MathWizard's profile

MathWizard Good things are good 20d ago

The ideal temperature for human comfort is around 20C, which is why people set their thermostats around there. Anyone setting their thermostats to anything meaningfully distant from ~20C is doing it to save money. If you're outdoors, you maybe want a bit more if it's windy, or a bit less if it's sunny or you're doing a lot of physical activity, but you want the sum of all effects to average you back so your individual subjective feeling is around 20C.

Whatever combination of sunny/cloudy/rainy gets you closer to 20C is the ideal weather for your region.

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MathWizard Good things are good 22d ago

On an economic level, I agree. This is a very very hard problem. In the case of orphans, you can resolve it by sending them to foster families or other forms of government housing instead of just handing a check to reward every kid that runs away from home. The state still pays lots of money, but the kids don't directly benefit because they get substitute parents instead of just money. But you can't really do that with single parents. You can't realistically assist single mothers with state-funded foster-fathers who come and act as the missing parent for the kid. Because she's an adult and has rights, there's a lot less coercion and control that you can't use to force compliance in the same way you can with a runaway teen (and if you tried it would turn out horribly dystopian). So we're kind of stuck handing out checks and trying to make them exactly the right size: not too small or the kids suffer poverty and neglect, not too large or the mothers have more kids and avoid marriage.

On a social level, there is so much more we could be doing to incentivize marriage. Stay at home mothers used to get respect and praise for their parenting. Single mothers used to be shamed and looked down on. Now we do the opposite. People respond to economic incentives, but they also respond to social ones too. Even if money incentivizes more single mothers, turning the dial on the social pressures in the opposite direction could help mitigate this.

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MathWizard Good things are good 22d ago

Do you believe that it's actually truly subjective? As in, it's okay for someone to kill someone else as long as they don't consider the victim to be a person? There's absolutely nothing wrong with people slaughtering "non-persons" as long as the non-person is sincerely believed by the slaughterers, and if people go around doing that you will have no complaints?

Or do you perhaps have a more nuanced and less genocidal belief about personhood grounded by something beyond mere subjectivity?

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MathWizard Good things are good 23d ago

Framing things in terms of "pro-single-mother" vs "anti-single-mother" makes about as much sense as being "pro-orphan" or "anti-orphan". You can believe that a situation is bad to be in and therefore want to help people who happen to be in that situation AND try to prevent people from falling into that situation AND not Goodhart the numbers by killing them.

DO: Help kids with no parents with money and support structures (without actively incentivizing the status)

DO: Try to prevent people from becoming orphans.

DON'T: Reduce the number of orphans by killing them

Really, a child of a single parent is just a half-orphan. Therefore

DO: Help single parent families with money and support structures (without actively incentivizing the status)

DO: Try to prevent people from becoming single-parents.

DON'T: Reduce the number of single-parents by killing them (or the children)

All of this follows trivially from the quality of life the child can expect, on average, in each state:

Full family > Single Parent Family > Orphan > Death

Whether you want more or fewer single parent families then depends on which direction you're coming from. Trying to pin people down into "pro" or "anti" single parents only makes sense if these were terminal ends rather than proxies for quality of life.

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MathWizard Good things are good 23d ago

A good rule of thumb to predict a pro-life person's opinion on something is to mentally replace the fetus with a 1 week old (post birth) baby. Or, if you don't think babies should have rights either, maybe a two or three year old. That is the logical implication of believing fetuses are people.

Would you have sympathy for a mother who killed her 1 week old baby because her husband committed suicide? Would that sympathy extend far enough to excuse the act?

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MathWizard Good things are good 28d ago

I see where you're coming from. On a gut level I immediately want to retort that punishment and forgiveness should be equally affected by your smallness and anonymity. If you're just one of many people such that your forgiveness barely matters, then your punishment barely matters too, especially since the external outcome of your forgiveness would be the cessation of your punishment/shaming.

But since it's also the case that

A: Punishments are applied in a decentralized way, with each person using their own individual criteria for what should receive shame

B: The impact of punishment via shame is nonlinear. Getting 20 death threats doesn't actually feel twice as bad as getting 10 death threats, so reducing the number of shamers by 50% doesn't actually help all that much.

Your point probably stands. Aella could repent and change her ways, and maybe 50% of people would forgive her and the shame would go down, but the other 50% would continue And also probably a bunch of sex-positive people would start shaming her and it might even end up worse. So then she's paid the massive social and lifestyle costs of repenting without actually solving the shame. Without a near-universally recognized authority who can forgive her and enforce other people's forgiveness (in deed, even if not in belief), she has no incentive to repent (beyond a genuine realization of being wrong and a self-sacrificing desire to do the right thing despite the costs).

Which in turn massively decreases the pro-social utility of shame. The point of punishments is to disincentivize the punished behavior, both on the part of the person being punished, and other people who witness them. But we've essentially lost half of that. If we make her miserable enough maybe we'll scare others away from following her example, but sometimes young people are stupid and do stuff before they realize the consequences. And anyone who does and then changes their mind is just stuck in a world where they can't be forgiven. Or more likely, doubles down on the side they're already on because they know they can't go back.

I don't know that we can do anything about that. But it still kind of sucks.

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MathWizard Good things are good 29d ago

I broadly agree with you, with the caveat that I think there's a little more room for charity/empathy/forgiveness for people who are being harmful by accident rather than on purpose.

A murderer knows that what they are doing is wrong. They know that they are going to inflict a huge harm on others (both the direct victim and everyone who knows them), and they do it anyway. They are evil and they know this and they do it anyway because they are angry/selfish and care more about themselves than others. It's an issue of bad morality.

Aella believes that she is doing good. She has a distorted view of society/psychology in a way that makes her think that her lifestyle will make the average person more happy instead of less happy. She does what she does partly in order to make herself more popular and justify her lifestyle, but in part because she genuinely thinks it will make the world better. Now, likely some of this is cognitive dissonance: maybe somewhere deep down inside she knows its wrong but doesn't care, but I think the majority of the issue is a question of bad objectivity.

Now, from a consequentialist perspective Aella is probably worse and so, if necessary and in isolation, we would be willing to inflict a higher cost in order to stop her. But the norms of "have harsher punishments for people who hurt others on purpose than those who do it by accident" is useful in general, as is "have harsher punishments for people who hurt others in unambiguous ways than those who hurt others in ambiguous and indirect ways". This makes it easier for people to know what to expect and adjust their behavior ahead of time (decreasing the rates of bad behavior) instead of doing it anyway and then getting punished randomly and unexpectedly afterwards. It also decreases the ability of people to apply punishments to good behaviors by making convoluted arguments about indirect harms. It also gives more opportunities for forgiveness and redemption. There's a non-negligible chance that at some point Aella will observe more of the effects of her actions, realize her mistake, and then change and start genuinely helping people and undo the damage she's caused. Because her underlying motivation: wanting to help people, doesn't need to change, she just needs to reconcile it with the desire to be popular and slutty and realize they're opposed instead of synergistic. I suppose murderers can also change and become better people too, but it's a different kind of change and it's impossible to undo the harm they've already caused.

This is entirely consistent with the principle of "shame Aella and jail murderers" rather than the other way around. But the shame on Aella should be tempered by education and a hope that she herself learns from her mistakes instead of just having the shamers by maximally cruel to make her suffer and hate them and reject what they say.

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MathWizard Good things are good 1mo ago

(which is were they roll the credits and probably marks around 30% of the games content)

For real? Or are you exaggerating here? I stopped playing after the first ending on the assumption that I had seen most of what it had to offer and the remaining puzzle threads that I had discovered but not yet solved seemed pedantic and annoyingly completionist and I didn't think I would have the patience to grind through them just to get a "true" ending.

But if there's literally more than half the game remaining (in terms of actual content, not merely playtime spent grinding runs hoping to get lucky) then I might pick it back up.

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MathWizard Good things are good 1mo ago

The courts should do their jobs and not do someone else's job. There's no contradiction here. It's not about the total magnitude of their power, as if there's some number that should be summed up over all the things they do and try to make sure the sums line up, it's about jurisdiction. The role of the judiciary is to interpret the law as written and intended, and apply it to individual cases, which are frequently weird and contain many facts and details that might make them edge cases or involve multiple laws that need to be combined together.

If the law doesn't say a thing and an activist judge pretends that it does by inventing new definitions for words that clearly were not what those words meant when the law was written, then they are legislating their own new laws, not actually judging. If judges go to some agency run by unelected non-judges and asks them to interpret the law for them, then those people are the judges, and the elected judges are not actually judging. They're supposed to judge, not legislate, not outsource.

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MathWizard Good things are good 1mo ago

I think this is typically handwaved away by assuming that if we, as humans, manage to solve the original alignment problem, then an AI with 100x human intelligence will be smart enough to solve the meta-alignment problem for us. You just need to be really really really sure that the 100x AI is actually aligned and genuinely wants to solve the problem rather than use it as a tool to bypass your restrictions and enact its secret agenda.

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MathWizard Good things are good 1mo ago

I am not a legal expert. I don't know the actual legal technicalities of "reasonable articulable suspicion". But at least taking a common sense definition of the words, "There is a serial killer drowning babies in wicker baskets, this man is on the marina with a wicker basket" is trivially "articulable", and seems eminently reasonable to me given the circumstances. Who uses wicker baskets? If the officer had no reason for suspicion then why did he call you in the first place? My understanding was that this was to prevent officers from searching people because "I dunno, he seemed kind of suspicious", not "I have a clear reason to suspect this guy in particular of a specific crime (and being the perpetrator of the same crime multiple times in the past) for a specific reason".

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MathWizard Good things are good 2mo ago

In most non-rpgs clothing doesn't imbue stats, so you can just wear whatever you want and there's no dilemma to fix.

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MathWizard Good things are good 2mo ago

I don't believe Minecraft dungeons does this (without mods?) but I have seen games that let you have two layers of armor: a mechanical one that's actually officially equipped, and a fashion one that determines your appearance. So you can have the best of both (and I think to incentivize players to buy fancy cosmetic armor with real money). I don't remember what game(s) this was, I think I've seen it more than once but not very often.

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MathWizard Good things are good 2mo ago

I think the point is that NATO, knowing they have nukes and are willing to use them, would choose not to invade in the first place. They still die in a hypothetical world where NATO wants the world to end. They live in the world where NATO doesn't want the world to end and chooses not to invade them, because they have nukes.

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