@MathWizard's banner p

MathWizard

Good things are good

0 followers   follows 0 users  
joined 2022 September 04 21:33:01 UTC 

				
User ID: 164


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
MathWizard


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Good things are good

				
				
				

				

					0 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					joined 2022 September 04 21:33:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
No bio...

				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 164


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
‎

			

				
				

					Hour
					Day
					Week
					Month
					Year
					
				

			


			
‎

			

	
	

	 Hot Bump Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
	



		

	






	

		
		

		
		
	

	

  







		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I'd argue the defining line is that you know exactly who the KKK are and how they are likely to react.




They don't know every single individual member of the KKK, they're still casting mistrust into the void, it's just a smaller void. If they speak in the public streets of a town with 10% KKK membership is that suddenly acceptable? Is it 1%? I'd argue the KKK meeting is a more egregious example in degree, but not in kind. We live in a society where you know mentally ill schooler shooter wannabes are a non-negligible fraction of the population and how they are likely to react. They want the fame and martyrdom that the media implicitly promises them, and if it didn't give them that attention then most of them wouldn't bother. Nobody was surprised that there have been multiple assassination attempts at Trump. This was expected behavior. I argue that, for a subset of the media, bloggers etc, this was literally intended behavior. That they deliberately incited anger and hatred in the public with the hope that it would inspire literal violence against Trump. And that most of these people did not meet the legal requirements for "incitement to violence" and got in no legal trouble and kept their jobs.




I think a relatively good and objective bar is the line between simply publicly wishing bad things on your enemies and specifically trying to convince someone to commit criminal acts.




For legal purposes that is the best we can do. For moral purposes the bar is much much further into ambiguous territory.


I want you to imagine, for a moment, an ideal stochastic terrorist. A person (or AI agent) who has two main goals:


    

  1. Maximize the probability that violence occurs against target X
    2. 

  2. Do not meet the legal definition of incitement to violence.
    3. 



That is, stochastic terrorism is literally their goal and intended behavior, not an accidental side effect. What sorts of behaviors would you expect this person to engage in? What sorts of words would they use? How does this compare to prominent left-wing media and blog posters in the real world? And more importantly, is this behavior morally good? Are you actually unironically arguing that this hypothetical ideal stochastic terrorist has done nothing wrong because they avoided breaking the law? Or are you arguing that they don't exist and every single person inspiring violence in the real world is doing it accidentally (and that this makes it perfectly acceptable)? I disagree with both of those, but I'm not sure how to focus my arguments because I'm not really sure where you're coming from.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Let's suppose the year is 1880, and someone who is not a member goes to a KKK meeting and tells them all about how their black neighbor is a rapist. They have no proof or evidence, they just make up a story about it and get everyone riled up. They do not literally advocate for violence, but they went there on purpose and told this story on purpose in this location to these people.


Some of the members, but not the storyteller, go and lynch the accused man.


Is the storyteller merely guilty of slander, equal to anyone else who makes any false rape accusation? Are going to the KKK and telling them in particular this story neutral acts which do not change the moral culpability of the action? Because that seems decidedly non-consequentialist. I agree with Scott that we can't really outlaw stochastic terrorism because it's too easily confused with regular criticism to avoid false positives.


But nobody is ever going to apologize for accidentally committing stochastic terrorism because it is almost by definition not an accident. It's primarily a crime of intent. If someone literally wants to someone to die but wants to skirt around legal prohibitions against inciting violence then all they have to do is carefully moderate their words to just fall short of the boundary and phrase them in a way that wink wink, nudge nudge everyone they're talking to knows mean "please commit violence". Adding "in minecraft" after wishing death on someone does not fool anyone that you literally mean you hope their character dies while playing minecraft but the person lives. Celebrating after someone gets assassinated is not consistent with an ordinary person who didn't realize their words might inspire a psychopath. If the death of the person is an intended outcome of the speech, a feature not a bug, then the people who encouraged it are morally guilty of stochastic terrorism, even if the law can't pin them down.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
All are saved if they repent their sins and seek forgiveness and salvation through Jesus Christ. As prerequisites this requires


    

  1. A basic understand/belief of Jesus, including his Divinity, Sacrifice, and offer of Forgiveness.
    2. 

  2. A basic understanding of sins., including what they are, why they're bad, and why you specifically are a sinner.
    3. 



Any distorted version of Christianity which teaches "Jesus was a wise human Prophet" or "You only have to apologize for sins that you personally agree are bad" is unlikely to result in salvation. There is some debate about exactly how strict the requirements for salvation are, but making up your own rules because you think you know better than God is not what they mean by "repentance".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is clearly and obviously not intended as a threat. This is their attempt to signal "we're paying attention to your concerns and are going to try to take them into account while we go forward".


The ad is not actually answering the questions, because they don't have answers. They're not explicitly saying "we are going to solve these problems", but they're definitely not saying "we don't care about these problems. They are implying they are going to solve the problems without making any explicit claims or promises. It's ultimately a hollow attempt at placating anti-AI concerns, but there is no reasonable way to interpret it as a "threat". It's just empty corporate "we care" slop.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My wife and I met online about 7 years ago, which came after 5 years of my trying online dating on and off because I lack the social awareness to avoid being awkward and/or creepy, but am self-aware/self-conscious enough about it to avoid hitting on anyone unless I am unambiguously allowed to (ie, online dating).


We have never officially gone out on "a date", in terms of going out and sitting down at a restaurant or movie and having it be a thing. Both of us are introverts, both of us are frugal, and we lived 3.5 hours away by car, so didn't meet in person for quite some time. We spent several weeks chatting, and then did video calls, and then found some co-op games to play on Steam together. I half-ironically credit the foundation of our relationship to Gloomhaven for being a fantastic game with a ~200 hour campaign. We did eventually meet up in person, but it was 4 months after we had been talking and playing games together and she sent me the address to her apartment and I drove the 3.5 hours there. She's not going to not show up: she lives there.


But this came when I finally met someone who actually liked me and wanted to interact with me, and someone I thought was actually worth spending time with and stepping out of my introvert shell for, after years and hundreds of failed conversations prior to that.


So... I'm not quite sure what advice to give other than "get lucky". If you go through a few hundred stupid people you'll eventually encounter some in the top 1% in terms of mutual likability (you like them more than other people like them, and they like you more than other people like you). But my other advice, which may vary in actionability depending on your hobbies and preferences, is to try to enable yourself to filter out the stupid people with less effort than setting up a date and getting stood up at it. Find someone who is fun to talk to and do things together with online. Write poems, tell stories, get to know each other. Do all the things you're supposed to do on a first date on the internet by typing on a keyboard, and drop anyone who isn't both interesting and interested in you. Maybe even do a video call as your "first date". This is going to massively filter out a lot of people who might be turned off by this sort of dynamic. I consider that a good thing, because I didn't want someone who wasn't interesting and interested in talking to me, and good with words (and spelling and grammar). But if this isn't the kind of person/experience you're looking for then my only advice is to try to figure out other ways to minimize your cost per person. Because it is a numbers game and you are going to have to go through a lot of people before you find someone actually good.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The reason I'm decidedly centrist is because the extremists on both sides keep identifying valid problems in society and then trying to destroy everything and cause ten more problems just to fix that one. And then utterly denying that the problems the other side identifies even exist or are worth worrying about. If we're clever and we tweak the incentives properly so that people can't enrich themselves by exploiting loopholes in the system, the system can function better and solve these problems. We should accurately assess problems. We should fix problems. We should not destroy society in the hopes that maybe it might fix one particular problem to the exclusion of all others.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


we will see "scientific" "studies" with the headline finding that self-driving cars actually get into more accidents than human-driven cars per mile driven (and then you dig into it and you find that the severity of the accidents in the former case is vastly lower than in the latter)




100% this, and the way they measure this will be the number of incident reports available in some database, where self-driving cars automatically and electronically send a report every time they bump someone even if there is no visible damage, including someone opening their car door into another car parked next to the, while human driven cars only count if there is a police report or insurance claim.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I would call it a non-consensual hookup. Less bad than an average rape, but still kind of rape. If you've had sex with someone several times and like them, and aren't opposed to having sex with them in general but just don't want to at the moment, you're way less likely to get violent with them than if a stranger attacks and tries to rape you.


I don't know what your marriage/SO situation is, but consider a time when you weren't in the mood for sex (maybe you're trying to get to sleep because you have to get up early the next morning, maybe you literally just had sex, maybe you're over at someone's house going to the bathroom). If your SO corners you, drunk, and tries to have sex with you despite it not being the right time or place, you're not going to stab them with sewing needles to get them to stop. I expect you'd use significantly less violence to make them stop and be much less likely to call the police on them afterwards when they're sober even if you do give them a stern talking to.


Now, in terms of the reasons rape is bad, in particular the physical and psychological trauma, this is way way less bad than a normal rape. But it's still bad, and not the same as a "hookup I regret". The hookup I regret is when the man did nothing wrong and the woman retroactively tries to change the morality of the action. If it wasn't wrong when he did it because he followed all of the rules, then it's not wrong. But if he's not following the rules, if he is forcing himself on someone who does not want it and unambiguously makes it clear that they do not want it, then he is doing something wrong. He is a bad person. Less bad than a central example of a rapist, but somewhere in the same ballpark, regardless of what word you use to describe it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for July 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
One of the big problems with dating apps is that they succeed when somebody stops using them, which makes them really hard to monetize. Honestly I think the best hope we have is for someone rich like Elon Musk or Bill Gates to donate a ton of money to a non-profit that just focuses on making a good app for relationships with no monetization so that it doesn't have any perverse incentives. Maybe have a donation link and encourage people who end up happily married to donate to show their appreciation, but otherwise just make a good product for the good of society and accept that doing the right thing is going to lose money.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for July 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The reputation and rating system is supposed to handle this, because if you try to scam people and 90% of them figure out what you're doing then they rate you horribly and you fall into troll/spam/bot hell and the sales people end up pairing with each other. But I guess there are risks of


A: Naive people who are sympathetic to salespeople and don't rate them horribly might end up getting paired with them more often, which is precisely their target audience. and
B: If people just make a new account they get paired with other people who made new accounts and it might end up making the default neutral reputation landscape equivalent to the troll/spam/bot hell, with only high reputation people being able to avoid it.


But it's not like I haven't thought of this. One of the main points of the reputation system is to prevent misbehavior in a similar way to how social networks do that in real life.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for July 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Every time I see a smart person come up with an idea of how to make a better dating app, what they're really describing is how to create a dating app that will only appeal to other like-minded smart people.




Yeah, and? Smart people like dating and are likely to want to date other like-minded smart people. If the normies with no attention span don't use it then that's just another filtering mechanism to weed them out.




If I want to have a conversation with a random person I might not see again, I'll go to a bar like a normal person, thank you very much.




Sounds like effort. I think you're overestimating the length of survey: like 1-3 numbers you rate on a scale from 1 to 10. People like upvoting people on Reddit, it doesn't need to be much more than that. I'm talking like numbers for an algorithm to dump into a mathematical function, not comments that a human is going to read.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for July 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I had an idea for a social media app involving an actual social network, with reputation effects and stuff.


This started as me trying to figure out how to solve online dating. Because it's garbage, random people just pop up and say whatever they want and then are jerks and ghost people. Nobody trusts anybody, nobody is well-behaved. And to a large extent this is a problem in modern dating as a whole. In the past, people lived in smaller communities and you didn't just start dating some random stranger who none of your friends knew. Well, people sometimes did, but it was frowned upon. Anyone being a creep or making false promises permanently ruined their reputation, and the reputations of their friends who vouched for them.


So I was thinking of ways to try to adapt this into an online dating platform, where people would chat with each other and then give ratings which would build reputation. Even if you ultimately don't want to date someone, you could still say "this person is polite and kind, and didn't ask for bobs and vagene after one message" and then the app would match people based on similar profile interests AND reputation levels. So all the good people would only see each other and all the bots and trolls would only see each other, making a better experience for good-faith participants.


Then I started thinking about how people could game and exploit this, and bad-faith ratings could tank people who did nothing wrong, and also only interacting with people of the opposite sex would skew ratings while realistically you also want same-sex recommendations (a woman who is not sexually attracted to but trusts the judgement of these five men should pay attention to a man that all five of them also like). And if people are political then everyone of the same politics will like them more but people of the opposite politics will like them less, but you could maybe filter this into bubbles dynamically. And in fact, maybe it's a good thing if you enhance and enable filter bubbles where similar people pair up together. And in fact you could even build entire makeshift communities this way. And you could actually encourage trying to game the system... And the idea continued to evolve.




THE SOCIAL NETWORK APP


We start with something like a cross between omegle and a pen pal app. You fill out a profile of interests somewhat similar to a dating profile, but more focused on topics that would be interesting to talk about rather than dating specifics. Each day, you get paired with a random person, with weights towards your interests but still allowing some variance. You chat with them for the day, and then at the end of the day you're unmatched, and you rate each other on a couple of axes. How much you liked them and why. And the algorithm takes that into account. And you get xp for more chats and getting a better reputation score. You can see how you were rated but it's too late because you're unmatched and will likely never talk to them again.


And the algorithm weights it to pair you more with people who are similar to people you like. And people who people you like, like. And it can try to set these up on purpose. Maybe day one it pairs A-B and C-D, day two it pairs A-C, B-D, then it has information about their pairwise compatibility. If A liked B and/or C, and they liked D, then it knows A is more likely to like D (and vice versa). And it can do anti-pairings. If A hated B and B hated D, then maybe A and D can bond over the shared experience (maybe the app even tells them that they both hated B as a conversation starter). It can do the thing where people of generally high reputation pair together, but also locally cluster by doing math on an actual social network.


Then we can add more features to make it less volatile. Like when you level up you unlock a week slot. At the end of the day, in addition to rating them you can vote to upgrade them, and if both of you do this then you are penpals for a whole week and can talk longer. But you've only got one of these slots so you can't just do this to everyone, you have to prioritize, and get longer deeper engagements. And maybe if you level up more you get a couple of these slots. And then maybe the app occasionally re-matches you with someone you liked in the past and you can talk about what's happened since you last talked (if you remember them). Balancing the desire for novelty with the ability to build deeper connections. But the idea being that, unlike a forum like Reddit or themotte where people just kind of drop in and out of conversation threads when they get bored, you have a clear finite 1-1 communication to get to know someone, and then rate them and exploit big data towards building reputations and social networks and stuff.


I dunno, maybe I'm just a math nerd who likes the math part of socializing more than actually socializing. I don't know if this would actually appeal to normal people. I just thought it was a cool idea.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The left was ultimately correct. ACAB.




The left was ultimately wrong because the first A stands for "All". Not all cops are bastards: some of them are some of them are not. The way to increase good behavior is to incentivize it, which can't be done if you just throw universal qualifiers "all" or "none" and then make demands based on these assumptions. We should not de-fund all police, we should de-fund corrupt police and replace them with better ones. We should have body cams and impartial audits and clear rules for how they should behave and then give them immunity if and only if they followed the rules, and not give them immunity when they don't.


But yeah, I mostly agree with your conclusions. If you live in an anarcho-tyranny where the police are more likely to side with criminals than victims, then ordinary people will be incentivized to form and join gangs for mutual protection and avoid police intervention. First and foremost people want to be safe, and once they realize the system isn't doing that they're going to create alternatives.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That's a lot less catchy than the original. Good memes are focused and pointed. Long-winded lists of grievances are why the left can't meme.


This event is definitely meme-able, but it would need to be something unique to this incident and not just lumped in with the rape stuff.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm Pennsylvanian. My parents, and my grandparents, and my great grandparents, and (most of) my great great grandparents were all born and raised in Pennsylvania. We do things like deer hunting, going to Firehall Weddings, doing the Chicken Dance, treating our neighbors with respect and kindness, and going to sane Christian churches that actually follow Jesus' teachings and focus on being good people instead of angry moralist hypocrites. If you work hard and take care of the people around you, they'll take care of you in turn.


I don't care whatsoever what "ethnicity" someone is, I care about their culture and their values and their behaviors. I'm not automatically opposed to any and all immigration, but it needs to be very limited and controlled so that the burden is on them to integrate into the culture and communities they move to rather than the other way around. If you LIKE Amerca, and want to BE American, and want to come join us and learn how to be like us, and put forth a good faith effort towards that then I will accept you and allow you to do that. I have had friends and neighbors of many ethnicities who have done this, or their parents or grandparents had done this, and they were Americans. If two people from a foreign country like America and want to be American and legally come here and have children who are born in America and raised in America and their parents do the thing where they mostly forget about their old culture and language and raise the child as American, then I will happily accept that child as an American.


What I have a problem with is exploiters. People who want free welfare and healthcare and education, so they come here and have foreign children who they raise as foreigners with foreign values living on our soil but with American rights. People who have no intention or desire to contribute to taxes and just want to take take take. People who come here for jobs to send money back home to their families and then leave but snatched a free citizenship for their children in case they ever decide to come back. People like Hasan Piker who was born in the U.S. then immediately brought back to Turkey where he was raised as a Turkish Muslim, whose feelings and nationalism and loyalty are to Turkey and the Turkish people, who then comes back to the U.S. and pretends to be one of us while trying to undermine us.


I have a problem with people who hate America and the American people while trying to extract our resources and export them to their home countries where their hearts and loyalties truly lie.


People respond to incentives. I'm like 80% on board with the general idea of birthright citizenship. If someone is born and raised in America, with the cultural values and loyalty to America, then by all rights they are American. But if you take it to the extremes, where a South American defector who does not respect their home community nor ours, abandons their people, violates our laws, hops the border, and then births a baby on our soil in order to get them citizenship on a technicality, this is a BAD incentive. That baby is not an American, it belongs to the country that its parents belong to. There is no sense in which the parents or the baby are loyal to or culturally American. They should all go back home, as soon as possible. I don't care what ethnicity they are. The problem is not that they don't look like me, the problem is that they do not act like me, and when conflict arises they will not feel an innate desire to protect me or stand up for me, because they don't consider themselves true Americans either.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for June 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yes, that too. Both contribute, but I think the majority of the effect we're seeing is the first order effect of the selection bias itself more than the second order creation that you're describing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for June 26, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think it's less about the incentives to create this content, but more about the incentives to signal boost it. If 1000 people make genuine and authentic content, then the 1% most positive is going to make Americans happy and they'll all comment/like/subscribe and then the algorithms spread it so that's what gets seen. You'll see 10 really positive videos and 0 lackluster, unimpressed, and disappointed ones.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The country IS the people, not the land. Land is a resource. You're essentially saying that you want to destroy me, my people, and my culture so that someone else can have my stuff. That is pretty antagonistic and make you unambiguously my enemy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That's an incredibly motivated reading which would not be used in the vast majority of other contexts. If someone wants a vegetable soup but asks you to exclude red, orange, purple vegetables, you're not going to toss in some carrots and tell them that they weren't crazy stripey polka-dotted carrots with red and purple on them. It's clear what they meant.


The text does not use the word AND, it's just a list of three things and then says "all other classes are included", meaning that these three classes are not. There are not logical operators being applied here. I suppose an OR could be implied, but I don't think mathematical logic was developed or widespread enough for them to speak that way (since there's often ambiguity between OR and XOR). Just listing the three traits which are excluded, and then saying "all other classes are included" is pretty clear.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But it would be really really hard for them to agree on an actual amendment. Somehow you would need to get 3/4 of congress to agree to one specifically worded amendment when all of them are going to have very strong opinions in opposite directions. I suppose the threat of random people having nukes would motivate people to compromise, but it still wouldn't be easy, and whoever was the most radical and stubborn about refusing to budge would get more of their way by making others compromise towards them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Things I had been able to do before, now I couldn't do because "only boys do that/you're a young lady now" and no adequate, so far as I could see, reason for that.




Horseshoe theory is real. Both the extreme left and the extreme right believe in rigid gender roles. These activities, interests, and traits are MALE, these activities, interests and traits are FEMALE. If you do the first you are MALE. If you do the second you are FEMALE. If you like both then you are BOTH/NEITHER/WEIRD.


The main difference is that the the extreme right demands your activities, interests, and traits change to fit your gender, while the extreme left demands your gender change to fit your personality. The reason so many people go from radically right households to become radical leftists is because you don't have to change your structure of how gender roles ought to work, just whether it's possible/good to change sides. There's less inferential distance to get from one extreme to the other than there is to become a moderate who believes in letting people be themselves without getting all obsessed about Identities.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I suspect that the fact that they have deliberately left out features which they are currently going through FDA approval for is going to show enough deference to and stroke the ego of the FDA enough to keep them mollified for the time being. It's possible that if the FDA rejects their submission for AI diagnosis tools it might also retroactively restrict the whole thing, but I think it's more likely they allow the partial use because it validates their authority.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I am not an expert in law, but my guess would be that if it doesn't do anything medical, and it doesn't diagnose anything medical then it probably doesn't trip any medical laws. It takes pictures. It's just a very fancy way of taking pictures inside your body, but not in a potentially damaging way like an X-Ray that has to be used for medical purposes in order to justify the risks.




We’re starting by just giving you detailed body composition maps — and we’ll be submitting regular test results to the FDA for increased capabilities.




Seems like that's their understanding too. If they want the AI to actually look through the photos and make medical conclusions based on them they need FDA approval (which they are working on getting). But if it's literally just taking images and giving them to you then it's just a really high tech camera.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for June 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Okay that's a good point. The only viewing them 25% of the time adds some probabilistic volatility to things, but on average if someone gets away with 75% of their infractions then penalties ought to be four times as harsh to compensate, and at that point if they get harsh enough to guarantee someone last place you might as well just DQ them. It's not an ideal system, but it seems reasonable given the monitoring constraints.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for June 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I feel like in a PvP setting the issues would be vastly worse. Being in a squad of 6 people and your teammates just stomp the enemies and carry you is kind of dissatisfying as you get rewards that it doesn't feel like you earned, but you still get the rewards. Getting killed by someone way stronger than you and you lose everything feels way worse, which is why most PvP games avoid strong meta-progression this way and only have small upgrades or let you get through them quickly and max out so the game can be balanced around a maxed out meta.