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MathWizard

formerly hh26

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joined 2022 September 04 21:33:01 UTC 

				
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MathWizard


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
formerly hh26

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 04 21:33:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Unusually expensive land is created by externalities of labor and capital.  If a bunch of people build businesses and and apartments and stuff in a certain place, it will cause the land value of surrounding areas to rise.  People working jobs and engaging in productive behaviors capture some of the value themselves, give some of the value to their customers, and have some of it diffuse into nearby land as rents.  Except in the rare case where one person owns all of the land in an area, this added rent value is captured by a different person than those who rightfully created it.


Therefore, the workers wages are already being stolen.  Well, not exactly stolen, it's not as if surrounding land owners are deliberately taking it from them.  It's automatically taken by the nature of economics, that's how externalities work.  Taxing it and then giving it back to the surrounding community actually gives the workers more of their own value.


At the very least, even if you're some radical libertarian who believes literally all taxes are theft, you should at least recognize land value taxes as the least bad tax for economic reasons of land values being inelastic, and thus a potential compromise given that you're never going to convince the majority of the population to shut down the entire government.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Are there any good centrist or right-wing think tanks in the U.S. that are respectable, principled, and might have interest in hiring a mathematical modeler that I could apply for jobs at?


For context, I have a PhD in math, I specialize in game theory and mathematical modeling.  I also have some experience with disease modeling, though not Covid specifically.  I am currently nearing the end of a postdoc research position at a University, and a few published papers and several drafts I'm still working on.  Over time I've felt less comfortable in academia as everything shifts less and all diversity stuff keeps getting worse.  It hasn't affected me directly much (though you can never tell when you don't hear back from a job application whether being a straight white male was the cause or not), but it's kind of uncomfortable, and some topics that I'm interested in I'm afraid to actually go into because the papers might be rendered unpublishable.  And just in general I feel the papers I publish don't actually matter all that much, and I suspect something more applied like this might feel more meaningful.


I'm still applying for some jobs at universities, but also industry jobs and am wondering if maybe a right wing think tank would be a good opportunity.  Given the left's capture of the Universities, this maybe implies there's a shortage of right-wing academics and I'd have a better shot of getting in?  But that's probably less true in math.  And I definitely don't want to work for some propaganda machine that just hacks studies together to conclude whatever they already believe is true.  I think that the left sometimes has legitimate points that are worth considering, and ideally would like to be able to make good scientific papers and mathematical models that give insight to people on both the left and right, and can potentially make the right stronger and smarter.


Bonus points for places that allow working remotely or are near the East Coast so I don't have to move very far, but at this point I'll take what I can get.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Has anyone at all been unbanned yet?  The most principled thing to do would be to create a formal, objective process for deciding who gets unbanned, and then the Trump decision logically follows from that process.  Therefore, Musk wouldn't actually know the answer until the process has been determined.  And maybe the Trump question is a big enough deal that it would bias the decision of how the process would work (maybe carving out exceptions to make it go one way or another), or maybe it doesn't.  I expect that most reasonable processes would end up unbanning Trump, but I guess it depends on the criteria (maybe potential unbanees need to jump through some hoops to demonstrate the unjustness of their ban, and Trump doesn't feel like going through that).


I have no idea of Musk is actually going to do things that way.  But if he is then there's like a 90% chance that Trump gets unbanned, but it isn't guranteed one way or another, so of course Musk can't commit to an answer yet.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Who is the ‘human’ in this example?




That's an entirely different question.  Obviously the LLM is not itself a human, but neither is a typwriter or computer which a human uses as a tool to write something.  So probably the copyright author would be the person who prompts the LLM and then takes its output and tries to publish it.  Especially if they are responsible for editing its text and don't just copy paste it unchanged.  You could make an argument that the LLM creator is the copyright holder, or that the LLM is responsible for its own output which is then uncopyrightable since it wasn't produced by a human.


But regardless of how you address the above question, it doesn't change my main point that the AI does not violate copyrights of humans it uses input from in any way differently from a human doing the same things that it does.  Copyright law is complicated, but there's a long history and a lot of precedents and individual issues tend to get worked out.  For this purpose, the LLM, or a human using LLM as an assistant, should be subject to the same constraints that human creators already are.  They're not "stealing" any more or less than humans already do by consuming each other's work.  You don't need special laws or rules or restrictions on it that don't already exist.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I'd welcome any thoughts people might have on what that might be.




Something along the lines of Trump's "Make America Great Again" but more concrete and effective.


1: Small businesses.  Make it way easier to start and run a small business.  Slash regulations, maybe taxes too.  Take like half the forms and policies and regulations that businesses have to do and either remove them or make them only apply to businesses over a certain size.  Make harsher anti-monopoly anti-corruption laws or just enforce existing ones more harshly on large businesses.  The American dream isn't that one day you might be a wageslave to a megacorp, it's that you can make it big by your own hard work.  Freedom and perseverance and all that.  This also will help the balance of power between labor and corporations, more small businesses means more competition for megacorps trying to convince employees to work for them, and a more credible threat that an underpaid employee can just quit as start their own business.


2: Infrastructure.  Build fancy buildings and cities and parks and bridges and highways.  A modern first world train system would be nice.  Cut the cost disease, be less wasteful, and do great things.  Create employment for working class people who build stuff, and probably bring some manufacturing jobs back.


Elon Musk seems remarkably well-suited towards being a figurehead or inspiration or actually in charge of parts of the above points.  He's good at taking things that everyone has been doing poorly, like space travel or electric cars or internet, things which everyone knows could be better but for some reason aren't, and actually doing it better.  And, importantly, these can be part of inspiring utopian visions about the future, not the past.  The internet allows for new decentralized employment like Uber or Airbnb, maybe self-employed tradesmen could use similar things to be plumbers or electricians or something, and maybe weird crypto stuff could allow workers and customers to coordinate without some large corporation pulling the strings and leeching the profits.  And fancy new technology makes building fancy new infrastructure possible.


3:  Family/Community.  This one is largely a return to the past, but part of the point of the right is that you don't destroy things just because they're old, you keep the good stuff.  The leftist future is one in which you are either an individual who can do whatever you want and cut people's throats to get ahead, or you are a member of a collective group determined by your sex/race/orientation determined by your birth.  The rightist future is one in which family and neighbors are bond together by shared traditions, cultures, and mutual duties to each other.  You don't just pack up and move to another city abandoning your friends and family every four years even if it would maximize your career trajectory.  You are loyal and act with honor even when it goes against your self-interest, because you actually care about the people around you, and they care about you.  Also, I think there is potential for this to go in future directions, as telecommunications, and the easier work-from-home meta caused by Covid allows for increased career opportunities for people who stay in their small hometowns with their extended families.


Republicans are too busy playing defense against the Democrats to build such a utopian vision, and too afraid of being cancelled to shrug off accusations of "-isms" and stick to their own vision of moral goodness.  And most of the voters are too uneducated and unambitious to demand such a utopian vision, or to demand honor and loyalty from their own politicians.  And the Democrats have been crying wolf against Republicans for so long that all such accusations are now ignored by Republican voters, allowing some actual wolves to mingle among them unnoticed.  It's a mess, and I'm almost as upset at the Republicans as I am at the Democrats for ruining the country.  But at least theoretically a utopian right wing vision of the future is possible and would be inspiring to people to vote for and genuinely good if accomplished.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				The Theory of Natural Selection is a tautology.
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This sounds intuitively true to me, but I've never explicitly noticed this before.  Do you know of a study/source measuring this, or is just obvious anecdotal trends?  And why do think it is this way?  Is it just that the Blue Tribe places intelligence on a pedestal and so care about it more when selecting friends and relationships, while Red Tribers are more down to earth?  Is it because of Blue Tribers congregating in universities and cities and that somehow drives this segregation, while Red Tribers are more likely to stay in their hometown and mingle with everyone else who lives there?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm going to try to steelman some of FC's points.  I don't necessarily fully agree with these, but I think they have some merit.  First, most of your comment seems to be premised on the idea that the objection is to converting all.  You keep repeating and extrapolating the phrase "abandoning the faith their forefathers" as if that, itself, is FC's core argument: that converting to a different faith is bad/traitorous.  This is an inherently relativist perspective, trying to be fair and treat all belief structures equally.  No Christians ever object to the notion of conversion in general, it is always a position that Christianity is actually true/good, and other religions, therefore conversion to Christianity is good and conversion away from it is bad.  It's possible to make all sorts of objections to this position, but the fact that you argue from a relativist perspective suggests you (or maybe FC, or both) are missing the point.


Second, independently from whether Christianity is true/good in some objective sense, there's the additional issue you don't seem to notice which is a simple pragmatic alliance.  Currently, Christianity is in the middle of being conquered by wokeism.  These are the two major factions argument FC seems to be putting forth, or maybe a steelman of their position, is that Christianity, as the defender and the prominent force for thousands of years, is the most realistic faction capable of actually defeating wokeism.  The criticism is not just that you didn't choose his prefered faction, but that, in the middle of a war between two major powers, you joined a minor third party with no hope of defeating either.  If you want to defeat woke-ism, you need to ally with or preferably join the Red Tribe for real, not play third party half-ally half-enemy where you're fighting against both.


Personally, I'm less optimistic than these arguments would imply about how realistic it is for Christianity to make a comeback and defeat woke-ism without significant Blue-Tribe support.  More realistically, I'm hopeful if we can defend for long enough then woke-ism will eventually collapse on itself and/or mutate into something less horrible and/or the Blue Tribe will come up with something less horrible which can outcompete woke-ism, which will then conquer and take over everything and be worse than Christianity but better than current woke-ism and our society won't collapse.  But I do think that Christianity has a powerful defense against woke-ism that non-woke atheists lack, which is a strong mostly-objective morality system.  We know what is right and what is wrong, and when progressives make moral arguments it's relatively easy for us to A. not be seduced by their arguments, and B. make strong defensive arguments against them.  And while these arguments aren't necessarily convincing to non-Christians if they rely on biblical principles which are not shared by non-Christians, but sometimes they are.  I don't think most atheists have the same level of moral conviction (a lot of Christians lack it too), which is why they keep ceding more and more ground to the leftists over time.  A lot of people don't care that much about moral philosophy, but they don't want to be a bad person.  If they don't already know what's right and wrong then they let someone else tell them what to do, the only question is whether it's the church or the diversity officers.  And, despite all of its many flaws throughout the years, if they're not going to think for themselves then I'd rather have people listen to the church than an alternate source.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The solution is to not lower the status of people with lower IQ.  It is possible, and quite likely, that we literally live in a world where black people, on average, have lower IQ than white people.  If true, this means that, in reality, one of the following must be true: people with lower IQ have the same moral value as people with higher IQ, or black people have less moral value than white people.


No amount of obfuscation, linguistic gymnastics, or averting ones gaze can avoid this dilemma.  You have to pick one of the two (technically there's a third option where unintelligent people have more value than intelligent people, but that's pretty niche).  An awful lot of people firmly believe that people with low IQ are lesser, which forces them to either accept reality and become racists, or deny reality to avoid the logical conclusion of their beliefs.  I would argue that the latter is just closeted racism because they believe unintelligent people are lesser, so all of the unintelligent black people who exist in reality are people they implicitly attribute as being lesser.  The bullet to bite is that unintelligent people are not automatically bad people, and you're not better than them just because you're smarter than them.  Once you do this, the entire structure of "racist truths" disintegrates, because you're not automatically assigning moral value or hatred to people just because of the way they were born.


The truth cannot be racist, because the truth does not assign moral value.  People do that.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You always have to be careful about controlling for confounders, but there's enough evidence in the same direction that I generally buy it.  HBD is probably true, but my argument is that its effect is significantly smaller than the effect from culture, so it's not an important priority for addressing or using to explain gaps.  It's not as simple as reasoning "Median househould income is $77k for white people and $46k for black people, but white people are smarter so everything is fine".  If HBD is false then with equal cultures, and absent racism, the median income for black people would also be $77k.  If HBD is true, then with equal cultures the median income with equal cultures might be $72k or something, something between $46k and $77k and closer to the latter than the former.  The gap is caused by multiple factors, and there is significant progress that can be made, and most but not all of the gap could theoretically be closed.  If HBD is true, then it will eventually be important to acknowledge as true so that someday if we reach the equilibrium we don't keep endlessly looking for racists and/or cultural issues, because the gap can't ever be closed completely.  But at the moment there's so much other stuff going on that it's only a small piece of the pie.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Besides the pro-life movement opposes birth control.




That's precisely my point.  It needs to change.  A lot of people are lazy and stupid, or just poor, and those are the people most likely to also be too lazy to pull out or time when they have unprotected sex, or think about long term consequences like pregnancy.  The pro-life movement needs to be on the forefront of not only providing and promoting free birth control, but pressuring people to use it.  Don't shame people for having premarital sex, shame people for having unprotected premarital sex, because that's the kind that actually causes harm.


If you're a rational person who plans ahead, I don't think there's a large practical difference between $10-20 per month and just free, for something as impactful as birth control.  But if you are lazy and impulsive there's a huge difference between not having condoms in your pocket and having sex anyway because you want to get laid, versus having a pile of condoms in your cabinets because the government and/or pro life movement keeps mailing them to you.  Or maybe they just keep having sex all the time without condoms but all of the women have IUDs because those are free now and they got tired of people pressuring them to please get one.  Or maybe it becomes a rite of passage for a girl to get one on her 18th birthday or something and it's just normal for everyone to have them until they actually want kids.


If people were smart and responsible, none of this would be necessary.  But also the abortion rate would be near 0 already.  The fact that it's not is pretty clear evidence that people are not smart and responsible.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 25, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Update to this post: https://www.themotte.org/post/498/smallscale-question-sunday-for-may-21/101809?context=8#context


where I wanted advice on getting an engagement ring for my girlfriend.  I have since proposed before getting the ring (as planned), it went wonderfully, and we are now engaged.  After looking at a bunch of examples together and honing in on concepts and features she found appealing (turns out she doesn't simply like flowers, which I already knew, but she really really really likes flowers), we settled on this ring


https://cms-media.taylorandhart.com/2021/11/11194729/Round_white_diamond_pear_diamond_halo_flower_engagement_ring-1000x1000.jpg


from Taylor and Hart.  It uses diamonds, but they use lab-grown diamonds, so I'm happy with that.  We considered substituting some colored gems in the flower, but then there's also leaves which would look a bit weird if we made them green, but would also look weird if we colored the rest of the flower but left them white.  Most importantly, my now-fiance thinks it's really pretty exactly how it is, so we don't want to change things in case it accidentally ends up looking worse.


Thank you for everyone who offered advice, regardless of whether I ended up using it or not.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for April 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


This means poor people benefit greatly from price discrimination: they get goods or services they want at a price they are willing to pay when otherwise they wouldn't be able to afford it.




No, the entire point is that they don't.  They benefit a tiny tiny bit from price discrimination.  If the maximum someone is willing to pay for a product is $10, and it costs $9.99, then they benefit by $0.01.  That is, they are barely coming off ahead at all, almost all of the benefit from that product they gain was lost to them in the $9.99 they spent and given to the producer.  You can sell five times as much product to five times as many poor people and create five times as much benefit, but none of them are gaining much benefit at all because the products are just barely worth it.


If you have a crippling leg injury, and a doctor cures it but charges so much money that the debt cripples your life 99% as much as the leg injury did, you have benefited... but just barely.


From the producer's standpoint, this is great.  Tons of value is being created by the increased number of exchanges.  Lots of people are incentivized to become producers... which benefits the people who are in a position to become producers and able to (assuming the market isn't an oligopoly that crushes small competitors).  And the increased trade does benefit customers... by like 1% because that's how much of this increased surplus they get to keep.


If the only two options are perfect price discrimination or unserved customers, then the price discrimination scenario is technically better for those particular customers.  But my goal is to find a third option that's better, because the price discrimination scenario isn't very good for anyone except producers.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


If I can ask an LLM for the "I have a dream" speech and it produces it, I have proven that the LLM contains a copy of the "I have a dream" speech and is therefore a copyright violation.




Except that LLM don't explicitly memorize any text, they generate it.  It's the difference between storing an explicit list of all numbers 1 to 100 {1,2,3...100}, and storing a set of instructions:  {f_n = n: n in [1,100]} that can be used to generate the list.  It has a complicated set of relationships between words that it understands, and is very refined such that if it sees the words "Recite the "I have a dream" speech verbatim", it has a very good probability of successfully saying each of the words correctly.  At least I think the better versions do, many of them would not actually get it word for word, because none of them have it actually memorized, they're generating it new.


Now granted, you can strongly argue, and I would tend to agree, that a word for word recitation by a LLM of a copyrighted work is a copyright violation, but this is analogous to being busted for reciting it in public.  The LLM learning from copyrighted works is not a violation, because during training it doesn't copy them, it learns from them and changes its own internal structure in ways that improve its generating function such that it's more capable of producing works similar to them, but does not actually copy them or remember them directly.  And it doesn't create an actual verbatim copy unless specifically asked to (and even then is likely to fail because it doesn't have a copy stored and has to generate it from its function)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


What exactly do all law abiding (even this qualifier isn't universal among US states) American citizens over 18, young and old, rich or poor, smart and dumb have; but which no non-citizen or child posseses?




Ignoring the non-sequitor and entirely separate issue of citizenship, one answer is legal independence from their parents.  If you give children the right to vote, the majority of them are just going to vote for whoever their parents tell them to.  This is not universal, some rebellious teenagers will stray and choose the other party, but most will not.  Even if they vote in secret, they could be pressured and interrogated by bad-faith parents afterwards and punished if the parent believes they voted incorrectly.  Children do not have the freedom or authority to decide when they go to bed, how can they be expected to run the country?


Additionally, age is the only fair and equal way of addressing intelligence while still weighting the vote of all people approximately equally over the course of their lives.  That is, it would be nice if smarter and more mature people voted while less intelligent people did not.  But if you implement IQ tests or something comparable as requirements to vote then some people would be permanently disenfranchized, reducing their ability to have their voices and concerns weighed appropriately by politicians (especially when IQ correlates with other traits and demographics), and massively decreasing their loyalty to the nation.  But everyone ages, so if you disenfranchize children, they eventually become adults and get to vote just like everyone else.  Every person has an equal amount of time not voting before they get old enough and then vote, so nobody is unfairly treated.  The only people who never get to vote are people who die before they turn 18, which is a tragedy we already attempt to prevent for other reasons.  As such, we accomplish part of the goal of preventing unintelligent votes, with very few of the moral or practical costs that a more restrictive policy would entail.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				2+2 = not what you think
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You can do equally annoying semantic tricks with pretty much anything, it's just harder to get away with it with when it isn't math:


Ie, "The Sun is smaller than a pebble"   - - (Pebble is an alternate name I made up for the Milky Way)


"Grass isn't green" - - (I've defined Green to be 00FF00 in Hexadecimal, and this grass here is 28CF0E, which I have named "moss", so the colors aren't equal)


etc.


When you say things without rigorously defining every word ahead of time, there is an implicit promise that your words mean approximately what they usually mean in that language.  Most words and concepts have reasonably well understood meanings, or such can be inferred via context.  And this is almost always a good thing because it enables people to have conversations without carrying dictionaries around, not some close minded thing that needs to be challenged and abused with pedantic tricks and deception.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for April 12, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Where Have All the Good Men Gone and Where Are All the Populists?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'd like to chime in here, because although I lean libertarian in general, am very fond of capitalism as a system, and don't think corporations are fundamentally evil to the very core as /u/ScrimbloBimblo states, I do think that in practice most large corporations are evil.  And I mean that in the same sense I would if an individual person behaved the way they do, I would call that person evil too.


Because human beings are not profit maximizing agents.  In-so-far as a person might be described as rational and thus utility maximizing, their utility function is not literally just money.  People value lots of things like friendships and relationships, and honesty, and reputation, and their conscience.  If you leave a bicycle unlocked, most people aren't going to steal it even if they could get away with it.  Obviously if enough people pass it it will eventually get stolen, but the amount of people that have to pass it is more than one.  If you make an informal agreement with someone, most people are not going to obsessively look for opportunities to screw you over.  If your friend lends you $5 they are unlikely to obsessively hound you about paying them back and calculate the exact amount of interest you owe them.  Obviously people like this do exist, and they're assholes, and most good-natured people try to avoid them.  The more greedy, money obsessed, and sociopathic someone is, the more corners they're willing to cut.  And even if they follow the law and restrict themselves to nominally consensual economic deals they still force people around them to constantly be on guard about what deals they make because the sociopath is trying to trick them to get more money.


And a large corporation nonrandomly selects for these people and promotes them and socially and legally insulates them from the consequences their actions would face if done as an individual.  It's much harder to shame someone for scamming an old granny out of her life savings if it's a faceless bureaucrat "just doing their job" than if it's the local small town repair shop run by Tom.  It's much harder to pressure Tom to give the money back, or spread the word that Tom is a jerk and everyone should boycott him, if Tom just acts on behalf of a multinational corporation with only two meaningful competitors, both of whom are equally scummy because they similarly promote sociopaths.


Ethical corporations should seek profit in the same way that you do when selling your labor: as an important consideration that you want to get a fair value for and need in order to survive, but not literally the only thing that matters in the world such that you're willing to tradeoff literally all other concerns for marginal slivers of extra cash.  Technical "consent" is neither necessary nor sufficient to define ethical behavior, though it is an important component.   Corporations, and the people making decisions within them, should be held to the same ethical standards that everyone else is when making economic transactions.  And I think ethical companies do exist, but typically the larger one is the less likely that becomes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Whose push?  If he's just a puppet letting someone else pull the strings, then isn't that person or group effectively the President?  How do you have Democracy and accountability if the literal President is just a figurehead representing unknown people in a political party?  Does every Democratic Senator vote to decide what Joe Biden's next position should be?  Does Nancy Pelosi call all the shots unilaterally and functionally equivalent to being the president herself except she gets none of the blame or credit if things go badly?  Is Hillary Clinton the puppetmaster and electing Joe Biden was politically equivalent to electing her?  Is the CEO of CNN actually influencing Joe Biden by implicitly threatening to smear him if he doesn't do what they want?  We don't know.  And next election cycle, if Joe Biden steps down and another puppet steps up you might have the exact same person/people pulling their strings, bypassing term limits, and pretending to be starting fresh with a new reputation, forgetting all the mistakes they made in the past.


I very much want a President who has policies and agendas, declares what they are openly, honestly, and publicly, and then sticks to them as much as reasonably possible.  Because then we the people can decide which collections of policies and agendas we actually agree with and vote for whichever President has the best.  Because we the people are supposed to be in charge, not shady politicians making secret deals behind the scenes and avoiding responsibility.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As a male (but not an especially masculine one), this is also very much not my experience, but I notice that most of the men I know also don't seem to have this either, even ones who are more masculine than me in general.  So clearly something is wrong here.  I only know my own experiences, and I don't ever think about literally nothing.  I don't know what that even means, other than being unconscious.  But I don't think it matches most of the men I know, so I'm mostly just extrapolating from there.  It's probably not true, and if it's is true for some men it's probably not true of people who I encounter in my filter bubble.  I'm torn between three possible hypotheses.  In approximate order of how likely I think they are:


1: This is a made up stereotype based on conversation preferences.  Nobody really experiences nothing in their mind, they just daydream about unimportant stuff and then when asked about it either lose their train of thought and forget, or are embarrassed by how silly it was.  It's easier to tell your wife that you were thinking about "nothing" than it is to tell her you were imagining the broader ecological implications if squirrels didn't have tails, or that you were trying to find symmetries in the patterns on the wall, and then have her judge you and ask questions about what's wrong with you that you'd think about something silly like that.  Or if you were imagining having a threesome with two of your favorite celebrities, and you think she'd get angry if you admitted something like that.  It's entirely possible that enough men (not all men, but a non-negligible number) have negative experiences with women questioning their inner thoughts and starting conflicts over it, or they just don't enjoy having conversations when they're trying to have alone time to think, and they learn to say "nothing" as the easiest response.  And if enough do this, and men do this more often then women, then  it becomes a stereotype.


2: This is an intelligence thing, not a gender thing.  Maybe people with IQ below a certain threshold really do space out and think about nothing sometimes.  I suspect if you were thinking about literally nothing you'd be trapped there forever, you have to have some sort of route for external stimulus to reach your brain, but I suppose your conscious mind could be off while your unconscious is still on.  Or more likely they're thinking about very little which gets rounded off to "nothing" when queried.  This is pretty far from my experience, I suppose the closest I can think of is when I'm really sleepy and my thoughts seem to slow and get muddled.  Maybe some people do this on purpose as a sort of micronap?  I don't know.  If this is the correct explanation, then I can think of two possibilities for why this is stereotyped as a gender thing.  One possibility is that it is socially uncouth to criticize women in certain ways, especially about their intelligence, so if men and women both do this men who talk about women doing this will be criticized for being misogynistic, while women who talk about men doing this will be sympathized with.  The other possibility is the male variability hypothesis.  If this only occurs in people with IQ below 90, and men have higher IQ variance, then more men will have this feature, therefore the stereotype might get applied to men more.  It could even be the case that there is a genuine gender component to this in combination with the IQ thing.  Like, maybe it only happens to women with IQ less than 80 and men with IQ less than 90, so some couples with the same IQ might see differences across gender.  Heck, it could even be the case that it never happens to women, and happens to all men with IQ less than 90, and it would still be consistent with lots of men in general having it, while none of the men you or I interact with have it.


3: This is a genuine gender thing.  Some sort of hormone or brain structure or socially nurtured psychological patterns cause some men to sometimes think about nothing.  That is, there is a common causal source (other than IQ) of many correlated masculine traits, and empty brain.  The stereotypes are right, even if not universal, and you and I are just less masculine than all of the meatheads out there.  Maybe I'm wrong about the inner worlds of the intelligent but not feminine men around me, and they do sometimes think about literally nothing, just not when they're around me.  That seems vaguely plausible, if you actually pay attention while you're at work and socializing and save your sitting around thinking about nothing when you're alone at home.


Again, I think 1 is the most likely, then 2, then 3.  But I suppose any are possible.