MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
10mo ago
My point is that this will reward upper class people more than lower class people. The correlation between "overtime hours worked" and "lower class people" has no reason to persist under the paradigm. Upper class people have more leverage to negotiate with their employers for overtime shenanigans, more institutional savvy and networking to figure out that this is a loophole that exists and is worth exploiting, and higher tax brackets that make it more profitable to avoid. John Manager who is a pencil pusher earning $200k/yr working 60 hour per week is going to benefit from this, while Billy Bob who struggles to get by working 20 hours each at three different part time jobs gets nothing, because none will hire him full time and have to pay benefits. This is a regressive tax relief, and then the government has less tax revenue and either has to raise taxes elsewhere to make up the difference, or cut spending. And if you were going to do that you'd be better off with a flat income tax reduction across the board, or if you still want to cater to working class then a tax reduction to lower income tiers.
This is probably good politics because it superficially sounds like it helps working class people, because a lot of them work overtime right now and their bosses are salaried. Lots of things sound good if you only look at immediate. first order effects and ignore long term second order effects. Printing free money to hand out as stimulus during Covid while all the supply chains shut down superficially sounds like it would help too, and yet here we are.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7d ago
Again, these are correct signals that I am sending intentionally. This IS a major part of my life. I DO spend at least 25 hours a week on anime and games. If you are looking to do "all the other stuff" that isn't gaming and anime and squeeze it around then you're not my 1 in 1000 and I don't want to marry you. That just sounds like a recipe for constant conflict and strife. While some amount of compromise is important in a relationship, and you should sometimes do things the other person wants to do for their sake, the less it's necessary because you both want the same things, the better. If one person expects to go out and do things all the time and the other wants to stay home all the time then at any point in time only one of them is getting their way. So if anyone sees this and realizes that I'm not the right person for them because I'm literally not the right person for them then good, we can both save some time and try to find someone more compatible. In practice, this did turn into me getting very few hits for precisely that reason. Most women saw my profile, made this assumption about me (correctly), they thought this was a negative trait, and then they didn't want to talk to me. Mission accomplished.
Because one did want to talk to me. Instead of dating and/or marrying someone like that, I found someone with whom I get to keep doing videogames and anime and my wife will do them with me. Well, she doesn't care for anime that much, but we play lots of games together. Sometimes we're just sitting next to each other playing completely separate games and she'll giggle as the monsters die and it's adorable. And sometimes she'll want to go somewhere and do something and I'll suck it up and go because it's not very often, because she's mostly like me and genuinely wants to be at home most of the time.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7d ago
One in a thousand find a gamer girl. But at the cost quite often of having hundreds of women see anime and gaming in the bio and deciding to not engage.
This is the point. It's not that for each random woman who sees your profile you roll a random die and there's a 99% chance you lose her interest. It's that for each woman when she was born and grew up life rolled a random die and there's a 99% chance that she became the kind of person who would lose interest in a man who likes anime and video games. If you want to date a woman who hates anime and videogames then I suppose you might consider scaring her off to be a bad thing, but if you want to find that gamer girl then the normie woman is an obstacle. A waste of your time. Instead of spending hours, days, years of your life sending messages and spending time with women who would have been scared off by videogames and anime but you kept by playing it cool, you could instead scare them all off and then the only people left are the gamer girls.
You don't have time to date 1000 women. If you're some super hot gigachad I suppose you could if you go on a brand new date every day for three years without breaks or repeats. But realistically, that's way too many. But if you scare 99% of them off (and not randomly, you're scaring the worst 99% off) you DO have time to message and date the remaining 10 until you find the perfect one in a thousand.
MathWizard
Good things are good
4mo ago
Who is the best, most sane, and intelligent, centrist or left-leaning commentator/podcaster you can recommend for me to listen to? I'm a bit worried that as the Motte trends further rightward that I'm in too much of a filter bubble, and most of the stuff I naturally listen to is right-leaning, because the stuff that's explicitly leftist is braindead and infuriating. I don't want someone ranting about how Trump is Hitler, I want people good, calm, and reasoned defenses for their positions that I don't already agree with so I can understand their position and maybe find some insights that I previously dismissed as braindead because I only heard the stupid version of it before. I used to like Sargon of Akkad for this, because he was in a nice centrist zone: left on some issues but right on others, but every year he drifts further right and I don't think he serves this purpose anymore.
I like to listen to people talk about stuff while I'm playing casual games that don't take up too much brain power or require audio themselves, so multi-hour broadcasts with a lot of backlog are ideal. I do read things sometimes, obviously since I'm here, but I'm mostly looking for audio right now.
MathWizard
Good things are good
6mo ago
But it doesn’t always line up. I think conservatives should be more afraid of climate change, for example. Particularly if you don’t want lots of immigrants coming.
It has always confused me why conservatives aren't the party of environmentalists and climate conservation. It's literally an attempt to prevent change. I can easily imagine a world where progressives are trying to build an economic utopia of plenty in order to make cheap goods for the poor, while the conservatives rail against the evil bureaucrats for destroying our god-given nature just to make numbers on a spreadsheet go up. And blaming foreigners for having terrible pollution and recycling policies (which they do).
You occasionally see this point trotted out as a counterpoint to liberal climate change policies (our country barely contributes to climate change, look at China's emissions), but always as a gotcha to shut down interventions, not because they actually care about China destroying the environment. It's weird. I don't understand why we live in the world we live in other than "left = government intervention" I guess. But the right usually supports government intervention if it's to prevent something they consider evil, and I would expect the destruction of nature to count.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10mo ago
What are the laziest healthy foods I can make. I'm fairly picky about what foods I like, but reasonably unpicky about what foods I'll tolerate. I don't have a clear concise way to list out all of them other than to say I have the palate of a five year old. Probably literally, I don't think my food preferences have changed substantially since I was a child other than an increased ability to tolerate foods I don't like.
I don't like cooking. I'm bad at it, it takes too long. I make simple things like soup or pizza, especially if I can make a bunch at once which increase the amount of food per effort, but foods which require less prep time are preferred. My go-to lazy healthy snack is raw vegetables. I will happily munch on whole tomatoes or baby carrots, which is just as easy as opening a bag of potato chips. But I need more variety, and something slightly fancier and slightly less lazy is acceptable. What are your thoughts and suggestions for maximizing health and taste per effort?
MathWizard
Good things are good
2d ago
I grew up in what I would consider a sane, earnest, evangelical church. Conservative-ish, but clearly more progressive than what you describe here.
We were taught about duties and obligations, but without the racism or sexism or inherent birthright class that you cannot escape from. Your role is determined by your talents. You should serve others in the best way you can based on what you're good at, because God designed each person to be unique and made them good at different things, therefore they naturally slot into different roles. The Parable of Talents was frequently taught, and metaphors were made to parts of the body, which each serve a different function but all collectively contribute to the whole. Another version of this was "Godly Gifts". Some people have the "gift of giving" which means they have a talent which allows them earn lots of money and donate to others in need (the church/missionaries, general charity, or just people who they meet who are struggling and need help). Some people have the "gift of leadership" which means they have social skills and can organize events or manage tasks. Some people have the "gift of service" meaning they are good at and/or enjoy doing tasks that help people like volunteering at soup kitchens or picking up litter or helping an old lady repair her house. Some people having "gift of caring" which usually means childcare, helping at a nursery or donating free babysitting. It's not your role as a man or a woman to do all of the things that society coded to be appropriate for your gender, it's your role as a Christian to love your neighbor as yourself, and to demonstrate that love in the best way you could based on your knowledge of yourself what the best way for you to effectively help people. If men and women statistically happen to have different talents most of the time, then most of the time the roles they filled would be largely gendered. But if you happen to be an outlier and be good at a role more typical of the other gender then that is something to be celebrated, not punished. I remember going with my Dad to help repair a fence and every single person on the repair team was male. One time we went to paint a house and everyone was male except one woman who came with her husband. 90% of the people on nursery duty during church were female, but ~10% were male, because that's the proportion of people who volunteered. When we were old enough my brothers and I were encouraged by our parents to volunteer in the nursery at least once so we could try it out and see if we liked it. We didn't, so didn't go back, but that's entirely the point. Your gender is correlated with your talent, but your talent and choice determines your role.
General duties and proscribed behaviors were similarly fair and general. Women should dress modestly and avoid tempting men into sin because everyone is supposed to dress modestly and avoid tempting others into sin, and everyone is supposed to resist that temptation as well. It happens to be the case that men are more prone to temptation and modern society normalizes women dressing less modestly to take advantage of this, but it is a shared duty and a man dressing immodestly is considered equally bad even if in practice the issue rarely came up. When the Christian summer camp I went to had issues with complaints about the teen girls wearing bikinis being immodest, and their attempts at mandating more modest female swimwear didn't quite work, they implemented a rule that everyone had to wear a T-shirt in the pool, because they didn't want to make an unfair rule that only affected the girls.
This is what social conservativism is supposed to look like. It's stupid and wasteful to force people into a mold that they don't fit. To take a man who loves taking care of children and tell them "you were born in the wrong body, you have to work instead" and take a woman who is intelligent, ambitious, and has dreams of becoming a lawyer and tell her "Careers are for men, go raise children." Just take both of them and suggest that they marry each other. They can collectively fulfill the role of creating a happy healthy family and contributing to society. The team is healthy. Why does it matter which genitals are held by the person doing each subtasks as long as the job gets done? As long as people consider themselves part of an organization (The body of Christ, or just society in general), are aware that their general role is to help that organization effectively, and make sure that they are contributing to those needs to the best of their ability, then the jobs will get done. Someone will grow the food because some people are born with the talent and/or desire to work on farms. Someone will clean the house and prepare food for the family because some people actually like those things, and some people just dislike it less than their partner. And usually that will be the wife because usually women like those things more, but if a husband and wife agree to do it differently then by all means do it differently. And if nobody genuinely wants to do it then one of you has to step up and do it anyway because it needs to get done and, if you both genuinely love each other and are being good Christians then you'll want to serve the other person.
I agree with you that conservative converts lack this. But it's not the gendered or class based norms that are missing, it's the authentic (and/or socially expected/pressured) love for others and your community. The team mentality. It's hard to devote your life to just take care of kids and not earn money if nobody else is giving you money, you'll starve. It's hard to work a bunch and leave your kids in daycare if the daycare is some faceless organization with 30 rotating and misbehaving kids rather than the local mom you know and trust from church with four kids of her own who your kids grow up with and become best friends with. It's hard to help the homeless man get back on your feet by letting him sleep on your couch for two months if he's a drug-addicted kleptomaniac who might shit under your sofa and rob you blind rather than the guy you know and trust from church who everyone vouches is hardworking but lost his job due to the economy. And then ten years later when you fall on hard times he hands you a check for $10,000 because he worked hard and got a job and is doing fine now and remembers how you helped him recover. You can't do that if everyone is always out for themselves and only interfaces through official, bureaucratic, profit-maximizing corporations. You have to have love.
MathWizard
Good things are good
13d ago
I'll admit that I don't follow politics super closely, so could have missed something, but I have literally never heard any right wing person defend the use of fentanyl. None have ever said that fentanyl is good, or that people should have fentanyl, or even done the George Floyd thing of portraying fentanyl-users as victims of someone other than themselves.
I might be missing some large coalition of right-wing fentanyl apologists, but I think it's more likely that you're tilting at strawmen here.
MathWizard
Good things are good
20d ago
That never held water. All people, regardless of their sex or sexual orientation, can marry someone of the opposite sex of any sexual orientation. Gay men are just as free and equally allowed to marry a woman as any straight man. If the gay man doesn't want to marry a woman, that's his choice, but he's legally allowed to.
And pretty much all of the equality under the law anti-discrimination stuff has carveouts for compelling state interests. Like, say, bearing and raising children and ensuring the survival of the species.
Telling gay people that it's illegal to have sex with each other would be one thing: the state intervening in a place where it has little compelling interest or jurisdiction (an argument could be made about preventing the spread of STDs, but it's weak, and promiscuous straight people do that too). But marriage, at least from a legal perspective, is a privilege the state recognizes for people to incentivize the formation of healthy and stable families, which gay people do not do. Arguing it's "equal protection under the law" is like arguing that childless people should get the same tax deductions and/or welfare aid as people with seven children because otherwise you're discriminating against the childless.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7mo ago
This. I think "don't ask don't tell" is an excellent policy that needs to be the norm in the entire culture. If I am not in or considering a romantic/sexual relationship with you, then I don't need to know about your weird fetishes, and you don't need to know about mine. Even if it's not weird, even if a straight man just really likes tits, I don't need to hear him announcing it and going on about it in public and making it his entire identity. It's tacky. Keep it to yourself, or talk about it in private with your close friends.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
They are increasing functions with respect to each other, but the effect is nonlinear. That is, if you make twice as many pizzas, people will generally be more happy, but less than twice as happy. You can only physically eat so much pizza, you only like pizza so much, and there are a bunch of things you care about that aren't food.
So first, let's construct scenarios where material productivity increases but utility decreases utility, starting with unambiguous but somewhat contrived and trivial ways that form a proof by example, and gradually transition into more sophisticated but debatable examples
-A bakery that produces 10 pizzas per day and serves them to customers, VS a bakery that produces 100 pizzas per day and shunts them off to a warehouse to rot. (Utility is derived via consumption, not production)
-A bakery that produces 10 pizzas per day and serves them to hungry poor people, VS a bakery that produces 100 pizzas per day and sends them all to the penthouse suite of a single really fat rich person who eats them all himself. (Utility per pizza is higher the fewer you already have)
-A bakery that produces 10 pizzas per day using the labor of 1 person working for 2 hours, who then goes home to his family and kids afterwards, VS a bakery that produces 11 pizzas per day using the labor of 1 person working for 16 hours, who goes home exhausted with most of his day gone. (Total output has gone up, but the cost has gone up more, so efficiency is lower)
-A bakery that produces 10 pizzas per day using the labor of 1 person working for 2 hours, who then goes home to his family and kids afterwards, VS a bakery that produces 80 pizzas per day using the labor of 1 person working for 16 hours every single day, who goes home exhausted with most of his day gone. (Pizza:labor efficiency is equal, but TIME also has nonlinear utility, so the quality of life for the worker has decreased even if he gets paid 8 times as much)
-A bakery that produces 10 pizzas per day using the labor of 1 person working for 2 hours, VS A bakery that produces pizzas with literally no labor or ingredient cost, but the pizzas somehow mess with their consumer's brains such that they to lose the ability to experience happiness ever again. (Obviously the most contrived example, but hopefully clearly pointing out the distinction).
The point being, that although all else being equal, more material production on its own is strictly superior to less material production for the same costs, all else is rarely equal. Therefore, increases in material production should be correlated with but distinct from actual utility. The biggest counterexample is the industrial revolution. Material production has, in reality, increased 100x. The wellbeing and happiness and prosperity of people has not increased 100x. It's gone up, for sure. But some things have gotten worse to compensate, and most things just have improved by less than a factor of 100x. The amount of joy you get from looking at art is less than a hundred times better than it was in the past. The enjoyability of food is less than a hundred times better. The amount of value you get from socialization is less than a hundred times more. Oh sure, you have access to a hundred times as much art, or food, or social connections via the internet, but you can't actually convert that into internal value, utility, at anywhere near perfect efficiency because you have bottlenecks based on time and biology and psychology. This is why Bill Gates isn't running around being thousands of times happier than everyone else: it doesn't work that way.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10mo ago
I dislike my political enemies, I don't hate them so much that I wish they were dead. I don't consider lethally culling their members or potential members in order to decrease their voting base to be a worthwhile tradeoff even if it's easy or even free. If you gave me a button which would cause all of my political opponents to instantly drop dead, I would not press it. Even if you gave me a button that only caused 20% or 5% or whatever percent would be enough to swing an election in my preferred side's favor, I still would not press it, because while I do think the right would make better policies than the left, I don't think they would be so much better as to be worth the lives of that many millions of people. Except via abortion, because that actually does cost millions of lives. But conceding abortion in order to eugenically cull the left over generations in order to win in order to outlaw abortion is circular and ridiculous and wouldn't work that way.
If we are willing to invoke eugenic methods, either to reduce the number of lefty voters or just decrease the number of degenerate criminals, why not do it non-lethally? How about free birth control? Same long term outcome, but nobody has to die.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10mo ago
I think the rebuttal would be to point out that she's been VP for 4 years, and neither she nor Biden nor the other Democrats have done or tried to do most of those things, and it's off-brand for them to even try. If Kamala promises to build a wall and it will be "uge! bigger and better than any wall ever built before. The best wall!" Trump will call her a liar. Now granted, Trump also didn't build a wall, but he tried, and can blame the Democrats for not letting him.
Kamala is restricted to promises that are consistent with Democrat positions, at least if she doesn't want to get called out as a blatant liar. And avoid alienating the Democrat voters.
My understanding of the alt-right is that their typical proposed solution to the problem of racial minorities is segregated ethnostates. We divide up the U.S. and each group of people gets their own country with only their own race, and from then on they suffer the consequences of their own behavior.
Less explicitly spoken, but there's also usually an undercurrent of schadenfreude where they believe the racial minorities are uncivilized savages who will create a crime-ridden hellhole without white people to subsidize them with wellfare and policing, but this is justified on account of them doing it to themselves. They don't want to directly exterminate the minorities, but some of them do secretly hope the minorities to exterminate each other and prove their racism correct in the process. But they don't especially care about the second part, because they get their white ethnostate either way. Once the minorities are out of sight, out of mind, it doesn't matter what happens to them because the white ethnostate can live up to its glorious potential or whatever.
I don't want to steelman the neo-nazis too hard, because I haven't spoken to very many of them and I suspect that lots of them are the way you describe. But I don't think most of them would be too opposed to the above approach (especially since there's some overlap with the alt-right). Some sort of plan like "Kick Palestine out and give all the land to Israel, then force all of the Jews around the world to move to Israel and they can have their own country, then remove all financial and military support from Israel and let them fend for themselves." would be the sort of plan that, on the face of it, does not require extermination. It would still be really awful for all the people who get their lives upended, and might lead to them dying if the Islamic states gang up on them, but it's not the level of hatred and evil that "Gas the Jews" is. I could have a reasoned discussion with someone who thinks me and people who are like me are ruining society and should live in our own separate society. I would get angry and heated trying to argue with someone who wants to exterminate me and people who are like me (if I thought enough people were taking them seriously and they weren't just some isolated troll). The former implies some form of thought and logic and reason, that this person is genuinely trying to make a better society and is just confused about how to do that, the latter indicates thought-terminating hatred from them as they jump to the most simple, obvious, and evil "solution".
Sidenote: there's also the even more nuanced take, which I wouldn't even consider to be "Nazi" (since I tentatively endorse it myself and most self-described Nazis wouldn't think goes far enough), but would definitely be called Nazi by some people, is that we should investigate corporations and universities and whatnot for discriminatory practices related to Jewishness with the same lens and at the same standards that we use for racial discrimination of all other kinds (ideally not quotas, but actual influence in decision-making), and punish discrimination against Jews AND in favor of Jews symmetrically (and also punish discrimination against AND in favor of white people). I think a lot of antisemitism is driven by Jews seeming to get the same double-standard of the law and society that the other minorities get: letting you get away with discriminating in favor of them but not against them.
MathWizard
Good things are good
24d ago
How easy is it to smuggle a nuke, and how long would it remain viable once smuggled?
My impression of nuclear prevention and watchfulness is that it takes a lot of science and infrastructure to refine uranium into a usable state for weapons, and you can't really build all of that stuff without a lot of commotion that foreign powers will notice.
But lots of nations already have all of that infrastructure, and the country wanting nukes only needs the end product. If country A without nukes allied with country B with nukes, would country B be able to use their own infrastructure to do most of the work and then secretly pass them enough weapons grade uranium and/or assembled nuclear warheads to stick into missiles that everyone else thinks are non-nuclear? And then several years later when it became relevant they announce "Tada! We have nukes!"
Or would this be immediately caught while happening and result in massive international penalties for countries A and or B?
MathWizard
Good things are good
3mo ago
The issue, as they point out, is that outcomes are heterogeneous. If the outcome is a combination of your decision and random noise and circumstance outside of your control, then outcome will be weakly correlated with the actual value you provide. Half of punishments and rewards will be deserved, and half will be simply responding to the whim of fate.
If your punishment/reward mechanism is long-term enough, like say the profits of a company that can accumulate over time and wash out the negatives with positives, then risky but positive expectation behaviors will work. If your mechanism is "fire any CEO who has a year with negative profit, no matter why it turned out negative" then you're likewise going to incentivize conservative behavior that guarantees the bare minimum at the cost of unlucky but smart people who take risks with positive expected value.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3mo ago
I have been using Suno AI to make music about silly events and inside jokes that amuse me. I have a song about my favorite character in Gloomhaven, a song about how much I hate snow, a song about my wife being a loot goblin in a game, a song making fun of some redneck who harassed my brother, a song about a tiny plant my wife got in a toilet-shaped pot that we put on top of our toilet, etc...
Most of them sound like real songs you might hear on the radio. Nothing super profound, but not terrible. Well, actually probably 80% of the time it's terrible, but as usual with AI you discard the garbage and retry and reprompt until you get something good. Occasionally I write the lyrics myself from scratch, but most of the time I prompt Chat GPT on a topic and then tweak the lyrics to fit the context better before giving them to Suno to make a song. It's wonderful, and I am gradually accumulating a playlist of actually good songs that mean something to me.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7mo ago
That's merely the distinction between why they think it's wrong in the first place, not the harm reduction variable.
That is, a general form of the "Harm Reduction" argument says that if thing A is bad because it leads to bad outcomes, then a decriminalized harm reduction environment where it can be done more safely with fewer negative outcomes is good because, although the thing is still bad, it's less bad here and they were going to do it anyway.
The tradeoff is that you are implicitly endorsing the behavior in exchange for this harm reduction. This argument doesn't really depend on the type of harm involved. If someone is being non-consensually harmed by DV, and this is extra bad, then the harm reduction is even more good, and the implicit endorsement and incentives are more bad, and presumably these are proportional so it should still be worthwhile or not for the same reasons as with drug use.
I suppose you could try to make specific mathematical arguments about the tradeoff values where harm reduction facilities for DV would be less effective at reducing harm and more legitimizing to DV such that the net effect would flip signs for this but not for drugs, but we've never tried it before, nobody has that data, and nobody who advocates for harm reduction for drugs seems to do any math or acknowledge tradeoffs in the first place.
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
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Redundancy: Axe already has a meaning. It's primarily a noun, a tool/weapon that chops things. It's only a verb when you mean hitting something with an axe, in which case it's very much not very friendly to axe someone. Any language change that overlaps other meanings receives a penalty. I suppose the contraction "it's" overlaps the possessive "its", and being able to tell the difference matters: it will almost always be clear whether you meant to ask something or hit someone with an axe, so this isn't a huge point against it, but it is a point.
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Efficiency. "It's" is faster and easier to say than "it is". I very highly doubt that the legacy is actually people hearing, remembering, and pronouncing "it is" wrong, so much as being lazy and pronouncing it quickly. People who are entirely aware of what "it is" means might choose to say "it's" to save time. Meanwhile, "Axe" and "Ask" are approximately the same length to speak or write, and I think "axe" actually takes slightly more time/effort in the middle of a sentence because it doesn't flow as well. Nobody would ever use "axe" on purpose unless it's to fit in with other people who already do it by mistake.
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Momentum. I am not an etymologist, I don't know exactly when/why/how "it's" became a thing, but by this point it is clearly established, while "axe" is not. Maybe it was a mistake at the time when "it's" became a thing and if people had resisted it then we could have less ambiguity about "its" (and might be allowed to use an apostrophe like we do with every other possessive). I'm not sure. But at this point it has been established and people understand it and use it. The primary purpose of language is to communicate with each other, consensus is incredibly useful in that regard, so all changes are immediately suspect and need to have positive reasons to justify themselves. If the majority of people said "axe" and some people started saying "ask" instead, I would oppose that on the same grounds.
MathWizard
Good things are good
4d ago
I think the "criminals" aspect of this is a red herring, and the real issue is the infidelity and "messaging multiple men" part. If she was a single mother messaging one man in prison, and he wanted to become the father of her kids, there wouldn't be an issue. If she was married and messaging a dozen non-criminal men and promising them to become the father of her kids they would end up in a similar risky situation.
The solution here which seems best suited to curtail dangerous behavior and not end up applied to ordinary good-faith actors seems to be some sort of child-protecting infidelity law. Or maybe just some sort of disclosure thing: don't tell multiple people that they can parent your kids without them knowing about each other. That way more benign cases like getting a new boyfriend while a divorce is being finalized, or consensual polyamory are not affected, while secretly cheating with a dozen people who become emotionally attached to a kid and then want to fight each other and/or kidnap the kid becomes illegal.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7d ago
There's a difference between someone sharing all of your interests, and someone who is willing to tolerate all of your interests. Even if they don't share the same hobbies, you don't want to date someone who fundamentally is unwilling to accept a part of you. If someone is going to be scared off by me liking anime, I want to scare them off instantly, not 5 dates later when they find out. Now, granted, there is some middle ground where some people might be willing to accept anime in someone who they already know is sane and not a pedophile but would screen it off on a stranger, but that still indicates some level of judgemental that I personally would rather filter out too.
And beyond the truly negative stereotypes, it signals that you're the kind of guy who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much.
Yes, this. This is who I am, this is who I deliberately signaled that I am. The kind of person I filtered for is someone who not only doesn't have a problem with this, but sees it as a positive. The woman who I eventually found and married is the kind of woman who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much. We have literally never gone out on a restaurant date just the two of us, because neither of us enjoys that environment and only go in a group when socially pressured by friends and family. When given the choice, we usually stay home and play games, where we both want to be.
Positives and negatives are subjective and high variance. And ultimately are scored from the single unique perspective of the person you end up with. They are not averaged. Your value as a romantic partner is not the average value ascribed to you by women collectively, but the value from the perception of the one person you actually end up with. So if you have niche interests and traits with high variance, where rather than everyone slightly disliking them, some people strongly dislike them and other rarer people strongly like them, then you want to filter for and find the people who like them, and then they become positive traits.
MathWizard
Good things are good
4mo ago
I just discovered and have been binging "The Years of Apocalypse" on Royal Road. Probably the most succinct summary I can give is: "It's almost Mother of Learning." Less rational, less super deep in depth worldbuilding, less comedy, less overarching grand mystery time loop shenanigans. But only very slightly less. Second best time loop story I've ever read, it's fantastic.
MathWizard
Good things are good
6mo ago
So, when we are trying to decide who the liars are, it seems likely that Trump and Vance were speaking closer to the truth, even if the specifics were off, than everyone else...
That's generally my impression of Trump and the Maga phenomenon in general. Most of what they say is technically false, but an exaggerated version of something true and important. The Truth is 1, Trump says 2, his supporters say 3, and the Democrats/media say -3.
You can't literally take them at their word, but as tentative allies we might make some progress in that direction, which is better than the opposite.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7mo ago
Part of this might also just be typical mind fallacy. I was a weird introvert who liked reading books and playing videogames more than going out partying with friends. I never even befriended party friend people anyway because they didn't like me and I didn't like them. I never did drugs as a kid, I never had sex as a kid, I never drank as a kid, and I considered myself morally and intellectually superior to all the degenerates who did.
I had issues, got into fights, got in trouble, but typically it was either spats with my brothers when they annoyed me or I annoyed them, or being lazy and then getting angry and lashing out when I had to do boring, time consuming, and unfulfilling things like clean my room or waste hours going to a museum that could have been spent reading or playing videogames.
I would be great at raising a kid who was exactly like kid me. I know me, I understand me, I'm pretty introspective and, above all, I really really like me and respect me and my values. And I think I would emphasize and know how to explain the importance of things that little clone me wouldn't want to do. I would be able to explain game theory way earlier which would make social things make so much more sense to little me's brain.
I would have absolutely now idea how to raise an extrovert, or a sports jock, or a depressed goth, or a slut. My explanation for why not to do drugs is because "drugs mess with the health and integrity of your body, and they're expensive, and don't accomplish anything you can't get from videogames, and worst of all, you'd have to hang out with the kinds of icky people who do illegal drugs, and you're better than them." And a lot of people would not find that convincing and in fact might rebel harder because it makes me sound like a jerk. But it's how I convinced myself. And while I'm confident on illegal drugs, I'm not sure how to handle other things like sports. What if my kid wants to play football? Football is stupid and gives you head injuries, also the equipment is expensive, but everything has tradeoffs. How can I tell how important that is in comparison to the potential positive value (both extrinsic as a form of exercise and financial opportunities if they're good, and intrinsic via letting them do a thing they enjoy), when my own valuation for it is negative. It seems stupid and boring and pointless to me even without any injury risk, but obviously a kid asking to do it doesn't see it the same way and I don't know how to evaluate that. My instinctive response is "don't play football, it's stupid" and I can't disentangle all of the legitimate reasons from my instinctive gut response.
I think a lot of the "not knowing what it's like to be a kid" is actually typical mind fallacy in disguise. There are lots of different types of kids, and each parent was only one of them. If they think that's how kids are then they won't understand when their kid diverges from that, and the reasons in their own head that convinced them to not be that way won't be convincing to their kid.
I'm going to nitpick just the word choice here. Material goods are NOT utility. Utility is actual internal value: happiness/wellbeing/fulfillment/life-satisfaction etc. The endgoal of desirability/morality. By definition, a 100x increase in utility results in a world that is 100x better for everyone. However utility suffers from massive diminishing returns as a function of material goods, as Yudkowsky shows. A 100x increase in material productivity does not result in a 100x increase in utility.
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