commissioner Frans Timmermans.
The key to understanding current Dutch politics lies with the VVD, the quintessential (neo)liberal party that supports globalism, open borders, low taxes, minimal environmental protections and less regulations for businesses. Their voters consist mainly of the “haves“ in society: wealthy people, high earners, business owners, home owners, pensioners; people who are happy with their lives, do not favor income or wealth distribution, and do not feel especially threatened by globalization or immigration.
The VVD has been part of the government for the past 13 years. The main reason for this is that despite being economically right-wing, they are quite flexible when it comes to social issues, which has allowed the party to form coalitions both with conservative Christians and with progressive liberal parties.
In terms of coalition building, based on the current polls, there is an obvious three-party coalition of PvdA/GL + NSC + VVD. While these parties cover a broad part of the spectrum, the combination isn't as far-fetched as it might seem: PvdA and VVD have governed together in the not-too-distant past (two cabinets between 1994 and 2002). Adding a third party would seem to complicate things, but on paper, Omtzigt's NSC is ideologically somewhere in between the two, so it feels like it should be possible to include them as well, though much depends on how flexible Omtzigt turns out to be: if Omtzigt insists on social conservatism, and the VVD insists on economic rightwing policy, then together they have nothing to offer PvdA/GL: the VVD's past success has hinged on yielding progressive topics to their left-wing coalition partner to secure the economic right-wing policy they really care about.
It's worth noting that historically, a coalition between PvdA and VVD has hurt PvdA much more than VVD. So it's unclear if they will dare to go for it again this time.
No other coalition seems immediately viable. It's probably best to wait for the election to see where the chips fall.
MartianNight
6mo ago
Switzerland
The Swiss federal elections occurred last Sunday. The biggest winner was the largest nationalist/populist Swiss People's Party (SVP/UDC), which rose from 53 to 62 seats out of 200 (a 17% gain). The losers were the Greens and Green Liberals, who went from a combined 44 to 33 seats (a 25% loss). The other left wing parties remained stable (the second-largest Socialist Party gained 2 seats, but the small Labour Party lost 2).
Apart from this shift to the right, in the center, the neo-liberal FDP (think: free market capitalism with gay rights and open borders) lost seats to the conservative Christian center party literally called “The Middle”. Overall, this election strikes me as a loss for liberal left and a win for the conservative right.
None of this directly affects the composition of the federal government, due to various quirks of the Swiss political system, but it's interesting to see that even in relatively conservative Switzerland, the European trend towards rightwing nationalism is clearly visible, despite the fact that Switzerland is objectively less affected by the factors that plague most other European countries, like influx of African/Middle Eastern refugees, rise in crime, and inflation.
Election results: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/elections-2023--projected-results/48897354
Objective discussion of the results: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/eight-takeaways-from-the-2023-federal-elections-in-switzerland/48915304
The commentary from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, arguably the most reputable newspaper of record in the country, and politically aligned with the neo-liberal center-right, strikes me as extremely salty. Archive link in German, but I'll copy/paste the Google translation (Google translate doesn't seem to work well with archive.is):
Citizens want more protection and more government - difficult times are approaching for liberals: wars, crises, high health insurance premiums. Parties that promise security won on Sunday - even if it is a false one.
The great shadow that has fallen on the world has also reached Switzerland. The war in Ukraine, inflation, geopolitical instability, refugee movements and the brutal attack on Israel are reflected in the voting results. People long for security, order and a strong state.
The Swiss People's Party promised security and won. It took her a long time to focus on the right topic. The SVP strategists tried city and country, neutrality and “gender gaga” – nothing worked. Only when they radically focused the election campaign on the issues of immigration and asylum policy did success become apparent. The first voter surveys already showed that the SVP was the only party that would make significant gains. The fact that she shamelessly mixed up the immigration of qualified specialists with asylum migration, that she scandalized a “Switzerland of ten million” as well as “foreign crime” did her no harm. On the contrary: with a voter share of almost 29 percent, it achieved the second-best result in its history.
And another party benefited on Sunday from the fact that citizens have different concerns than they did four years ago. The Social Democrats had already noticed during the pandemic that they had more success with concrete material demands than with post-material zeitgeist issues. Instead of gender equality, the SP increasingly focused on the issue of loss of purchasing power. It calls for lower rents, cheaper health insurance premiums, higher pensions, reduced daycare rates and promises simple solutions: “speculators” and the state should pay.
This calculation also worked out. While social democracy in Europe is in decline almost everywhere, the SP was able to make slight gains again. It's not much, and the gain is probably largely due to dissatisfied former voters of the Greens, but the SP is also benefiting from the trend of these elections: parties that addressed specific concerns and promised the population solutions were able to increase their share of voters .
This tendency is also clearly visible in the results from the center. Their mobilization strategy, enriched with all sorts of social-populist demands, failed. The party promises fair taxes and falling health insurance costs without explaining how such additional spending will be financed. And here too, the promise of concrete solutions worked its magic. The center only won slightly, but it won - and not only that. It achieved what had been apparent since the fall of the CS [Credit Suisse, a large Swiss bank that collapsed earlier this year]: it caught up with the liberals.
No impact on the composition of the Federal Council is expected any time soon, but elections have consequences. With two almost equally strong parties in the political center, the magic formula is coming under pressure. It states that the three largest parties should each hold two seats in the state government, while the fourth largest is entitled to one seat. But what if the third and fourth strongest parties are practically the same strength?
Under party president Thierry Burkart, the FDP [liberals] wanted to overtake the SP [socialist party], but nothing came of it. The party even lost a few tenths of a percentage point compared to 2019. In times of crisis, liberalism finds it difficult to assert itself against calls for state intervention and more law and order. The belief in free borders and free markets has suffered in recent months. This is evident in the immigration debate, in the asylum debate and in the discussion about how to deal with the defunct CS. The state also had to intervene when the big bank was taken over by competitors; the market alone couldn't fix it.
The FDP was able to more or less maintain its share of the vote, but the competition from the center and the dominance of the SVP hit the party hard. In the aftermath of the elections, party president Thierry Burkart will have to answer some critical questions: Did the party focus on the right issues and was it a match for the political parties in terms of campaigning?
Because something else has been shown in this election campaign: those who polarize win. This applies not only to the SVP and the SP, but also to the center. Gerhard Pfister copied a lot from Christoph Blocher and invented a third pole party.
The real losers in these elections, however, are the eco-parties. Although climate change remains one of the population's biggest concerns, the two parties apparently do not have the confidence to develop concrete solutions. Voters have determined that the Energy Strategy 2050 has failed. Progress in climate protection can only be achieved if compromises are sought across party lines and if green dogmas such as the ban on nuclear power plants are abandoned.
The gains of the SVP and the losses of the Greens are causing the party political majority in the National Council to move more to the right again. However, that does not automatically mean more bourgeois politics. Liberalism is emerging from these elections weakened, and personal responsibility counts less than ever. The world is burning and there is great uncertainty: parties that demand something from citizens are not in demand. Those who promise security win. Even if it's a wrong one.
MartianNight
7mo ago
I'm starting to think you're trolling me, but in the interest of assuming good faith, I'll say for the third and final time: the question isn't whether he had the intent to set off the fire alarm but whether he set off the fire alarm with the intent to stop the vote.
The obviousness of it being a fire alarm speaks to intent
It only speaks to an intent to set off the fire alarm, not an intent to disrupt an official proceeding. The question is: why did he set off the fire alarm? Three options:
- He mistook the fire alarm for a door release button.
- He thought triggering the fire alarm would allow him to open the door, so he could get to the Capitol building in time for the vote.
- He thought triggering the fire alarm would cause an evacuation of the Capitol building which would mean the vote would be postponed.
You can say the obviousness of the fire alarm makes option 1 unlikely (and I mostly agree) but it does not prove option 3 over 2.
As to the rest of your post, the real issue here is that only the left receives this much charity from the legal system and the mainstream media.
Yes, that's a problem, but that doesn't prove the intent of Bowman.
Maybe it makes sense for the Republicans to assume the worst because when it came to the January 6th protesters the Democrats assumed the worst, but here on this forum we are not active participants in the culture war, we're only discussing it. I think the Jan 6 protesters were judged much too harshly, but I'm also willing to entertain the notion that Bowman is just a dumbass who was in a rush (option 2), rather than a man intent on undermining American democracy (option 3).
MartianNight
7mo ago
You can also see the fire alarm in that image. It's bright red and says "FIRE".
The discussion isn't about whether or not he set off the fire alarm (he clearly did) but whether he did it with the intent to prevent/delay the vote on the funding bill happening in the nearby Capitol building. That's not so clear.
Maybe Bowman will eventually admit something along the lines of “I set off the fire alarm because I was in a rush to leave the building” which is pretty bad (and probably against some law or other) but it's an order of magnitude better than “I set off the fire alarm because I wanted to stop congress from voting on a bill”, which makes him guilty of a felony that carries up to 20 years in prison as a penalty.
I read somewhere (I don't remember where), that the motive could have been to buy time to actually read the bill. Which, honestly, is a great motive.
For Bowman this doesn't strike me as a great reason to risk 20 years imprisonment, which honestly makes me think it's more likely the “I was in a hurry to leave the building” excuse is genuine.
The claim “I didn’t realize a fire alarm would set off an alarm” is pretty weak.
That's not what he said. He said: “I was trying to get to a door. I thought the alarm would open the door, and I pulled the fire alarm to open the door by accident.”
That's also questionable (if you pulled the alarm because you thought that would open the door then you didn't do it by accident) but the point is: he doesn't deny intentionally triggering the fire alarm, but he claims his intent was to open the door, not to prevent the vote. And that seems at least possible. On twitter I saw this image of the location with a sign that reads:
EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY
PUSH UNTIL ALARM SOUNDS (3 seconds)
DOOR WILL UNLOCK IN 30 SECONDS
(But note that in the still of Bowman pulling the alarm that sign seems to be missing! Which maybe explains why he pulled the fire alarm lever on the wall instead of pushing the exit bars as the instructions by the door suggest.)
This does make it sound like you can open the door by setting of the fire alarm (which also makes logical sense), though it's pretty clear you're only supposed to do that in case of an emergency. Maybe Bowman thought that the alarm would be local and he could just shut it off after opening the door, or maybe he knew the building would be evacuated but thought nobody would know he was the one that triggered the alarm. Either way, it doesn't show that he pulled the alarm in order to delay the vote happening at the Capitol.
The evidence against an intentional action is this:
- The building that was evacuated was the Canon Hill building across the street, not the Capitol building where the vote occurred. If he wanted to prevent a vote wouldn't it make more sense to pull the alarm in the Capitol building itself?
- The bill was passed with near-unanimous Democrat support, including from Bowman. Not to mention that Democrats have absolutely no interest in a government shutdown with a Democratic president in charge. Why would a Democratic congressman want to obstruct the voting on a bill he is in favor of?
MartianNight
7mo ago
You've conveniently left out the 1 word that could exonerate Bowman. The relevant text is this:
Whoever corruptly [..] obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so [..]
So the law does not apply to Bowman if he can make a convincing case it was an innocent mistake (which is of course exactly what he is now claiming). It makes sense that the law is qualified this way, otherwise a janitor accidentally triggering the fire alarm could go to jail for 20 years.
MartianNight
8mo ago
The problem with your reframing however, is that fighting typically implies killing others, even if you are not at risk of getting killed yourself. So if you are a humanitarian, even if you "win", you lose. In other words, the correct choice is obvious only if you don't care about other people's lives.
Imagine a different version where an enemy army is about to attack your village, intending to kill all who stand in its way, but leaving others unharmed. But the enemy isn't reckless. If the village fields a large enough army in its defense, the attack will be too risky, and the enemy will call it off. In that case, the status quo is maintained without any bloodshed.
In that case, just like in the original scenario, it would make sense for you to join the defense if all of the following hold:
- You believe some people will choose to fight regardless of the odds.
- You care enough about those people to risk your own life to help save theirs.
- You believe it's likely your army will reach the critical size necessary to avoid bloodshed.
The rest is just squabbling about probabilities: how much of a risk would you be willing to assume for a chance to save someone else's life?
(By the way, I always hate it when people declare their own point of view as obvious. Even if you are right, you aren't obviously right. And before you say “well, it might not be obvious to a dunce like you, but it's obvious to me, a very intelligent person!”: in my experience there is little correlation between people who declare themselves to be highly intelligent and who are able to demonstrate their intelligence. For example, there are plenty of people who, at least at first, insist that in the Monty Hall problem it's “obviously” pointless to switch.)
MartianNight
8mo ago
The point is that to a utilitarian rationalist who optimizes for expected utility, the mechanism shouldn't matter, only the (expected) outcome.
MartianNight
8mo ago
I wonder how much the choice of colors affected people's choices. Blue is the color of American Democrats. Red is the color of American Republicans. Most Twitter users are aligned with the American Democrats so they are biased towards "voting blue”.
The red pill is also a term that is also associated with the anti-feminist manosphere, which puts off the pro-feminist Twitter majority. Those people wouldn't want to be on record taking the red pill on any topic!
MartianNight
9mo ago
I don't think that's nearly as subversive as you suggest, since Yudkowsky ends up endorsing the orthodox libfem belief that the central example of a transgender person is a male body with a female brain in the skull (a view that is, as far as I'm aware, completely unscientific):
But if brains were not sexually typed, brains born into the wrong bodies wouldn't be in such awful straits - they could just construct a gender that matched their body. Yes, there are androgynous men and women, bisexuals, people who go transgender for other reasons... But to deny that many brains are strongly sexually typed is to deny the very real problems of a male brain born into a female body or vice versa.
MartianNight
9mo ago
a double-blinded study would actually provide evidence for the efficacy of magical healing in those times
Why would magical healing prove more effective than a placebo in a double blind study, where, by definition, neither the doctor nor the patient knows whether the patient receives the “real” treatment or a placebo?
MartianNight
10mo ago
This will never be allowed.
Do you remember the guy who modded the Spider-Man game to change LGBTQ+ rainbow flags into American flags (the game is set in New York City) and got his account banned for homophobia for daring to touch the sacred pride flag? That's right: users who bought and paid for the video game are not allowed to change the flag in the game they play on their own computer!
Also, did you know there is another mod for the same game that changes all the American flags in the game into LGTBQ+ flags, and this is perfectly allowed?
Given that, why do you think your augmented reality glasses (courtesy of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or another ESG-compliant mega-corp) would allow you to remove the mandatory pride colors from the bench, you fucking bigot?
MartianNight
10mo ago
Your use of the word "luddite" suggests that you have a negative emotional valence towards the Actors' Guild strike.
It's unfortunate that Luddite has a negative connotation, but it seems useful to have a term to refer to people who are concerned about AI taking their jobs, to the point that they're willing to go on strike to enact a ban on AI. Can you suggest a more neutral term you would prefer?
MartianNight
10mo ago
It's not that crazy, considering that the US already had a full blown Twitter addict as a President.
If he steps down for health reasons, he proves his critics right, and I think he is just too proud to admit he is no longer fit for the job.
Also you have to wonder what drives career politicians like Joe Biden. He has spent most of his life in politics. The office of president is the culmination of his career. I think it's plausible that he would much rather die in office as the most powerful man in the world, than spend his final years comfortably in a beach house while being politically irrelevant.
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