MathWizard's profile

MathWizard formerly hh26 4hr ago

There are a class of cellular automata which follow some form of the rule "look at what your neighbors are doing, then copy the state that is most common among them". There are variations of this: sometimes the copying is probabilistic rather than deterministic so the most common is simply the most likely to be copied. If you attach some game theory or other fitness function you can get an evolutionary system where higher scoring traits are more likely to be copied and you can watch natural selection play out across the model.

What these tend to have in common is that under a broad range of parameters they eventually result in consensus. Even if all of the initial strategies are completely arbitrary, just numbered differently, you still by random chance have one of them end up more prevalent and then it snowballs out of control until it is universal or near-universal.

In the case of language, that would be useful. My point is not that the oldest form of language is the most correct. My point is more that the most common use is the most useful, unless some objective concern such as use efficiency or uniqueness can overcome that. Having minor dialectic enclaves within a language are burdensome and confusing. Therefore, the burden is on all new changes to prove themselves worthy of the cost of breaking consensus. If I lived in Chaucer's time and everyone said "axe", if that was just what that word meant, I would likewise oppose changing it to "ask" for no reason. But if 95% of people say "ask" and 5% of people say "axe" then, unless they've got a really good reason, it is useful to pressure them to conform and bring the language back together instead of splintering it, or trying to convert the remaining 95% their way.

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MathWizard formerly hh26 7hr ago

Redundancy: Axe already has a meaning. It's primarily a noun, a tool/weapon that chops things. It's only a verb when you mean hitting something with an axe, in which case it's very much not very friendly to axe someone. Any language change that overlaps other meanings receives a penalty. I suppose the contraction "it's" overlaps the possessive "its", and being able to tell the difference matters: it will almost always be clear whether you meant to ask something or hit someone with an axe, so this isn't a huge point against it, but it is a point.
Efficiency. "It's" is faster and easier to say than "it is". I very highly doubt that the legacy is actually people hearing, remembering, and pronouncing "it is" wrong, so much as being lazy and pronouncing it quickly. People who are entirely aware of what "it is" means might choose to say "it's" to save time. Meanwhile, "Axe" and "Ask" are approximately the same length to speak or write, and I think "axe" actually takes slightly more time/effort in the middle of a sentence because it doesn't flow as well. Nobody would ever use "axe" on purpose unless it's to fit in with other people who already do it by mistake.
Momentum. I am not an etymologist, I don't know exactly when/why/how "it's" became a thing, but by this point it is clearly established, while "axe" is not. Maybe it was a mistake at the time when "it's" became a thing and if people had resisted it then we could have less ambiguity about "its" (and might be allowed to use an apostrophe like we do with every other possessive). I'm not sure. But at this point it has been established and people understand it and use it. The primary purpose of language is to communicate with each other, consensus is incredibly useful in that regard, so all changes are immediately suspect and need to have positive reasons to justify themselves. If the majority of people said "axe" and some people started saying "ask" instead, I would oppose that on the same grounds.

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MathWizard formerly hh26 11hr ago

I think there's a few subcategories of of boundary pushers that play very different roles.

There are people who deliberately make up a new word, or adapt an existing word or phrase to a new use. Science in particular is a common example. These people need to be able to communicate their ideas, generally new ideas about things people have never thought of before so there isn't a word for it, so language has to change or their ideas can't be communicated, or would be communicated very inefficiently with entire phrases. Pushback is not really needed here unless they make some really stupid choices.

There are people who modify or use words to mean things as slang out of some combination of convenience, usefulness, and laziness. Kleenex does not mean the same thing as "tissue", "Coke" does not mean the same thing as "soda" or "pop", someone who is "cool" is not actually cold, something that is "hella lit" is not burning with the fires of hell. Basically every contraction ever is just a shorter faster way of saying two words that go together so frequently that you don't need to say the whole thing in order for someone to figure out what you meant. It's laziness, but it's efficient laziness. Here, I think, is where your explanation makes the most sense. Some people will advance such slang, some people will push back on it, and hopefully the good ones that serve their purpose well will survive while the dumber ones will fail to become popular and die.

Then there are people who just learn and use language incorrectly. "Let me axe you a question", "supposably", "could care less". There's a thing they're trying to say, it's language that already exists, they just heard it wrong or remembered it wrong or pronounced it wrong. Unlike the above case where the user is generally aware of what the old language was and chooses to use the knew language, people in this category are not usually doing it on purpose. It's just a mistake. We don't treat five year olds learning how to speak as guides and copy their language, we correct them and teach them how the language is actually used. Similarly, we don't treat people with the language skills of five year olds as guides and copy their language, we correct them and teach them how the language is actually used. The only reason prescriptivists might not be useful here is that adults are hard to teach, and your prescriptivism is likely to fall on deaf ears, but they're absolutely right to enforce to the extent that it is possible here.

If we're looking at things from a coarse scale then all the boundary pushers can push forward, and the prescriptivists push back, and then the more useful things get more people pushing forward and fewer people pushing back and survive, and both forces are useful. But if we zoom into these categories, the third category is not serving any purpose. Vanishingly few if any of their mistakes are actually useful language changes, in many cases they make things more confusing and ambiguous. Most of their mistakes are destined to die because nobody wants to copy them, and the few that do survive end up making the language worse and harder to understand for future generations. Granted, there isn't an unambiguous line at the boundary between deliberate slang and mistake slang, but there are examples that clearly fall into one or the other. Meaning a substantial portion of "boundary pushers" are just useless and the prescriptivists who oppose them are just right, even if the dynamic you point out is occurring at higher levels.

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MathWizard formerly hh26 3d ago

No more or less than the man who yells "Trump deserves to die" and then doesn't shoot at him is politically irrelevant rather than an extremist. I'm not a political activist, but neither are the vast majority of people, and yet all the voices do add up. An awful lot of activists and politicians and media are emboldened by the prevalence of people supporting them and saying the same thing. Rather than being one more of the millions of voices shouting "you're scum, you deserve to be killed" to their political opponents, I am one of the thousands shouting "No you. You are scum, you deserve to be shamed and mocked but not killed, not because of which side you're on but because you are an uncivilized thug who resorts to violence over words." If it were reversed, if there were millions of us and thousands of them, a lot less violence would happen because they would find less comfort and confidence and public support.

Activism is useless, and in many cases actively harmful, unless you're actually supporting the right cause. Even if my words turn out to be entirely useless because nobody listens to me, literal 0 is still higher than a negative number. And if I'm lucky then maybe my words and my sane representation of ideas that are usually misrepresented by insane extremists will help people realize that their political opponents aren't all nutjobs, even if some of them are, and be less violent and more forgiving as a result.

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MathWizard formerly hh26 7d ago

I have only seen a small number of these, but the fact that you dismissed the good ones with approximately the same level of disdain as you dismissed the bad ones makes me not trust your judgement on any of the ones I haven't seen.

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MathWizard formerly hh26 7d ago

But this would require skill and insider information and subjective analysis. Having a deterministic, mechanical process with known inputs that can process this data goes a long way towards preventing someone from corruptly picking and choosing which places they count as "high risk" and which they don't. And lowering variance, since some individuals are going to be better at doing this sort of subjective guesswork than others, while the AI can have its performance actually tested.

And goes a long way towards laundering this in the public perception. Even if everyone "knows" that this group is high risk, having an AI with testable metrics say so is probably going to be easier to sell (in the long run) than having human beings say so.

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MathWizard formerly hh26 10d ago

Centrists get high ground on this.

I've been consistently anti-violence, anti-terrorism, anti-riot, anti-extremism, etc, my entire life. Every gives centrists crap for not getting things done, but some things are better undone, and some better things would actually get done if it were possible to get more sane centrist candidates elected.

I have the high ground Anakin. Don't try it.

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MathWizard formerly hh26 10d ago

Hence the qualifier "some approximation of". The vast majority of Reds will end up on one side, the vast majority of Blues will end up on the other side, and exceptions to that will be exceptions rather than the rule.

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MathWizard formerly hh26 11d ago

Manually, we could make a weekly/monthly circlejerk thread where everybody upvotes every post that's made and new users can introduce themselves and everyone congratulates them and each other with infinite upvotes.

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MathWizard formerly hh26 12d ago

I felt the same way about 8.1 vs 10. But if I go to 10 I'm going to run into the same issue again in half the time.

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MathWizard formerly hh26 12d ago

What's the best way for me to upgrade to Windows 11?

I've had my current computer running Windows 8.1 for about 10 years. When Windows 10 came out a bunch of people complained about it and I was happy with what I had so I never upgraded. And no longer being forced to update my computer suddenly and without my permission was really convenient. I've upgraded the actual physical computer itself multiple times, basically ship of Theseusing out parts as they wore out or just got outdated such that at this point I don't think a single component is the same as it was 10 years ago, but when the hard drive got upgraded I cloned it over so I had continuity of experience, and it stayed on Windows 8.1. So most of the actual computer parts right now are two years old and mid to high end, but some are older and cheaper.

Gradually though, the amount of videogames that I can't play because they don't work on Windows 8.1 has increased and become rather inconvenient, so it's probably time to switch. Unfortunately, the time period where I can do that for free has long passed, presumably because they don't want people digging up old decrepit computers in order to recycle the windows keys. And some... nautical attempts at downloading and manually upgrading didn't work, I'm not entirely sure why, but I eventually gave up.

My computer skills are kind of mishmash hacked together by necessity. I did build my own computer myself, but only with a lot of googling, advice from my brother, and suffering. I would very much prefer not to have to learn more command line registry nonsense, but can probably follow step by step instructions if I have to. So I think my best bet is to just buy a new hard drive with Windows 11 installed on it, but I'm not sure. I don't actually want a new computer, I want my computer, but able to play modern games. I would like to keep continuity of experience as much as possible, including if possible all my files and folders, their positions on the desktop, my hundreds of Firefox tabs that I use in lieu of bookmarks. What's the best route for me to take to get my computer upgraded with as little difficulty as possible?

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MathWizard formerly hh26 15d ago

I don't think this is a very strong argument. Playing Devil's Advocate for the other side (who I strongly disagree with in principle), they could argue that the ethics are more easily solved by having better informed consent for the models and actors. If they want to use your image for an unsympathetic role, they need to advertise the position that way so the models and actors can make an informed decision. The fact that this will result in social ramifications means that such positions will have to pay extra in order to make up for it, and people who feel like the tradeoff is worth it can earn extra money in exchange for sacrificing their reputation, just as a sewer works earns extra money to compensate for the fact that it stinks and is unpleasant. Supply and Demand will handle the details for you, as long as people are informed.

I personally don't think that people have a right to jobs that can be automated, that's just strictly inferior to welfare. But if you did believe that, then replacing these jobs is potentially more damaging than average because they are (or ought to be) higher paying jobs than average.

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MathWizard formerly hh26 16d ago

You misunderstand. I'm not saying it's never okay to do that. If Omelas were literally the only solution then yeah, I'd probably be okay with that. I'm saying it's less than ideal. Suppose we have 1 homeless person simultaneously suffering from homelessness and whatever mental illness or anti-social personality is causing it (1 point) and inflicting suffering on 3 people (1 point each). And the following options:

Do literally nothing: Everyone suffers, (-4 points)
Pay to house the homeless person. They no long suffer, but they still harass everyone else, and it costs money (though less than the suffering of being homeless or else ordinary people wouldn't buy homes. So maybe (-3.5 points)
Exile the homeless person to another town. They suffer double, but the three people they were harassing are no longer harassed. BUT the new town has three new people for them to harass. (-5 points)
Exile the homeless person from all society and/or incarcerate them and/or execute them. They suffer.... I dunno, a lot, call it X. But the three other people are fine. (-X points)
Fix the homeless person's issues so they transform into a normal person. Let's suppose this is very difficult and expensive (-Y points). But everything else is resolved. They no longer suffer, the other people no longer suffer. (-Y points)

Your imagining of utilitarianism seems to be the claim that X < 3.5, that if we sacrifice homeless people via option 4 it's better than letting them inflict suffering on others. If option 5 did not exist, I might tentatively agree. 5 Does exist. I think Y < X < 3.5, and so Option 5 is ideal. Utilitarianism does not require sacrificing people to make other people happy, sometimes it just involves making everyone happy simultaneously. That's not always possible, but given that in this instance the very issue that is causing homeless people to inflict suffering on others (mental illnesses, addictions, and/or criminality) is the same thing inflicting suffering on themselves, solving that would get us both simultaneously.

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MathWizard formerly hh26 16d ago

I suppose if you have some sort of selfish or elitist morality system where only you and people like you matter. But even then, "helping" homeless people doesn't just mean reducing their suffering but also converting them into productive members of society.

As a utilitarian, I think all humans matter. Failure to own a home (which is a state that literally all humans are born into and only manage to avoid by having kind/competent parents or producing enough to earn money for a place to stay on their own) does not discredit one from being a human and having inherent worth as a human being.

Now, if the cost to help a drug-addicted violent person fuel their addiction is the blood sweat and tears of five other people who have to pay for it out of their wages and suffer from crimes, then yeah, that's not worth it. But if you can help fix their addiction, and their behavioral issues, and turn them into a functioning and contributing member of society, then you've done all that AND saved an entire person's life, and then they can go and help other people as a productive member of society.

That's a big if. But it's a big gain if done. I'm sure that some homeless people are irredeemable scum who can't be changed. I'm equally sure that some people with homes and lots of money are also irredeemable scum who cause more harm than good but do it sneakily enough not to get caught. Houses are correlated with being a good person, but not even close to perfectly.

An actual solution to homelessness means solving the root cause of the issue, be that mental, behavioral, cultural, economic, social, or some combination. And then they're not homeless in the first place and that solves their issues and the problems they cause for other people at the same time. Anything less is a bandaid. Maybe useful as a temporary patch, but not ideal.

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MathWizard formerly hh26 16d ago

I think the implication was that the "solution" actually solved their homelessness (ie housing them, finding them jobs, treating their mental illnesses) rather than solving the issue of them being unpleasant for locals, like kicking them out or throwing them in jail. It's not a real solution if you simply push them off to be someone else's problem, then you're just in a prisoner's dilemma where everyone does that to each other.

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MathWizard formerly hh26 17d ago

I suspect that something like this is true at least via indirect pressures. Gender dysphoria is based on feeling uncomfortable in one's body, gender and identity, so anything that increases this discomfort is likely to at least increase symptoms if not the actual neurological source (though might do that too), and anything that decreases this discomfort will decrease symptoms (and possibly the source).

So I can easily see it being the case that if you regularly have positive encounters with people of the opposite sex which are founded in part on them liking you for being your sex, this might make you more confident and comfortable with yourself as you are. If such things are completely lacking, if you're just kind of the same as all the people around you but a small number of women get tons of attention and praise and special opportunities because they are women, you might start to wish you were one of them because it seems nice. If everyone around you hates straight white men, and loves women and especially trans women, then that might make you feel uncomfortable with your identity as a straight white man and wish you weren't one.

Maybe, I've never had gender dysphoria, but I used to be single and alone. And then I fell in love and my relationship with my wife is founded on me being a man and her being a woman. As a result, I'm way more confident in myself and my masculinity than I used to be. I'm not an expert, but I strongly suspect that falling in love heterosexually could cause someone wavering on the border to happily settle into their birth sex rather than becoming trans, so a lack of opportunities to do so would change the frequency of that occurring.

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MathWizard formerly hh26 17d ago

Person B: No, X is not happening. X', a different thing, is happening, and X' is good.

I think what usually happens is Motte and Bailey shenanigans where this is the Motte, and the Bailey is split among "people who think X is happening are insane conspiracy theorists" and "X'' is good (where X'' is superficially distinct from X to enable this argument but similar enough that people would object to it for the exact same reasons)"

The sane reasonable people honestly endorse the Motte and have good arguments for why it makes sense, and then they side themselves with and defend the Bailey people who aren't actually endorsing the same principle, and the Bailey people obfuscate and point to whichever snippets of Motte argument made by other people support their current argument.

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MathWizard formerly hh26 24d ago

Gloomhaven. It's a high quality adaptation of a board game with a persistent campaign that lets you level your adventurers, buy new loot, and unlock new stuff between missions. You both will need your own copy, but it's on sale for $13.50, which even when doubled is way cheaper than the physical board game. And the computer handling setup, monster behavior, and deck shuffling makes it a lot more convenient to play. My wife and I have 250 hours in it together, and I credit it for a significant portion of our relationship progress during the years we were dating long distance.

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MathWizard formerly hh26 28d ago

You can vote for literally anyone you want to. At least, anyone who meets the legal requirements to be eligible for office. The constitution does not formally acknowledge the existence of political parties at all, they're not part of the official legal process. All the political parties do is provide a Schelling point so that all the people with similar ideas can coordinate votes instead of wasting them splitting among a bunch of candidates in a first-past-the-post election.

Now, informally this is an incredibly powerful tool that has become a de-facto necessary component of the election. But the political party is legally allowed to do whatever it wants, and if the voters don't like that they can try to figure out a different way to coordinate on a different Schelling point to vote for.

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