MathWizard
formerly hh26
No bio...
User ID: 164
MathWizard
formerly hh26
13d ago
It reads like a joke that someone forgot the punchline to and butchered the delivery. Would have been much better if they had figured out how to get it in the correct order.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
13d ago
Precisely. The government's one and only legitimate role in this would be to mandate that it has to be labeled correctly and can't be falsely advertised as ordinary meat. Other than that, they need to stay out of it and let the people make up their own minds on what they choose to purchase.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
12d ago
It is material in-so-far as it modifies their branding/camouflage, tactics, targets, methodology.
It's not "just" corruption. A cop explicitly asking for bribes in America is going to get fired and prosecuted instantly. There are a lot of things cops can and do get away with, but explicit bribery is not usually on the list, with rare exceptions. But if they camouflage it, it's more possible and likely. Call it "asset forfeiture", make excuses for why it doesn't count as theft, and then target poor people with drugs that don't evoke sympathy from the public. It's still a form of corruption, but it's a very different form of corruption than the DMV official demanding an extra $100 to expedite your paperwork or it will get lost for 6 months, or a police officer pulling you over and threatening to write you a ticket for made-up charge unless you slip them $50. Just using the word "corruption" doesn't tell you the difference, or orders of magnitude, about what to expect to have to pay and how to avoid it.
Similarly, woke progressives are not going to pull over your car and extort $50 from you, nor will they arrest someone with marijuana and snatch all their money. They worm their way into industries and beurocracies and government agencies, then hire friends and family and like-minded people who look and act and speak like them, fire people who don't, and divert funds away from productive uses and towards spreading more woke-ism and getting cushy jobs for themselves and their friends. And they use nice-sounding ideals as a cudgel to choose who to attack and who to let go. I agree that this is a form of corruption, but it's a very different form of corruption than most other forms. And it's very very very good at masking the corrupt parts of itself and pretending to be good, and thus skates by unnoticed and in fact praised by so many people.
Calling it "corruption" is not wrong, but there's so much nuance it misses.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
22d ago
Small-scale shower thought, since I don't want to wait until Sunday
You do realize that you're allowed to post in the existing thread, right? It still exists, it doesn't expire on Monday, it expires next Sunday when the next thread comes out.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
13d ago
"Destroy your opponent before they can destroy you" does not at all sound like the "reasonable answer". Especially since this won't literally destroy them, they'll still exist and be even more ravenous to seize the reins of power. It seems like the actually reasonable answer is to de-escalate and decrease the power and influence of the government so people can make their own choices about their own personal lives.
I don't even get why there are "sides". I don't care whether the meat I eat comes from a "farm" or a "lab", I just care whether it's cheap, tasty, and nutritious. Let them both try their best and we can judge them and eat them according to our own preferences. I'm on team freedom, and that means nobody gets shut down pointlessly just to "own" the other side.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
16d ago
It's unclear what he'll use as a replacement for it in the likely event that Trump sits there next year
Does he need a replacement? If Trump stays on the same side, at least with respect to the culture war, then there won't be anything he does that Texas would feel the need to nullify. Any overreaches of Presidential authority that Trump makes will probably be in favor of the right and against the left. At which point left-leaning states may try to pull the same stunt using these incidents as inspiration/justification. But as far as Texas is concerned they'll probably just cheer on whatever he does as something they were doing anyway or would like to do.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
13d ago
I don't think anyone has meaningfully decreased the power of the government in decades. Maybe a couple overreaching laws here or there got repealed, but plenty more came along, and the government just keeps doing whatever it wants with whatever justification they can make up ad hoc to justify the thing they already decided to do.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
13d ago
That's almost a prisoner's dilemma, but I suppose technically counts as Chicken. You're doing a (very slightly) negative sum interaction in order to siphon zero sum rewards away from other people. Nash equilibrium, everyone does this and ends up worse off than if they just respected the queue. (Although I suppose queues themselves are a bit of a prisoner's dilemma with respect to arrival time)
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
It's one or the other, no in-between.
....no? It's definitely in between. He is a nice guy who genuinely believes in the value of his service, and has seen it genuinely help people, and has rationally concluded that valuable services are worth large amounts of money, and good advertising and optics help you sell more of them.
This is no different than a top class chef charging $100 for meals at a high class restaurant instead of working at a soup kitchen. You would not describe such a person as "the nicest kindest chef", it's not a charity, but neither is it merely a scam.
High value product for high cost = fair
High value product for low cost = kind
Low value product for high cost = scam
Low value product for low cost = fair
Whether it genuinely is a high value product, I have no idea. But I believe that he genuinely believes in it, and wouldn't offer it if he didn't believe it was valuable, in a way unlike Andrew Tate or other scammers.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
The actual mathematical definition of a tautology is a logical statement which is always true. As opposed to a conditional statement which has some free variables and might be true or false depending on the inputs of those variables. It need not be "obviously" or "trivially" true: any mathematical theorem, if packaged together with its axioms and assumptions, is technically a tautology because it's always true.
In the context of science then, a tautology is a theory which is always true, not requiring conditional variables from the real world. Natural selection of some sort is true in every conceivable universe or system with reproducing and mutating life-forms. I think this makes it more profound as a theory, rather than less.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
Because the test wasn't supposed to be painful, and if he did show his pain, that would be interpreted as an intentional clinical sign by the examinees, who not having access to the script, would then promptly jump to the wrong diagnosis and thus immediately fail the station.
Is that a bad outcome? If the examinees are conducting the test incorrectly such that it caused pain, and then jumping to incorrect conclusions as a result, that is something that will lead to incorrect conclusions when done in the real world on real patients, and deserves to be flunked.
Unless what you mean is that the test "officially" doesn't cause pain despite frequently causing pain in practice even when done correctly, such that the students are not to blame for the inevitable mis-diagnosis because the expected exam answers are flawed.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
20d ago
Seems like this depends entirely on what aesthetic the game is aiming for. Would The Matrix have been a better film if it were in the style of a Miyazaki film? Or as an animated version of a Leonardo da Vinci painting? From a certain perspective you might consider the Mona Lisa to be "better art" than The Matrix, but being real people with some minor CGI added worked for what it was going for and made a fantastic film.
We're not there yet, but if we can reach the point where hyper-realistic faces in games can actually be mistaken for real actors, there's a huge range of applications where it would actually be useful and better than a stylized game character because it fits the aesthetic the game intends, even if such situations are the minority.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
I read a comment on Reddit by someone who talked about posting Flat Earth stuff as a creative writing exercise. You get to think up clever arguments and find loopholes when arguing against people who are objectively correct, and not worry about getting your ego hurt if you're proven wrong because you're not actually taking it seriously. I browsed the Flat Earth sub for a bit after that and tried to figure out who was serious and who wasn't, though with no way to test that I have no idea how successful I was.
I think the main issue I'd have with actually participating is the propensity to delude naive and mentally ill people into joining unironically. The more people who are involved and having fun and aren't lunatics, the more legitimate the movement seems. Although on the other hand it's a relatively harmless conspiracy for people to believe, so maybe it helps steal thunder away from more dangerous conspiracies that mentally ill people might fall into, so maybe it's useful, I dunno.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
2mo ago
In fact, before this controversy, the main thing gamers were complaining about was in-game transactions.
Maybe it's just because lean right in my media consumption, but I've heard a lot of complaints about woke nonsense in videogames. Horizon Zero Dawn made the main character way less attractive, The Last of Us killed off the main guy from the first game in a disrespectful way. GTA 6 looks like a woke disaster. And of course I've seen quite a few games with the weird lefty art-style that indicate them as obviously woke that nobody ever plays or cares about because they aren't beloved franchises (though I don't think it's reasonable to complain about these. If woke people want to form their own IP and let people freely choose to play or not play, good for them, as long as they aren't co-opting non-woke franchises and destroying them)
I don't know that Sweet Baby Inc was involved in the games I mentioned. The Sweet Baby Inc Detected only has 16 reviews and those aren't any of them, so either they're not thorough, or something else is involved. But some sort of woke force has been going around corrupting games just like it has in comics and movies, and people have been complaining about it for the last decade. Not as much as they complain about in-game transactions, because it is less prevalent, but it's been there.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
It's Easter. People talk about Jesus. Most of his life occurred in the Roman Empire.
This is the main reason why I find the question rather silly. The Roman Empire could have accomplished absolutely nothing of note other than been where Jesus lived and the prevalence of Christianity in the West alone would make it reasonable to think about them in passing at least once a day.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
2mo ago
An important distinction needs to be made between the film "Starship Troopers" and the novel "Starship Troopers" that it's inspired-by/parodying. Given that the director did not actually read the novel, absolute despised fascism, and set about parodying and mocking the original story, they are clearly distinct stories in a way that most adaptations are not.
I'm assuming /u/bearmarket is referring to the film, whose main character "John Rico" is white. But if so, this undercuts his actual point, since this is a parody attempting to demonstrate how this white imperialism is BAD, not celebrating it.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
Nope. Controversial opinion here, I think coffee is a flavor not a real beverage. I absolutely love coffee-flavored desserts, ice cream, mocha, stuff like that. The only time I'll drink actual coffee is if it's in a super-sweet latte or something, with more milk and sugar than actual coffee. Essentially a warm coffee-flavored milkshake.
Or, if I'm trying to be responsible and not drink a meal's worth of calories in a cup, I'll just drink water.
I just don't get proper coffee just brewed in water with nothing or very little else. I don't think it tastes good, it's like stirring spoonfuls of cinnamon or nutmeg into your water. They taste good when combined with the right stuff, but not by themselves.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
29d ago
My guess, extrapolating from my own similar albeit weaker feelings, is that it's something along the lines of corruption of virtue. Taking what should be positive qualities and wasting them or subverting them. Similar to a beautiful delicious barbecued pig falling into the dirt and feeding the flies and germs instead of a person. Turning from something nourishing and healthy to people into something that only feeds rot and disease.
That is, kindness has the potential to do good things and have value and make the world a better place. But misplaced kindness that rewards bad behavior will incentivize them and make them more prevalent. The vast majority of toxic behaviors we see in society are there not because the people who do them are stupid people who can't figure out how to be kind, but because they have been systematically rewarded for those behaviors in some way or another. Being toxic works, at least on some level for some people. To the extent that toxic behaviors are analogous to disease, systematically feeding them with misplaced kindness is comparable to someone going out and feeding expensive high quality meat to a wild rat colony, or a beautiful woman allowing mosquitoes and hookworms to feast on her blood. Not only are they wasting something good, but they are actively allowing badness to reproduce for everyone else to have to deal with. It's disgusting.
I feel less scorn and revulsion for people who do this accidentally than I would for someone doing this on purpose. And less for people doing this on a social level than with literal diseases. But it's still gross in a similar way.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
26d ago
In the original construction, you win if you choose the absolute best partner, you lose if you do not, so the 75th percentile is a guaranteed loss, no different from the bottom 1 percentile. You only want to maximize the probability of getting the actual best, so it has to be better than anything you've seen so far or there's no chance and no point settling.
However, you are right that in this modified version trying to maximize utility this no longer applies, and a proper optimal strategy should probably be a function f(n,d) describing what percentile you're willing to settle on as a function of what time step it is (n) and what your estimate of the distribution is (d), depending on what you've seen so far and your meta knowledge.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
26d ago
It seems to me like the best way to model this would be to have some multiplicative scaling factor on utility that diminishes over time, since 50 years of your life with the second best suitor is (probably) going to be better than spending 20 years of your life with the best suitor. Perhaps a linear decay to simulate amount of lifespan remaining, so the utility of choosing the nth suitor is their actual quality multiplied by (1-0.01n). Or maybe weight it more towards the beginning to account for youth and childbearing years, like (0.99)^n or something.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
I would consider a "scammer" to be someone who deliberately tricks people into overpaying for a service above what value they would actually acquire from it. In a normal rational capitalist transaction, both the seller and consumer gain utility by transfering a good which the consumer values more highly than the seller does, for some price in between the two subjective valuations of that good. A non-scam seller genuinely helps their consumers while enriching themselves because the consumers value the good more highly than the price paid. A scam is when the seller deceives the consumer into over-valuing the good to the point that they pay a price higher than the actual value they receive once the good is obtained. Importantly, this involves actual deception: someone who unknowingly sells something to customers is like someone who unknowingly tells you false facts that they believe: they're wrong, but they're not a "liar".
I'll be honest, while I've watched a reasonable amount of Dr K. I'm not very familiar with Andrew Tate directly. Everything I know about him is third-hand, so I wouldn't place bets on my belief that he's an actual scammer, it's mostly based on vibes. His advice is largely selfish and unconcerned with helping other people as long as you maximize your own well-being at the expense of others, which is entirely self-consistent with maximizing his own well-being at the expense of others. It would be not at all hypocritical for him to scam his audience. I think. Again, I've mostly heard about him third-hand, so I could be wrong here. I'm much more confident that Dr K is not knowingly scamming others, at least in the form of deliberately deceiving or overcharging them, based on his general personality and genuineness. I believe that he believes that his customers will benefit from his services at a value higher than the cost. I don't know if that's true or not, but even if false I wouldn't consider it a "scam", in the same way that I don't believe $100 restaurants are worth the price to non-millionaires, but still aren't scams as long as they're up front about the prices.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
2mo ago
even though you've never believed in the validity of the accusation at all?
This is an incredibly rare scenario that almost never sees play anywhere, especially in the examples you give. Nobody in mainstream politics or culture thinks that being a racist or a pedophile is okay and therefore an invalid accusation that can simply be ignored. Dismissals are always founded on assumptions that the accusation is so obviously false that they don't even require rebuttals, that opponents are wolf-criers with no credibility, not that the accusations are true but ignorable because the they aren't bad.
Therefore, it is entirely consistent and not at all hypocritical to believe that opponents are unreliable wolf-criers who shouldn't be taken seriously when they make accusations, but then if you find actual evidence of them misbehaving to accuse them of the same crime, if you have actual evidence. Which of course, each side believes about themselves and not their opponents.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
24d ago
Do you know if there's a way to.... I'm not even sure what the right language is here.... put different classes in different .py files, or at least different tabs, without running into recursive dependency issues.
Like, in Java, I can make a World class that contains a population from the Agent class, and models an epidemic going through them, and the Agents have a bunch of methods internally regarding how they function as they get infected and recover and stuff. And if I pass a copy of the main World to each Agent when it's created, then when they do stuff in their methods they can call back up to the World, usually for counting purposes, they say "hey I got infected, increment the total infection counter" or "hey someone was going to infect me but I'm already infected, increment the redundant infection counter".
As far as I can tell, in Python I can't do that nicely. If the World class imports Agent, then the Agent class can't import World. I can resolve this by defining both classes in the same .py file, but then all my code is arranged 1-dimensionally and I have to scroll through tons of stuff to find what I'm looking for (or use ctlr F). Whereas in Java each class has its own tab, I can open or close or switch to, so well-behaved ones that I'm not working on don't take up space or get in my way. I'm not sure if this is a Python issue or just a Eclipse issue. Is there a way to split a .py file into multiple tabs so I can organize better?
MathWizard
formerly hh26
24d ago
Partly a response, partly hijacking this to ask a question of my own to everyone else: what are you using as a editor/compiler?
I programmed exclusively in Java for years, but my new boss wanted programs in Python so I've been doing that this past year. Using Eclipse, which is wonderful as an editor, since it lets me organize everything and highlights typos that I make and stuff.
Aside a whole lot of friction involving different conventions and abilities, I was annoyed that all of the Python editors people recommended seemed way less functional until I discovered that I can program Python in Eclipse if I do the right stuff. So I've been doing that.
I'm not sure what the general consensus is, because I'm mostly self-taught and program on my own, making mathematical models for research purposes that nobody else has to use or collaborate with, so I've probably got all sorts of weird habits that would make more sophisticated programmers cringe. So I can't tell how much of this is objective and how much is just me being used to Eclipse for so many years and having little experience with anything else. But I tentatively recommend looking into PyDev for Eclipse, because in my opinion it's nice.
All of these are plausible depending on surrounding factors absent from the example. As written and inferring from base rates, and assuming some degree of mental illness on John's part, I'd think 1 is most likely, but 2 is fairly plausible, if we assume the mental illness is something along the lines of "pathological liar" that keeps him exaggerating even as it starts to fail to gain sympathy.
It could also be a more steelmanned version of 1, what if people do keep trying to kill him? Like, not these specific people at his work, he's still exaggerating about them, but what if it's other people? Maybe John lives in a really bad neighborhood and gets mugged once a week, barely escaping by throwing his wallet and running the other way. Maybe he has to fight tooth and nail and ends up in the hospital regularly badly wounded. Maybe it's not about John at all, it's just a really bad neighborhood and everyone who lives there gets mugged regularly, or maybe John looks like an easy target. But the repeated trauma makes him think it's a conspiracy and he's not smart enough to pick out the pattern: person in dark alley = mugger, person in office = friendly, and he just thinks all people have a 50-50 chance to attack him.
If we reduce his pattern-matching abilities even further, maybe he never actually gets mugged, but he keeps doing something stupid like climbing rusty fences and scratching himself, or drunk driving and getting in accidents that almost kill him, and generalizes that to people trying to kill him.
Or maybe he just watches too much TV and movies and people are trying to kill each other all the time (especially trying to kill the protagonist) and he thinks of himself as the protagonist, therefore people must be trying to kill him.
If instead, we increase his pattern-matching abilities, maybe he does regularly get mugged, or his friends and family members do, and he notices that most of the muggers in his bad neighborhood have a certain ethnicity, and so he becomes a racist. Or maybe he goes to the police to fix the issue but they don't take him seriously because he sounds like a paranoid nutjob (when he accuses the actual mugger and Alice from work in the middle of the same rant the police can't tell which one is real and which is exaggerated), then he becomes anti-cop, or anti-government, or anti-whoever is in charge of making the cops be so lax on crime and oh hey have you read this article about how such and such group is secretly controlling the government to be soft on crime or whatever?
Stepping out of the metaphor, which I think is somewhat of a weakman for this phenomenon, I think this simultaneously explains a large chunk of racists (in all directions), anti-religion, anti-capitalists, etc etc etc. Bad thing happens to person or to people that person knows, or hears from (sometimes signal boosted and exaggerated by the media, sometimes by word of mouth). There is a real pattern causing it to happen repeatedly, though sometimes it's a pattern as complicated as "The Entire Economy", it gets oversimplified, exaggerated, and then attributed to a particular group, and the people who believe this explanation become radical anti-that-group. It's a combination of paranoia and actual pattern recognition, because there usually is an actual legitimate instigating factor that is genuine Bayesian evidence against that group, it's just much weaker than would be needed to draw the exaggerated conclusions they come to. There ARE evil racist white men trying to keep minorities poor. There ARE worthless degenerate minorities who live on crime and welfare and contribute nothing to society. There ARE corrupt police officers abusing their authority. There ARE pedophiles in government jobs. There ARE Zionist supremacist Jews who want to control all of America and manipulate it into being pro-Israel. All you need is for someone to encounter some of these in real life, or evidence of them existing, and then the pattern matching can begin until it spirals out of control.
And some of these people will have genuinely convincing evidence on their side, by sheer random chance. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been mugged. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been unfairly harassed by police. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been stared at suspiciously by shopkeepers despite doing nothing wrong. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been laid off by a Jewish boss. They're going to look at the evidence they've seen with their own eyes and be unconvinced that it might be a coincidence. It doesn't seem like a coincidence, it seems super unlikely. If their life were admissible as a scientific paper it would reject the null hypothesis. p < 0.05. They're Jellybean people!
I think that's what a lot of this is. People who perceive patterns where there are none, people who pick out genuine patterns and misattribute them, and people who have coincidences happen to them that are rational evidence when viewed from their individual perspective but don't stand out when you adjust for multiple comparison tests.
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