MathWizard
formerly hh26
No bio...
User ID: 164
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
Ur, Amilia, and Marked are the easiest to avoid the taboos of passively if you want to just have a free power and not dedicate your life to advancing some cause.
I'd probably go with Amilia, become the head of a magical hospital where I heal people for money (and have enough EMTs and ambulances to keep people alive until I can get to them, and get obscenely rich while simultaneously helping people. I assume that charging money for healing is a lot less pleasing and would advance the agenda less than doing it for free, but it's not strictly taboo. I think as long as I don't turn away poor people, healing anyone who comes and simply charge them proportional to their ability to pay, it'll probably be fine. I assume that the existence of other Amilia users will drop demand to reasonable levels such it won't lead to absurdly high prices like it would if you were the only one who could cure otherwise incurable disease, but one in a million multiplied by the proportion of people who choose Amilia means this will still end up with a lot of money.
Alternatively, see if the Fae power can be munchkinned for absurd amounts of money by growing rare spices or something. Depending on the growth rate and quality/quantity it can be used on at a time, it might be more profitable to heal people entirely for free to boost your strength more and earn all your money from growing stuff. Though again, profits will be mitigated by other Amilia users.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
I don't see why that would always be true. I would expect red-leaning judges to be biased towards the red states, while blue-leaning judges would be biased towards the blue states.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
This is a victory conditional on the belief that Republicans are more prone to putting their thumb on the scale than Democrats, rather than the other way around.
That is, if we have any two parties, A and B, and A is more prone to putting their thumb on the scale, then more leeway towards voting regulations is a victory for A, and less leeway is a victory for B.
It seems nontrivial to simply assume that the Republicans are party A, especially given their recent demands for more transparency and stricter adherence to election rules.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
I'm not super familiar with the specific laws, but I'm pretty sure there's some sort of oversight. That is, if the Nevada State legislature suddenly coordinates and decide that all of them are permanently elected, only they are allowed to vote so they always win elections and can pick whoever they want to send to the senate/house/president, the federal government would object. I'm fairly certain they can't just overthrow their own Democracy. The Supreme Court would overrule them somehow, even if they had to stretch the text of some law or constitutional clause to make it happen.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
How is that winning the issue? If blue and some swing states are able to exploit a lack of ID to cheat elections and remain perpetually blue, then they can win all the elections via fraud. And all the republicans can do is prevent fraud in already-red states so they don't also flip to blue.
On issues related to local governance, each State being able to do whatever it wants is a victory. But on federal issues, especially elections, that's not good enough.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
It might be appropriate (or just tempting) to have some level of discussion, at least on the meta-level, regarding whether other people agree or disagree with the request or potential difficulties they anticipate arising from it or something.
Like, literally right now, you have in this post made a suggestion and we are having a meta level discussion about it, though it's about site content rather than a specific CW topic. As long as the discussions remained brief and meta level that would be fine, but when it comes to CW topics that's always a slippery slope.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
The intro says
Culture war topics are accepted
so that suggests to me that simple requests for topics would fit here. I don't think it would drain energy from the main thread and, if it worked, would actually drive more discussion there, as long as the small scale questions didn't consistently spin off into a length discussion of the topic here in this thread before a big post was made.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
What matters depends on what you're trying to extrapolate it for. If you're evaluating whether you or someone you know should purchase the product, then the value of the product matters, and intent only matters in-so-far as it correlates with the value of the product If person A is an intentional scammer then the vast majority of products they offer will have low value and high cost, so you can use that as a prior and probably dismiss all their offerings without any additional investigation.
If you're extrapolating it to the value of their other offerings then intent matters a little. An intentional scammer is going to offer bunches of scams and fail to cultivate real value. Someone who values themselves highly in a genuine way is going to attempt to offer good value even if they tend to overprice some of it, so the correlation between offerings will be weaker.
If you're extrapolating that to the value of their character, then intent matters a lot. If person A offers a bad product unintentionally, then you can't conclude they're a bad person, while if they do it intentionally then they are.
So if two people, A and B, have free videos offering advice, and then paid videos and services offering more detailed advice and individual attention for a cost, and person A is a known scammer and person B is not, you should probably avoid even the free videos from person A, because they're optimizing for advertising the scam and getting money rather than being genuinely useful, while person B is likely to offer more genuine advice in their free videos, because they believe the value of their product can speak for itself.
Ultimately, the value of the free and paid content is what actually matters, but the intent correlates strongly across content
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
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
a fractured arm/ribs/cheek
Each of those seem like they would lead to vastly different outcomes, I would not just lump them together like this. If bat guy hits the chest or the arm not holding the knife then it plays out like you say and the knife goes in, game over. If bat guy hits the head, even just a cheek, then knife guy is not going to be in a good position to follow through on his lunge. If it's a strong hit and knife guy can't recover in time then bat guy can follow through with more hits, if not then maybe he scrambles away and they start again but with knife guy at a disadvantage. If bat guy hits the arm with the knife and knife guy drops it then it's over, but if he maintains his grip he might get his stab in.
So I think the outcome strongly depends on if bat guy's first hit can decide the match and prevent the knife from getting its first hit. Which for inexperienced fighters is probably going to be mostly luck.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
I'm not sure you can disentangle that, as the majority of these cases are not biological nepotism, as in people hiring their siblings and cousins, but ideological nepotism: people hiring their friends and colleagues who think the same way that they do because they have a shared ideology. The ideology and the nepotism feed into one another. Without the ideology they wouldn't feel such hatred for outsiders that they would feel the need to discriminate against them. It's not simply self-interest because they're not (usually) hiring actual family members.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
I think part of the problem is simply a failure to optimize for quality. An absence of merit and meritocracy. It's not required for wokeness to be an objectively negative property in games as long as it distracts from quality. If you had a substantial fraction of people obsessed with blue flowers to the point that they start hiring people to work on their game on the basis that they are fellow blue-flower enthusiasts rather than their programming and game design skill, that alone would decrease the quality of games (or productivity in pretty much any industry). If you insert a bunch of fanservice characters whose main appeal is that they wear blue flowers, and fail to make them appealing in other ways because the blue-flower-wearing takes care of that in the minds of the developers, then you end up with lackluster characters from the perspective of anyone who doesn't care about blue flowers. If all mainstream games all start to share similar plotlines of evil villains trying to poison all the blue flowers, or worse, dye them red (the horror!), people will get tired of it. Nobody cares about blue flowers, tell some good stories!
Any overly ideological creator that gets too self-absorbed in their own niche obsession will struggle to make good content that appeals to anyone who doesn't share their obsession because they get too many false-positives from self-masturbatory appeals to their own niche and stop optimizing for more objective quality once something meets their own distorted subjective view.
This is why any overly preachy content is cringe and lame even when it contains a message that I agree with. The fact that wokeness in many instances happens to be toxic and destructive is just the cherry on top. The ideological obsession is the majority of the problem.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo 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 been a while since I've seen it, but I think the main clue is the over-the-top propaganda commercials in it. The tone makes it clear that the director does not intend the audience to believe it or take it seriously.
Aside from that, the horrible meat-grinder of combat and disregard for the lives of the troops makes it clear that the human army is not a desirable place to be and the higher ups do not respect their troops. Also the literal child soldiers.
If it was a pro-fascist movie, the human government would be portrayed a lot more competently.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
My vote is on the similarity to concentration camps. People in general, especially people far away hearing news reports about events in other countries, are not utilitarians. 10000 civilians dead looks pretty similar to 100000 civilians dead, but the words "concentration camp" with some lurid descriptions gets people outraged. I suspect that the amount of international blowback from your plan would be more than the amount of international blowback they're getting now, even if the actual harms were much lesser.
But different traits scale disproportionally with respect to each other, so I think you can meaningfully translate quantitative differences into qualitative differences in practice via orders of magnitude difference in ability.
That is, if someone with an IQ of 120 can throw a football 2% more accurately than someone with an IQ of 80, then we'd say that football-throwing skill does not scale meaningfully with IQ even if there is technically a minor improvement. If someone with an IQ of 120 can solve simple arithmetic problems 40% faster or more accurately than someone with an IQ of 80, then this would reasonably be considered a quantitative difference. If someone with an IQ of 120 can solve problems related to hierarchically nested hypothetical scenarios 50 times (5000%) faster or more accurately than someone with an IQ of 80, (which is realistic if the latter can barely handle them at all), then this would reasonably be described as a qualitative difference despite technically being quantitative in the details.
Clearly there isn't a well-defined bright line distinguishing the scenarios. But there are cases which fall unambiguously on one side or the other, such that it's meaningful to discuss.
edit: mixed up the words "quantitative" and "qualitative" in some places
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo 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
Indoor. It's cheaper/safer in terms of disease risk and thus the amount of vaccinations they require, it's comfier for them in general with respect to weather, and you get to actually encounter them and interact with them more, assuming you spend more time indoors versus outdoors.
Having an outdoor cat is like halfway between having a cat and just feeding a stray cat. Might as well actually commit to having a cat if you want to have a cat.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
if the woman lives in a castle doctrine state
Sounds like a big if. An lot of people don't live in castle doctrine states. And while on a societal level this could be fixed by adding this to more states, that's not super realistic for an individual person in this situation. An individual solution would be to move to a castle doctrine state, but that has some pretty high costs depending on how their social circles, family, and careers are structured.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
The wiseness of marrying her or not is going to depend on who she is now and in the future, the past is useful in-so-far as it informs those.
Having promiscuous sex is a sign that someone
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Does not treat sex as special or sacred or important, at least not to the extent that a chaste person does.
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Does not have a proactive loyalty or consideration towards their future partner. A chaste person who saves themselves shows respect and loyalty to the person who they will eventually end up with, before they've even met them. This means that once they do and that person fills that role they are irreplaceable.
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Does not think about long-term consequences of their actions, or highly value things like reputation and honorable behavior. A lot of people are going to find this behavior icky, which both severely narrows down the promiscuous person's future partners, and leaves a permanent regret in the heart of partners who decide to forgive their past but still have to know about it.
All of this together means such people are more likely to cheat, and more likely to divorce when they get bored and find someone new. Their current partner may be special, but they are unlikely to be the same level of special that a purely monogamous person would have. However, this is correlational, not guaranteed. And people can change. I don't know Alice, I don't know how much she's changed since then, how loyal she is, how devoted she is to Bob, how much she does or does not regret her past. All I know is that however many years ago she thought that sleeping with however many guys was an acceptable thing to inflict on Bob before she ever met him. But ultimately, the decision is up to Bob. He has to figure out whether he's willing to be guy #537 to Alice, whether he can accept that without it bothering him for the rest of his life. And decide how much he trusts her, whether he's actually truly special to her or just another notch in her belt. And he's allowed to choose to marry her. And it might even be the right decision, I don't know her, I don't know how much her past speaks to her current character, whether she's still the same kind of person or whether she's truly changed.
But when making an argument, it should be focused on Bob, his future, and what's right for him. Her past only matters in-so-far as it affects those.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
2mo ago
In a pure, mathematically perfect, game theory bilateral monopoly, any distribution is a Nash Equilibrium, making the actual distribution arbitrary and impossible to deduce logically. Any offer someone makes and commits to would be irrational to refuse, but any counter-offer is similarly irrational to refuse, although I suppose if you modify the game with some sort of negotiation system attached and maybe some semi-rational actors you could come up with some sort of converging equilibrium.
In the real world, nothing is a perfect bilateral monopoly isolated from other economics, in which case the asymmetry of the breaking of this monopoly is likely to have a very strong impact on the negotiation. Labor pretty much always has value, if nothing else than the fact that sitting around relaxing is typically more enjoyable than working (not literally always though), and there are plenty of other jobs someone could take. So if there's a resource A that is completely worthless without skill B, and person B has skill C that's useless without resource A, you still don't have a perfect bilateral monopoly because person B could go do something else even if it doesn't use that skill. This gives person B an advantage in negotiations. Or maybe person B can extract value from A with 99% efficiency and some random Joe off the street can extract value with 5% efficiency. That gives person A an advantage. Unless the bilateral monopoly is truly perfect, both the resource and the skill/labor are completely useless without each other, the imperfections in the monopoly are going to provide pressure on the negotiating price. Internal factors of the people such as their wealth and utility functions may also play a role, as you point out, but I think the asymmetries in the monopoly are going to be a bigger factor.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
2mo 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
2mo ago
It can get especially bad on Reddit when you're in a back-and-forth conversation with someone that goes enough layers deep that probably nobody else is reading your comments except the responder, and you can see when they're downvoting each reply you make.
Oh hey, I've been playing a bunch of Warframe and Factorio as well. I can't get enough of games with in-depth crafting systems.
Do you know of any other games with similar progression systems to Warframe? Monster Hunter is kind of similar in crafting, but I'm more interested in the mastery system: "do all the things, collect one of every single weapon/armor/companion etc, and each thing you collect adds to your exp even if you never use it."
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