MathWizard
formerly hh26
No bio...
User ID: 164
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
It would be hilarious if the world ends because a movie generating AI decided decided the best way to generate realistic looking movies was to create exciting and violent scenarios in real life and film them. Or just did that because it's blindly imitating things that it thinks movie directors do and doesn't notice the distinction between actors pretending to die and actually dying.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I've played Trails in the Sky 1 and 2, and about a third of 3 before getting bored of it, since it's very different from the first two. I haven't played the other series in the franchise, since I was originally planning to play them all in order, but at this point I don't think I'm going to go back and finish trails in the sky 3. If I do skip ahead, where do you recommend as a new entry point?
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I do not consider repeated game strategy to be "out of game". It's a basic element of game theory - ever heard of repeated prisoner's dilemma?
In which case the "Game" your are trying to optimize for is the sum payoff over the entire repeated scenario. That is, you have one main game, which is composed of many subgames, and acting rationally within the larger game may involve local "irrationalities" in the subgames which are only rational within the larger structure. Importantly, this is explicitly declared in the game formalism. Individual board games do not mention each other, so unless you're at like a board game tournament or doing a best 2 out of 3 or something, each game is being considered independently. Maybe you as a human being want to maximize the number of board games you want to win or something, but actually you also want to optimize for things like money and friendships and comfort and happiness and eventually we've gone full meta. My claim isn't that it's impossible to treat board games as repeated games or that you won't improve your winrate, my claim is that it's inappropriate and unfun. It's effectively a defection in the board game playing experience, something which increases your own enjoyment (assuming you like winning) at the expense of everyone else, and if everyone does it then everyone ends up having less fun.
Kingmaking for game theory purposes, especially if warned beforehand, is valid strategy. Introducing strategic spite into the game makes the table rethink how they build alliances and gives players more agency.
Conditional on you being able to keep the spite entirely within the game, and credibly signal that to other players so they're not worried about making you upset in real life, I would again consider this to be a defection in the board game playing experience. It will make you more likely to win, and make the game less fun for everyone else because now you're restricting which actions they can do. If you unilaterally declare an ultimatum "nobody can do any harmful actions against me or I will sacrifice all chances of winning to destroy you" then you'll have a massive advantage as no player wants to incur your wrath (unless they're so far ahead they can afford it, or so far behind they are going to lose anyway and want to reverse-kingmaker you). But if everyone player does this then you have a big mutually assured destruction scenario and, unless the game was specifically designed around that scenario, is likely to be less fun than playing the way the game was intended.
Note that spite being a defection, a form of unsportsmanlike conduct, does not mean you should literally never do it. I would consider it appropriate in a meta tit-for-tat scenario, where you threaten players who behave unsportsmanly against you with unsportsmanly spite. If a player seems to be picking on you unfairly and spitefully, or doing some other action that is legal within the rules but the entire group agrees is bad behavior, then you can spite them back to punish their behavior. But in general the best outcome is one in which everyone cooperates, which means voluntarily forgoing a small set of behaviors that are technically legal but unfun, which varies from game to game but generally includes most meta concerns and kingmaking. You should generally seek to increase your chances of winning, but not goodheart it at the expense of having fun.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Yeah, I think that makes sense. Looking at some of the graphs in that link, the fastest growing category is "Personal Care Aides", ie people who take care of old people in nursing homes and stuff. Which makes sense why that's growing: as people live longer and longer the fraction of old people increases. In some cases, old people would have been taken care of by their families instead of by a paid health care worker. But in many other cases they would have just died.
I suppose from this perspective then, cost disease is largely akin to social security. A bunch of young people pay in more than they take out for their insurance and taxes, and then when they're old they are subsidized by the next generation of young people. Which seems like a massive principal agent problem, but not one with an easy solution unless we want to let all the old poor people die in order for young people to keep more of their own money and get better cheaper healthcare while they're young (but not live as long unless they invest their extra money in a healthcare retirement account for themselves)
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Oh hey, I didn't even think of using flair for that. That's pretty convenient, I'll probably do that for a couple months.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
I've been doing it like that, where they're all together and reference each other, it's just that then when Agent has 15 methods because some of them are experimental variations on each other or niche things I wanted to do to see what would happen, then I make another class for graphing scatter plots, and I've got a bunch of methods for (Make a world, then modifier the parameters according to X, then execute Y, then graph the results, then repeat that N times) that would be nice to stick in their own class somewhere, and then I've got a bunch of useful static methods that do stuff like load and save data to CSVs that would be nice to have in their own class for organization purposes. And if I just lay them out linearly (which I mostly have, with a few rare exceptions that definitely have 0 recursive dependencies and I actually have moved them to their own .py file) then I have literally 2000 lines of code I have to scroll up and down just to find the right class whenever I want to check to see what the name of the method I want to call is or something, and then scroll back down to find the spot I'm working on.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo 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
1mo ago
1: Outlaw abortion, provide free non-abortive birth control for everyone, which is mandatory for heterosexuals until they get married, or at least sign some sort of contract with their long-term partner about how potential children will be raised.
2: School vouchers, which includes subsidies for homeschooling, provided said schools and homeschools pass certain accreditation procedures so they are actually providing a legitimate education and aren't just scamming for money.
Actually.... you asked for things out of left field, and 2 seems too normal. So to play more into the thought experiment here, let's ramp it up beyond what I'd normally advocate. Massively subsidize homeschooling. Provide free teacher training for parents, with a specialization towards teaching in small classroom sizes of children who you get to see repeatedly year after year, in every subject, and teaching kids to teach themselves. Pay enough that families can go from living on a two-working-parents income to a two-working-parents-but-one's-job-is-homeschooling-their-own-kids income. It won't even cost money, just divert it from the public schools who don't need as much because many kids have moved to homeschools. Have economists figure out every possible way that bad-faith-actors could exploit the system and figure out how to prevent it.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
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MathWizard
formerly hh26
3mo ago
I think a distinction needs to be made between conspiracies where the mere knowledge of the conspiracies existence is secret, versus ones where specific details are secret. Everyone knows that Coca Cola and KFC exist, and have spice blends, and that those spice blends are secret. The existence of the spices have not been successfully hidden, and in fact many (most?) of the individual spices are known, but their exact combination and proportions are unknown, which means competitors can sort of imitate them, but not perfectly. We know the who, what, and why, just not the how.
Meanwhile, if you had a similar level of secrecy for something like political assassination, it would be over. If it leaked that X, Y, Z people were in a secret assassination club that killed people for political gain, but the exact details of who they had killed were secret, you could arrest and interrogate X,Y and Z, and then find out the details (and even if you never found out the details, you could still punish them for what you did know). Criminal conspiracies require not only that specific details remain secret, but that the existence of the conspiracy itself remains secret. Which is a lot harder to pull off.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
4mo ago
They didn't ask for constitutional amendments which are good ideas, or which might receive grassroots bipartisan support, they asked for ones which stand a shot of actually getting passed.
1 seems plausible, if you could make each party think it was their own idea and defending against incursions of the other party.
2 seems very unlikely, all of the politicians are stuck in their ways and in the DC culture and are not going let through a Bill that limits themselves in this way.
3 has absolutely no chance, the Democrats are not going to do anything that discourages illegal immigration, especially if it can be spun as race-related, and having noncitizen children born in this country and then being deported to a country they've never been to is way too easy to stir up emotions about.
4 seems unlikely for similar reasons to 2. The politicians love DC, they're not going to do something that messes with the status quo unless it's strictly good for them.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
4mo ago
I like discords for some of the games I play that involve people theorycrafting and optimizing builds and stuff. Usually when I stop playing said game I stop hanging out in that discord though, so it's more of a category of server I like than a specific server.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
7mo ago
So where is the disagreement, exactly?
The way you phrased things, and still to some extent now, seems to be implying that race is always useful because information is too costly. My premise is that information is costly up front for strangers but accumulates automatically over time such that race becomes less and less useful the more you interact with the same individuals. If you agree with that entirely then I guess we don't have a disagreement other than with phrasing of things, but the fact that you phrased it the way you did makes me suspect that there is some underlying disagreement even if I'm not sure what it is. Because I wouldn't say that the existence and importance of friends and coworkers whom you can accumulate significant amounts of information on over years are compatible with
in practice you don’t get to have enough evidence to ignore this prior, because evidence is not free.
The usefulness of the prior asymptotically approaches zero over time such that, although it might never literally reach zero, after a couple years of knowing someone it's probably close enough to ignore (though this will vary by how much you actually interact with the person, since knowledge is not gained via the literal passing of time.)
Or maybe we both entirely agree on its usefulness in both the stranger case and the friend case but you are considering the stranger case to be "typical" and I am considering the friend case to be "typical" and we are each dismissing the other as an exception to the rule.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
7mo ago
racismschool.tumblr.com links to a user on tumblr named "racismschool". It appears to be empty now, though I can't tell if that's because they deleted everything or because I don't have a tumblr account. Presumably they're the person who made the thing that he's referring to in this post.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
7mo ago
But it specifically applies pressure against negative behaviors, at least according to the subjective perceptions of the mocker. X behavior is stupid/bad -> Y group of people mock it -> Z group of people care about Y's opinion and/or avoiding mockery in general and do X less or fail to start doing X -> less X exists. If the mocker has good subjective opinions and targets, then this is a net positive since it reduces the prevalence of stupid/bad behaviors. If the mocker has bad subjective opinions and targets, then this is a net negative since it reduces the prevalence of good behaviors that have been mislabeled.
Speed running.... makes speed running look cool? Like, maybe it encourages people to try really hard and dedicate themselves to a task, or peer into the underlying mechanics of games and pedantically look for flaws that they can exploit which maybe increases their ability as a hacker/programmer/anti-hacker? But the most likely outcome is that it makes people more likely to become speed runners. I suppose one could make a similar argument about a lot of hobbies, but a lot of hobbies have depth or broadly interesting components, while speedrunning is about pedantic details and weird edge cases.
Like, if someone has a hobby of using tweezers to arrange tiny colored grains of sand into beautiful artwork, that's kind of cool. I wouldn't do it, it seems like more time and effort than it's worth to me, but if someone else wants to do that good for them, and maybe at the end I'll look at the picture they make. If someone has a hobby of using tweezers to arrange tiny grains of sand into binary representations of the code to retro videogames, that's stupid. It takes similar levels of pedantic effort to perfectly arrange each grain of sand into the right shape, but in the end you have a bunch of dots of sand and the binary representation doesn't do anything because operating systems can't read sand, so it's functional equivalent to a random arrangement of sand. I suppose if someone had some property of their brain that makes this hobby enjoyable for them I'm not going to say they're not allowed to do it, but to me it's boring both to do AND to hear about or watch, while the colored sand piles are boring to do but might be worth watching a little bit. I feel that videogames are more analogous to the colored art sand: pragmatically useless towards survival in the real world but interesting to experience or view, while speedrunning is analagous to the binary representations: similarly complex in function but more pedantic and way less interesting.
All to say that pressure towards making people more interested in speedrunning is negative because it increases the amount of people with boring hobbies, which funges against more interesting hobbies that they could have. And while this is mostly a subjective opinion from me as someone who thinks speedrunning is boring, I think there is some way in which speedrunning is objectively worse than most hobbies, including broader videogaming, although I'm not entirely sure exactly how to formalize, hence vaguely gesturing at it via the above analogy.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
9mo ago
How does class-based AA disadvantage blacks? If blacks are disproportionately poor, then they're disproportionately likely to fall into the category that the class-based AA is looking for. Granted, they'll have to compete against poor white and asian students for those slots, but they won't have to compete against wealthy Nigerians. Obviously if you measure "black" as a class and look at the average outcomes across all of them it will go down as benefits shift from wealthy black people towards poor white people, but it's not obvious to me (possible, but not obvious) that poor black people, as individuals, would lose out by the switch.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
9mo ago
If strong-arming them works to reduce abortions then do that. And quite a few adults are bad at calculating risk and dislike condoms, so strongarm them too. Somewhere around a million abortions happen each year, which means millions more are not using birth control. Whether that's from "access" or cost, or social acceptability, all of those are levers to push.
The point being, more birth control usage = fewer abortions = good, and most pro-life people are leaving hundred dollar bills on the floor by ignoring this avenue for solving the problem.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
10mo ago
I'm struggling to imagine a scenario in which anything involving aliens was kept hidden for this long but didn't count as national security data to be exempted from such a clause. Like, if aliens were real and we captured their flying saucers of course that would be secret national security data! What is Scheumer's bill expected to do in the first place?
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Thank you for the detailed advice. I'm going to propose with a fake ring and then discuss what the real ring should be in detail before buying one, so there isn't going to be any tricking. But she is also incredibly shy and reluctant about receiving gifts, so it needs to be more about the thought put into it and the sentimental value than mere monetary cost. If I spend too much she will feel guilty about the burden, but if I even suggest something inferior she will be secretly disappointed and then feel guilty about not appreciating something that I did for her and try really hard to pretend she likes it.
Your point about elaborate designs is helpful. I'm still trying to decide how quirky/unique I want to go versus just plain fancy. Like, I've been looking at dragon and cat shaped rings and gemstone patterns, which would be more special and sentimentally unique to her, but the goofiness might detract from the universal beauty standard?
I suppose I can't plan too much ahead of time before I've actually had the discussion with her. But if I just bluntly say "you can have whatever you want" she is probably going to get overwhelmed by the pressure of too many options with no direction.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I am not sure. I suspect, but I'm going to propose with a fake ring and then talk to her about it in detail and probably go shopping together since I think sacrificing the spontaneity of the moment for a more accurate and satisfying ring will be worth it in the long run.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Where were you fifteen years ago when I needed this advice?
I am frustrated that all of the social and romantic advice that I received from adults as a kid was inscrutable and unquantified and vague normie intuitions that I didn't understand. I always knew I was doing it wrong, but couldn't figure out how or why, and nobody could explain it to me. And only since I discovered rationalist and rationalist adjacent spaces did I start hearing coherent logical explanations that I could use to actually figure out social situations and figure it out. And these are verbal descriptions! It's not just that I'm older and wiser and have learned from experience lessons that cannot be taught by words. If I had heard these words fifteen years ago I would have understood them and been able to adjust my behavior!
And the worst thing is that all the normies probably understand all this already and if you told them this they'd be like "yeah that sounds about right", but when they give their own version of the explanation in their own words it's just incoherent nonsense.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Georgist land value taxes are probably the best possible solution, and it is kind of annoying to constantly see people constantly being oblivious to them and conflating landlords with "the rich" as if capitalists who create products that people can consensually choose whether to buy or ignore are the same thing as landlords who hold not-homelessness hostage from everyone born without a huge amount of money to buy into the Ponzi scheme of land ownership.
A fair start to life is one in which everyone starts from zero, with nothing but the support of their parents and an equal share of the land and the bounty of nature. One in which you can go out into the land and use it to feed yourself and clothe yourself and build more and better things, and trade with others doing the same. In so far as land privitization of land has deprived everyone from the ability to do this, it is only fair and just that they be compensated for the value of the land. Not by giving them some vaguely defined "wealth redistribution" of arbitrary source or amount from "people who we think ought to help them", but by directly taxing the land equal to the value it provides as "rent", and distributing it to people either in the form of UBI and/or cuts to other taxes (or a combination of both). Anyone with less than an average amount of land should be paid by people with an above average amount of land (weighted by the land values). And if that's not enough to feed and clothe them, then they can work to make up the difference. But it will at least establish a baseline that removes the exploitation of landlords while not punishing capitalists who actually create value and inhibiting them from continuing to create value. (Also, reducing income taxes will significantly help employment rates and wages)
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
This is a distinct problem in that they're going to colonize a new planet, not rejoining broader society as when evacuating a localized disaster. Thus, long term considerations are important. You're not just trying to maximize value of the lives currently being saved, but the long term potential of the human race stemming from these people, their reproductive potential, and their ability to survive in the wilderness. Hypothetically, if you had 2 adult men, 2 adult women, and 8 young children, you should save all the adults and 4 of the children, rather than saving 8 children, because otherwise they just starve to death and haven't really been saved. Whereas on a ship, on a non-destroyed earth, you should save the 8 children because they can be taken care of by society so are actually saved long term.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Not exactly. The true authentic Christian response would be to help all the people at any cost to yourself, in which case physical proximity is not really relevant. The pragmatic response to having a selfish human brain is to help people when you can convince yourself to do so, which will tend to be when there is a high help to cost ratio, or when the direct feedback is strong enough that it actually feels meaningful. People near you are more physically accessible, and more psychologically responsive, so will be easier to directly help than people far away, so physical proximity is relevant.
But physical proximity can change. If someone lives in LA and, rather than stay and dedicate their life to helping the beggars who live there, decides to become a missionary in African and help poor people there, then they are in some sense choosing not to help the LA beggars. Or at least, choosing not to help them as much as they otherwise could.
So yeah, you do have to help the people in front of you. But you do not have to prioritize them to the exclusion of people far away from you, and you do not have to refuse to move to a different location which will change who's in front of you. It's okay to send money to a distant charity even if that diminishes the amount of money you have for people nearby. But part of the helping people you do should probably be non-monetary, in which case it almost has to be for people near you.
I guess that's a good point. So really it means hereditarianism rules out the possibility of behavioral interventions on the individual level but allows for genetic/eugenic interventions on the population level. Which are less useful given you can't apply it to already existing people, and generally less tasteful to most people, and harder to enact ethically. But theoretically tenable if you can pinpoint the actual IQ genes.
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