MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I don't know. Why would you care about genetic fitness at all?
Some people care about their descendants because they actually know them and form emotional connections with them as "family" which are stronger than those formed with friends or neighbors. Such connections can also be formed by adopted children who have no genetic relation at all. From this perspective, there's no reason to care about distant descendants of any type, closely or distantly related, because you will be dead and form no connection at all.
Some people care about their descendants out of an instinctive or cultural care about bloodlines and legacy. They care about making an impact on the world even after they're gone, and part of that impact is in the actual people who will be living there. This would imply a slight preference for descendants staying in the same ethnic and culture because they can carry on the cultural traditions as well as the genetic, but again there are some summation effects. 1,000,000 descendants each with 1/1,000 of your genetic material and 1/1,000 of your cultural traditions might be equivalent to 1,000 genetic/cultural clones. I suppose it depends on whether you care about cultural traditions individually (be kind to people instead of stealing from them) or as an entire package (you must obey every single one of these religious traditions in order to get into heaven, which is pass/fail such that obeying half is pointless).
Some people don't care at all.
More importantly, this thread began as a discussion of the Mongol's evolutionary success. On the level of evolution and selection effects, genes/cultures which in practice increase their probability of spreading will be more likely to exist. The Mongols did in fact end up with an extremely high number of very distant descendants. The genes that the Mongols had did in fact replicate themselves diffused throughout those descendants rather than staying clumped together. And to this day there are many more genes which are copies of Mongol genes than there are of most other groups of people who lived at that time period. From an evolutionary perspective those genes were in fact successful: they are more likely to exist today than other genes at that time period. In so far as those genes cause certain traits and behaviors, those traits and behaviors were selected for and exist more in the current population as a result. They did not successfully spread the "Mongol archetype" as a cohesive culture and distinct people, but they did spread their genetic heritage and make it more prevalent. You don't need to "care" about genetic fitness on an individual level such that you personally seek to maximize it to care about it from a scholarly perspective as an explanatory and predictive force of nature. Genes which "win" from this perspective don't need to be desirable or good, but from an evolutionary perspective they still tend to win and increase their prevalence and it's important to understand that and adapt to their presence and natural advantage in competition.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Why do they need to be clones? Genetic fitness applies to individual genes, which don't especially care about each other except in-so-far as there are synergies in ability, so can be measured by just adding up the number of descendants weighted by their relatedness to you. 1,000,000 descendants each with 1/1,000 of your genetic material (above the average human baseline) is equivalent to 1,000 clones of yourself or 2,000 direct children (who have 1/2).
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Is it possible that Musk is fully aware of this and overreacting to a minor comment someone from Apple made as a publicity stunt so that when they fail to remove him (since they never seriously planned to anyway) he can point to it as a win? Or is that too much 4D chess to be realistic?
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Seems like a straightforward corollary of the Things vs People difference in preferences among genders. Men tend to be more interested in doing physical things and making things and thinking about object level things, while women tend to be more interested in social things and people and interactions.
Voting is an indirect social thing. You are not making the world a better place directly on the object level, you are not building bridges or earning money or arresting criminals as a voter. Instead, you are exerting influence on the assignment of people to a role that will do those things. Voting is not a central example of social interactions, but it fits into it better than it fits into object level things. As such, we should expect women to be more interested in and engaged in voting, and men to be more interested in running for office where they actually get to do stuff directly. (I'm somewhat hesitant on the latter conclusion. You can make an argument that being a politician is still social since you're directing other people to do things rather than physically doing it yourself, but the same is true of being a manager or CEO and we see more men rise to those roles anyway, so it's probably object level enough).
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
My understanding (as someone who does not use Twitter but read about this once) is that the literal ratio is Comments:likes. You are "ratioed" if your ratio is high, because it means lots of people saw the post, especially since only some percent of them comment, but few people liked it, which is less effort than a comment.
The comments getting more likes than the original is icing on the cake, and is highly likely to correlate with the ratio, but isn't the actual ratio.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
It's not magic, it doesn't fulfill the task perfectly, but again, the cutoff has to be somewhere. Having a predefined, unambiguous, and fair method for the cutoff is better than tests which might correlate better with some things but open up others to accusations of or actual corruption and bias that unfairly disenfranchises some groups more than others. So having a single age at which people get to vote is a good method to accomplish this, and among all of the ages, 18 seems like the logical choice. If we somehow came up with a reasonable measure for social coercion on someone's vote, and averaged it over people at each age, there would be a discontinuous jump around the 18th birthday, maybe slightly afterwards when people leave home for college. It would not be absolute, it might even show that the jump would even be smaller than the total increase summed through ages 12 to 16, but age 18 would have the highest derivative on average because of the legal rights it represents. An 18 year old might still live with their parents and face social coercion, or they might not, and if the coercion gets too bad they can leave. A 16 year old is legally stuck with very few exceptions.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Because the 5 year old would (and usually should) do what their parents tell them to, and 16 year olds are somewhere in between 5 and 18. It's a continuum, and there has to be a cutoff somewhere (unless you think 5 year olds should vote too). The distinction between 18 and 16 isn't much different from the one from 16 to 14, or 14 to 12, etc. It has to be somewhere.
More importantly, as I state, 16 year olds are not legally independent from their parents. I'm not just relying on the argument that 16 year olds are simpletons who do whatever they're told like 5 year olds do, but also that the relationship is inherently coercive. It is relatively easy for a parent to apply soft punishments to their kid that sway their behavior while falling short of legal child abuse or any feasible law against parents punishing their children for their voting choices. And while the majority of parents would not do this, especially if it were illegal, some would. And if one political tribe were more likely to do this it would give that side a direct reward for doing so, influencing politics in favor of people who are better at manipulating their children. It's not that I'm afraid children forming actual political opinions will tend to agree with their parents, it's that children will vote how their parents want without actually following their own political opinions (or even forming genuine ones in the first place).
If we were to simultaneously lower the age of majority and the age of voting to 16, I wouldn't take issue with the voting component of this change, though I would have qualms about the age of majority changing. That is, the minimum age of voting should be equal to the age where children get legal independence from their parents, regardless of where that limit is, because that's when they simultaneously gain the freedom to make their own decisions with significantly less coercion, and (at least in theory) become productive members of society who participate in it directly instead of through their parents. I think I'd be in favor of exceptions where minors who are legally emancipated from their parents and taking care of themselves (rather than being wards of the state in a shelter or foster home or something) can vote. But not kids with parents: their parents can vote and act to uphold their interests politically, just as they uphold their interests in other areas.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
In the context of voters deciding who to vote for, Gc is probably the most relevant, though Gf may play a smaller but nontrivial role. You need knowledge of stuff like what problems does society face that are amenable to political solutions? Which solutions are viable or not, what similar circumstances have been faced historically, what solutions were tried then and what were the results? Which promises that politicians make are plausible and which are blatantly unrealistic? When one politician promises criminal justice reform to protect oppressed people from police and the other attacks counters that this is soft on crime and will increase murder rates, Gc is going to be more useful for comparing the truth value of each side. It doesn't really matter if the voter has high Gf can think up a clever and creative solution to the problem that addresses both issues, because they're not the one running for office and the politicians aren't going to listen to them. It might help a little, but it will help less than Gc. And Gc is also more likely to increase with age as someone goes through the education system and their brain matures, so it correlates more strongly with age.
Again, I wouldn't advocate an actual hard test for Gc as a requirement to vote, since that permanently disenfranchizes people who fall below it. But a mostly fair system which correlates with Gc is preferential to a fair system which doesn't.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
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.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
This assumes that the entire interaction is sexual in nature. He didn't say he's hitting on her, he was just trying to talk to her.
Now maybe she is attractive enough, used to being hit on, and stuck up enough that she just naturally assumes any attempt to talk to her by a male is a prelude to sexual overtures, and given her behavior that seems reasonably likely. But it's definitely not obvious or universal enough to just assume it is definitely the one definitive answer. People usually don't need explicit rewards incentivizing them to play nice in a conversation unless they are unusually antisocial.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Don't forget that popularity within a group is itself a source of value, otherwise nobody would ever spend any money on it, so it's entirely consistent for a rational individual to pay more for a functionally inferior but socially superior (for their social environment) device if the sum of both effects end up positive. iPhones aren't massively inferior to android devices, they're close enough that the functional difference can be outweighed by the social component without too much pressure. So I would consider this comparable to the BLM supporters: there is a negative effect but the actual effect on the individual is small enough to be outweighed by social forces.
Now, I don't believe that all or even more iPhone users explicitly believe that they're inferior but use them anyway because they're cool. That's not how signalling usually works, usually there's some element of cognitive bias (halo effect?) going on such that individuals rationalize the behavior as being actually superior in all aspects. Even in cases where two products have genuine tradeoffs where one is good at certain things while the other product is good at different things, rabid fans will incorrectly attribute all good things to their thing and all bad things to the other thing. Or in some cases dismiss the faults of their thing as unimportant while the superior thing is what actually matters.
I don't think people are perfectly rational, or perfectly irrational, but instead are some mix of both. If tides somehow magically shift to make Androids cool and iPhones uncool, without any of their functional qualities actually changing I expect more than half of existing iPhone users would eventually switch to Android, and simultaneously convince themselves that Android is superior. It would take some time, as habits and built-in biases can be slow and stubborn, but I expect it would happen. And others would stick to iPhone devices because they genuine prefer them (and others genuinely prefer iPhones but would switch anyway out of conformity).
I guess the way I'm modeling it is to assume that everyone is mentally doing a weighted sum on all the evidence in favor of each side, and coolness increases the weight people place on evidence in favor of the cool side. So if one side is massively superior according to the evidence, people will side with it regardless, but if there's a small change then enough coolness on the other side will outweigh it, and the smaller the difference in evidence is, the smaller the coolness needs to be to make up the difference. But all of these calculations are done implicitly and in the end the person mostly just ends up concluding that one side is "better" without a full rational understanding of why they believe that.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I think there are two main forces contributing to this:
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Signalling being "hard to fake" is not just about the physical/financial difficulty of sending the signal, but also the knowledge of how to send it, or that the signal even exists in the first place. You have to know who the fashionable celebrities are and pay attention to them, and avoid paying attention to the wrong celebrities (doing so signals you have good judgement, or more likely know the right people who inform you about who is cool and who isn't). You have to keep up to date with new information and new products as the fashions shift, and not be stuck with yesterdays fashion (doing so signals you still know the right people and aren't getting your information second hand as fashion slowly propagates). And most importantly, you have to actually care enough to spend your time and money for pure signalling, indicating that you are committed and loyal to this signal and not just sending it out frivolously. Anyone with a few hundred bucks can buy an iphone, but only someone who actually cares about being cool will willingly sacrifice the superior quality/price ratio of android devices for an overpriced apple product just to look cool. It's a costly signal not just in money but in time, knowledge, and dignity. (The last two sentences are exaggerated for comedic effect, but hopefully you get the point)
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Signals are more diverse than a one dimensional quality slider that you want to maximize. A lot of signals are about belonging to a particular group. You might wear lots of dark clothing and makeup to signal that you're a goth, or conspicuously listen to Taylor Swift music to signal you're a fan and belong to groups which tend to like her, or go to church every Sunday to signal you're a good Christian, or wear giant ear gauges to signal... I'm not even sure what those signal, probably nonconformity and a rejection of normal beauty standards. And while people in each group will see these as good qualities, people outside the groups may consider them weakly positive, neutral, or even negative signals if they dislike that group. You can't send signals favorable to every group simultaneously, so choosing one demonstrates some level of solidarity, loyalty, camaraderie with those people in particular.
Personally, I think Apple products are decent-ish but overpriced relative to their quality (or equivalently, low quality relative to their price), and have unfriendly business practices such as making all their stuff incompatible with other brands when it would be trivial to have otherwise, especially when they do petty things like change the shape of their usb cables so they won't plug in to non-Apple devices (and normal usb cables won't plug in to Apple devices). As such, I consider ownership of Apple devices to signal some combination of uninformedness, susceptibility to advertisements, and hive-minded prioritization of signalling over substance. A person who buys things because they're cool instead of because they're useful. So I treat it as a (weak) negative signal and respect people with Apple devices slightly less. But also I'm a weird nerd and I am neither cool nor popular, so people who send those signals are in fact successful in signalling that I am not one of them, they are part of a different group, and that's probably the signal they want to send. If everyone wanted to send the same signal then money would be the only hurdle, and you're correct that it's not all that much money so not a strong signal. But by choosing an arbitrary product that's worse in some aspects you select for people who care about the signal strongly enough to make arbitrary choices in exchange for status with the group, and exclude people who just choose the best product and don't know or care about the group. And that becomes part of the signal and its cost.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
There are a finite amount of product/service. There are more people who want product/service than exist. Someone is getting screwed no matter what, the only question is who.
With dynamic pricing, the product is distributed according to some combination of desire and wealth. If we have 5000 things all sold to the highest bidder, then the 5000 people who are willing to pay the most get it. If you really really really want it, or have lots of money and resources of your own to exchange for it, then you get it. While people who only slightly want it don't get it. Importantly, this is decentralized: people can decide on their own the maximum amount they are willing to pay. In some sense, casual customers who only want it badly enough to pay $100 losing out to obsessives who are willing to pay $300 is a good thing, because the obsessives actually want the product more. Also importantly, there is no deadweight loss. The extra price goes directly to the seller, and via market forces will incentivize them or competitors to produce more comparable goods/services (if all GPUS cost double, then existing manufacturers can afford to scale up production, and investors will fund more competitors)
With fixed pricing and no scalpers, the product is distributed on a first come first serve basis. The first 5000 people who get there get the product. Now, this does nonrandomly favor customers with a higher valuation on the product who will be more likely to obsessively stand in lines or wait for product release, but in a much weaker way. It rewards people with more free time on their hand instead of people with more money. It's much more "fair" in the sense that rich people don't have an advantage over poorer people, but much worse at assigning product to people who actually want it more, as some people may not have the same time flexibility as others. And, importantly, this extra time spent is pure deadweight loss. A person standing in line for 48 hours doesn't benefit the seller whatsoever, it's just 48 hours of time lost in order to change their order. The supply/demand feedback breaks down and fails to send the proper signals to the producer that they need to produce more of the good.
Scalpers provide the "service" of effectively changing the second system into the first one, which is more market stable. People who value the product at a very high level but failed to get lucky with the timing would be screwed in the second system when someone else buys their product. But if they pay a scalper then they can get their slot as if it were in the first system. And, since they value the product more highly than the average customer who would buy the product at the low price, value is created, because products are distributed to people who want them more.
Now, scalpers can also rentseek by creating artificial scarcity (if there are 10,000 seats at a concert and only 5,000 willing customers, then allocation wouldn't normally be an issue, but a scalper who buys 9000 tickets creates scarcity). But for anything that would have sold out anyway this is not a concern. The only real concern is that they're sapping the profit that by all rights ought to go to the producer and incentivize them to create more product. In some ways it's the worst of both worlds. But they are providing a service to high-value customers who want the product and wouldn't get it without them. And, importantly, dynamic pricing would provide that same service without the rent-seeking. The market is broken, scalpers are a symptom and not the disease.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
And is that not the world we live in? In the existing system, with primaries, the electorate all decide which among their party is the most popular, and then the chosen candidates of those parties go against each other. In the delegation system the electorate all choose their favorite candidates, and then candidates within each party pool their votes together towards the most popular one. It's the same steps just in different orders, and the forces towards and away from extremism seem pretty much the same to me. In the world where it's D/mR/tR = 45/35/25, the moderate would have won the Primary in the current system and become the Republican party candidate instead of Trump.
There are small technical differences, such that you can come up with very niche scenarios where the outcome will differ. But I think the general pattern of having two monolithic parties with extreme candidates are the same in both systems for the same reasons, and in almost every circumstance they will lead to identical incentives and outcomes.
I don't see any meaningful distinction between the pedos and anyone else on the LGBTQ flag except the potential exploitation and harm of actual children. They're weird sexual fetishes that make the individual happy if they can fulfill it, but strays from the biological purpose of actual reproduction, and disgusts 90%+ of the population who don't share that fetish.
My stance on non-offending pedos, ones who look at drawings of cartoon children but would never harm a child in real life, is basically the same as for anyone else with a weird fetish: keep it to yourself. Do whatever you want alone in your bedroom, but I don't want to hear about it or have you mainstream it. Stay out of public, don't go on parades about it. But this doesn't require banning them from all art websites, just have a strong tagging/filtering system so normal people don't have to see it unless they opt in.
But I think it very much matters when actual children are involved, because that is evil behavior with massive harm. So the distinction is incredibly important, and I think is the most important aspect of this whole issue. People's fetishes and pride flags matter a little, but they matter less than violent harm done to children. In so far as "normalizing" loli art will lead to a slippery slope to pedos getting accepted to LGBTQ and this later slipping into normalizing actual harm to children, this matters. But the second step in that process is the primary question I'm concerned with: does loli art actually gateway towards real CP or physical acts? Because if not then the question of loli-pedos getting into LGBTQ or not doesn't matter because they won't slip further.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Because policies aren't binary like that. I think Scott would side with them on policy like 60% of the time, but he would pick the better 60% of policies they have and leave out the insane culture war stuff.
The extremist candidates will get less initial votes, but if each moderate delegates to someone 10% less moderate than themselves then it ends up with the extremists anyway. Look at how Trump has captured the Republican party. I suppose you could model it as splitting the Republicans into two factions, the pro-Trump and the never-Trump. So suppose at the end of the day you end up with three leading candidates: Democrat with 45%, pro-Trump Republican with 35%, and anti-Trump Republican with 25%, the anti-Trump Republicans are going to be forced to delegate. If the anti-Trump Republicans decide to delegate to Trump in this circumstance to keep the Democrats out, then we see how extremists capture the moderate votes. If the anti-Trump decide to delegate Democrat because their candidate is more moderate, and if this stance is known ahead of time, then voting anti-Trump Republican is equivalent to voting Democrat. And some Republicans did that in the current system: they voted Democrat because it was preferable to Trump. But there is still the same pressure towards extremism for the same reasons as in the current system: ie the median voter theorem. Which hasn't exactly worked out nicely.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
From a game theoretic and psychological perspective, I'm not sure this would be meaningfully different from first past the post. To a first approximation, everyone just votes for the same person they would now: red team or blue team, and then one of them has 50%+ and wins (I guess it eliminates the electoral college if this is in the U.S.)
Theoretically, it might help third party candidates, because you can vote for one and if they lose your vote won't be wasted, but this is only true if you're certain that candidate is going to delegate to the correct side. For instance, if Scott Alexander was in a standard election and had a good shot at becoming President I would definitely vote for him over pretty much any politician (because they're all scum). But under normal circumstances I would not delegate my vote to him in your system because he's not going to win, and then he's very likely to send it to some Democrat, and I think they tend to do slightly more damage than Republicans. Even if he delegates it to an above average Democrat, they're also going to lose and then the vote stays in house until eventually it ends up with Hillary Clinton, or whoever else ends up on top of the Democrats that year (I'm using the 2016 election as an example since it's a strong case of when I'd very strongly prefer my vote not stray).
So in practice, all the high up Republicans and Democrats end up in bed with each other and refuse to send votes to the other side, all the voters loyally vote for someone on one side or the other, and their vote stays in house, until eventually whichever side got more votes ends up sending them all to the most popular person on that side. Theoretically, this would allow someone to vote say Bernie Sanders instead of Hillary Clinton, but then he loses and delegates the votes to her and she has them all, which is kind of what the primary system already does, it chooses the most popular person on each side to pre-emptively delegates all of the votes to. If anything, this system makes things worse because if someone had a preference for, say, Bernie > Trump > Clinton, then Clinton unfairly siphons votes by being vaguely associated with a more moderate person even though she isn't him. Your system will incentivize more moderate people to run for office, on both sides, but only for the purpose of siphoning votes for their party's main candidate.
And the strategic thing for voters to do in response would be to not trust any of the moderates who are unlikely to win and are just going to siphon their vote for one of the two main parties, and instead just vote for their favorite party directly rather than risk choosing the wrong moderate. And then we have FPTP again.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
there are no spoiler effects
I'm not sure this is true, because voters are not incentivized to vote entirely honestly.
Ie, if the true global popularity of candidates goes A > B > C
and everyone knows it, then people who honestly approve A,B but prefer B > A > C have some incentive to not vote A, because if the numbers are close then artificially dropping A's apparent popularity gives B a better shot. And then in response people who prefer A > B > C might counter by not voting A. And then seeing this turmoil people who prefer C might fail to vote A,B even if they do approve of them, because this gives C a chance to shoot up.
But the spoiler effects are certainly more limited, this issue only comes up when comparing multiple similar candidates that are simultaneously approved by individuals and close to each other in the rankings. It would do a better job of having people be able to support third party candidates and their true preferences (since you always want to include your actual favorite) and introduce more centrists while still hedging their bets on the lesser-of-two-evils candidate most likely to prevent the evil villain on the other side.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Except that the primary question here is the banning or lolicon, drawings of fake children. If the marginal low-value user you're deterring is exclusively looking at drawings while the high-value users look at real CP then you're not actually accomplishing anything by reducing the marginal users. Assuming the goal is to prevent exploitation of real children, rather than preventing perverts from getting off because they're gross.
The argument that actually matters here is whether lolicon acts as as gateway to real CP, converting marginal users into higher-value over time, or as a substitute that reduces real CP use/production. I can think of reasonable arguments in both directions, but am not really sure which is really true.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I am not 100% certain it's impossible for someone (including myself) to be mistaken about the definitions or meanings of commonly used words or mathematical symbols. It's technically possible with nonzero but very very small probability, especially for very commonly used stuff like 2 and +. But that's true of literally every fact, and there is not enough time in the human lifespan to thoroughly interrogate all of them, so 2+2 is not a wise choice to focus on. I think that the assumption of common knowledge of words is incredibly useful when used appropriately, so sowing doubt and being pedantic about it is likely to cause more harm than good if done unstrategically. Your goal is potentially useful, but pedantry is not the way to accomplish it, you'd do better targeting more ambiguous words that don't have the force of mathematical logic and precision behind them.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
The map is not the territory.
If you hold constant the referents, then 2+2 is always 4. That is, the number 2 in the integers/real-numbers, added to the number 2 in the integers/real-numbers, deterministically always yields the number 4 in the integers/real-numbers.
The symbol "2" does not always refer to integers/real-numbers, and "+" does not always refer to addition in the integers/real-numbers, and "=" does not always refer to equality in the integers/real-numbers, so the string of symbols "2+2=4" does not always refer to a true statement, but that's only if it refers to an unusual statement other than the standard referent of the string.
So I would say that "2+2=4 is always true" is true, because when I say 2+2=4 without additional context I implicitly mean the integers/real-numbers. I will concede that " "2+2=4" always refers to a true statement" is false, but consider this vacuous, because literally any string can be redefined to refer to any true or false statement. So when somebody says "2+2=4", I am not 100% certain that the statement they intend with their words is true, but I am 100% certain that the statement in my mind induced by those words is true, and am 99.99% sure that the true statement in my mind would be the same statement created in the minds of the majority of people who have at least 1 month of mathematics education using Arabic numerals, so am not at all worried about considering this to be the default interpretation unless otherwise specified.
And in plain arithmetic, which is what more than 99% of all uses of those symbols occur in, 2 + 2 = 4 is a true statement.
Perhaps a better analogy would be if you throw a random French word that sounds identical to a different English word into an otherwise English sentence, and trick people with the double meaning. It's a language that exists, it does mean that thing to some people in some contexts, but you've deliberately placed it out of context and in order to deceive the audience. This can be great as the setup to a pun/joke, but not so much for making educational points.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
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.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I think it's politically motivated from the Democrats to increase their votes. This is mostly speculation/extrapolation, but there are multiple pieces of evidence:
First, note that the majority of the pressure appears to coming from Blue Tribe looking sources. Although they don't explicitly say who to vote for, you can guess that they personally are voting for the Democrats based on the general tone of the piece and source.
Second, my general opinion on American politics is that the Democrats and Republicans are mostly the same mix of generally incompetent and corrupt politicians who are there with the primary goal of being elected and accumulating wealth, power, and prestige, and a secondary goal of serving the voters and advancing their team's agenda, but only just enough to keep the voters happy enough to keep them in power. Both sides do this in different ways, but the Democrats are much better at disguising it with nice sounding words and smiling faces. Therefore, the average uninformed voter tends to think that the Democrats are better than the Republicans, because on the surface they appear better. Therefore, the marginal lazy/uninformed voter is more likely to vote Democrat. This provides a motivation for Democrat aligned groups to want to increase voter turnout.
Even if this effect is minor and the marginal uninformed voter has 60-40 odds in favor of voting Democrat, that's still an improvement for them. Increasing participation in the Democratic process is just an excuse, you're right that it isn't about helping society.
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.
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