MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
7mo ago
Just got it today. I don't normally buy games when they first come out because $60 is a lot and I want to wait until they go on sale, and get enough reviews to know if it'll be worth it. But $20 for a game I'm nearly guaranteed to enjoy given how good HK is? I'm in.
Preliminary opinions are similar to yours. It feels a bit more streamlined in a way that makes it more convenient, but kind of loses some of the mystique. Same with Hornet talking instead of being a silent protagonist: it makes sense lore-wise, and might allow more options for the story to deliver, but it gives a very different feel.
It's fun to play so far though. I hope it ends up even better than HK, but even if it's slightly less good it'll still be worth the time and money.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7mo ago
The issue is that the pushback is elastic: if it has enough momentum it can go far beyond the equilibrium before it gets pushed back. I don't think the social justice mobs are going to end up strong enough to push forth a violent revolution and take over the country, but if they try they might kill dozens to hundreds of people before the national guard cracks down on them hard enough to stop them (and possibly hundreds or thousands die in the ensuing chaos).
Likewise, someone who thought that Trump was an actual fascist and would try to coup the government might fear that hundreds or thousands of people would die in the ensuing chaos before enough legal force got around to stopping him.
The damage is bounded, but it's a high bound. I don't want hundreds or thousands of people to die. I don't think either scenario is especially likely to get that bad, but part of preventing it from getting there is starting the push back via complaints, critiques, and votes, before it gets there.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7mo ago
I'm fairly certain Boltzmann brains are unfalsifiable. Under the theory, you think that your experience is mostly ordered only because you have randomly configured into a brain with false memories of an ordered experience.
That said, it should be treated with the same level of seriousness as other unfalsifiable theories like an invisible intangible dragon in your garage.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7mo ago
and if it's legal, then that's how the system is supposed to work. I have faith that our institutions have the checks and balances to deal with any presidential overreach appropriately.
Setting the Trump issue aside, this seems overly naive to me. Laws are exploitable. Many laws are designed to be exploitable. Gerrymandering, lobbying, pork barrel spending, filibustering: these were all created by finding a tiny crack in the wording of a law that was intended for normal common sense behavior and then bending the interpretation and exploiting it towards some obviously unintended but technically legal end. Heck, 90% of the federal governments actions are "constitutional" only on the basis of deliberately misinterpreting the Commerce Clause. As long as they can convince a judge to sign off on it, literally anything could be considered legal on the basis of literally any existing law.
The law is not automatically moral, or just, or well-designed. Broadly speaking we should have respect for it and follow it because that creates a predictable and orderly society. But that's while keeping an eye on it to make sure it leads to good outcomes, and the instant it stops doing that we ought to have an emergency scramble to fix the loophole before people get used to it and think that's normal. Not that that's what they usually do, usually half the politicians are the ones exploiting the loophole and block any attempts to fix it by the other party. But that would be an appropriate response, rather than shrugging and saying "if it's legal it's intended behavior." Politicians are too good at deceitful word games for that to be true.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7mo ago
The officially declared estimate is somewhere around 6 million Jews being killed via all causes, including shootings, gunshots, and concentration camps.
There were around 6 million members of the Nazis.
The genocide is supposed to have taken 4 years.
So each Nazi needs to kill an average of one Jew over the course of 4 years.
On a mathematical and physical level that seems trivial. ONE. It's not Hitler driving around with a gun trying to shoot everyone himself (which would require three kills per minutes without stopping or slowing down). It's the entirety of the Nazi party with weapons and organization vs the entirety of the Jews who are fleeing and mostly not fighting back.
I want to be clear, I am not making the argument that it did actually happen: I have no special expertise, insight, or evidence beyond parroting what other people claim and taking them at their word. But
It's mathematically impossible to do so, physically.
is such an absurd exaggeration that I feel compelled to object. You either need to study your math, or your physics, or your rhetorical honesty. You're already fighting an uphill battle by going against the mainstream consensus, you're certainly not going to convince anyone to take you seriously if you're not even trying.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7mo ago
I think we're 90% in agreement on the broader framework. My primary objection, first and foremost is your leap from "this is strongly hereditary and these people are scum" to "this is 100% genetic". Aside from this being a scientific and biological claim about reality which is demonstrably false, it suggests that the problem is fundamentally unsolvable. If this level of criminality were actually 100% genetic then the only options would be to either tolerate it, or exile/genocide people who have it so they can't make more.
I'm not claiming that I have a grand plan for how to cleanly and reliably solve all of these issues on a society-wide scale, just that such interventions could have an effect, and on a case-by-case bases clearly do. While I don't think it's either physically or politically realistic to identify degenerate scum and confiscate their children to raise in better homes, many instances in which we can legally confiscate children from degenerate scum via CPS do result in better outcomes for the children and a partial improvement of their overall life outcomes compared to children who get stuck in an equivalently bad environment without being noticed. This is actionable. It's not going to solve the entirety of the problem, but in marginal cases confiscating degenerate scum kids who are being abused helps not just them but our entire society by making things just a little bit less toxic. If it were 100% genetic then this would not be the case.
To put it in a metaphor: you're out here claiming that heart disease is 100% genetic and any treatments or scientific research into it is pointless. And then using the fact that we don't have a reliable general purpose cure for it and even people who go to the hospital for it just die anyway as evidence for this basis, and extrapolating this to suggest that a cure or even interventions to reduce risk are completely impossible. And while obviously there is a strong genetic component to heart disease and we can't just snap our fingers and magically fix it, there are surgeries and medications that help reduce its probability and its impact. It's a combination of genes and environment both, and an understanding of it is incomplete without considering both.
I don't have an infallible and reliable cure for curing all degenerate scum behavior. I'm just refuting the idea that one cannot in principle exist because the problem is literally unsolvable. And, more practically in the short term, assert that marginal changes have marginal effects. Even if we lack the omnipotence to solve 100% of incidences, a weak 1% intervention which reduces degenerate scum behavior by 1% is actually thousands of people. It would improve thousands of lives and prevent murder and suffering. Or even on an individual level. If you or someone you know saves one person from a childhood of degenerate scum parents and that has a 50% reduction in the chance of them becoming a degenerate scumbag then, in expectation, that's a meaningful improvement in not only their own life but the lives of everyone they ever interact with. If it was 100% genetic then this would not be the case and the intervention would be pointless.
That seems like an important distinction to me.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7mo ago
LLMs are like 90% useful, depending on what domain you're trying to use them for. They generally give the right answer for simple questions, and flub things that are more complicated or just randomly. So when using them you need to externally apply a lot of epistemic humility on their behalf: take everything they say with a grain of salt because they might be hallucinating. This makes them especially useful for creative/inspiration ideas where truth doesn't matter "I have halloween decorations including a witch, a ghost, and a vampire. What are other things I should include?" or things you probably already know but can't quite remember "what's the name of that common tall ovally fruit that isn't an apple?" where as soon as it says an answer you're like "oh yeah, duh" and can verify it's correct independently.
I am hacking my way through getting better at python and am finding it to be wonderful help because it knows all sorts of methods and syntax that I just don't know exist. Or it can quickly scan through a hundred lines of code and find a stray comma that I accidentally typoed and was causing a weird bug that I'm sure someone more experienced would have instantly recognized as being caused by a stray comma, but I'm used to Java where that would have just refused to compile and shown up red in the IDE rather than compiling but doing weird stuff.
Even though 10% of anything tells me is wrong, usually because it can't keep all of the code in its head simultaneously and sometimes spontaneously misremembers the name of something, the ability to test and verify what it's doing while still using it to discover things and offer suggestions or alternatives is very useful. Because 90% of the time it's right, and any time it's wrong I'm not much worse off than I would be without it. As long as you maintain skepticism and don't just blindly believe it then you're fine.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7mo ago
Pretty much all of your post can be true except the second paragraph which is an orthogonal claim. The culturalist claim that I mostly believe (my ballpark estimate is that this sort of thing is 80-20 culture vs genes) is not that Raja is a normal unbroken person and if you put him in a good environment he would suddenly start acting like you or me. The claim is that he was not born this way. It was not inevitable, it was instilled into him slowly over the course of decades.
It should be obvious that there is a non-neglible influence of culture by considering the limiting case. If a toddler were left in an empty room with literally no parenting other than support robots that kept it physically alive but provided no socialization, they would end up completely feral and with all sorts of psychological issues. The child raised by wolves. Even if you later introduced them to society, they would almost certainly never reach the same level of development or civilized behavior.
And this is a continuous function. If you take an uncivilized half-animal man and he has a child and raises them that way you'll likely end up with an uncivilized half-animal person. If you have a mostly civilized but not quite man who has a 1% chance of aping out and trying to murder someone every time they are provoked, they're likely to raise children who are mostly civilized but not quite men who have a 1% chance of aping out and trying to murder someone every time they are provoked. Heritability is not synonymous with genetics. It can simultaneously be true that Raja is, in his current state as a 25 year old, an insurmountable and unfixable failure. But it was not inevitable. He was not born broken, he was slowly twisted and mentally disfigured into this state over the past 25 years. All you have to do is look at minorities who get adopted by functioning civilized people and oh hey, 80% of the problems magically go away. Some of them don't, and it's a little tricky to disentangle the genetics from the trauma of whatever caused them to be adopted and being temporarily parent-less as an infant. But the reason I think it's 80-20 as opposed to 50-50 or 20-80 is because the majority of adopted minorities I've seen emulate the culture, behavior, and civilized behavior of their adoptive parents, not their genetic ones. Maybe slightly less intelligent, which does correlate with criminality, but only weakly. And if you look at middle or upper class minorities who live in mostly white areas and act like them, their children usually end up middle or upper class and act like their parents too, because that's how they were raised.
Bad parenting doesn't fall out of the sky by chance. It's cultivated in a chain reaction over generations, as bad parents beget bad parents beget bad parents. But that doesn't force it to be genetic, and doesn't force it to be immutable. The majority of mutability happens while they're children, but that's not some magical things about race: all children need to be raised properly or it will cripple them psychologically and leave them horrible mangled monsters. Even if it's too late to fix Raja now, he could have become a better person if he had been raised better.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
The police have issued a statement, and the BBC, in a notably careful choice of words, clarifies: “BBC News understands that officers have found no evidence to substantiate claims being made online the youths were at risk of sexual assault.”
This is one of those non-substantive claims. It offers nearly zero Bayesian evidence of anything, because what would evidence look like? What evidence does "threatening sexual assault but stopped before contact via intimidation" leave behind? There would be no physical struggle, no wounds, no semen. All this means is that the incident was not caught on camera and it's entirely a "he said she said" situation. There's no evidence to substantiate these claims, but there's symmetrically no evidence to in-substantiate these claims. My prior is that both hypotheses (pervert immigrants or delinquent teens) are plausible, and the police or media saying what they said does not shift these priors in either direction, because this is exactly what I would expect them to say in either scenario.
Given a complete and utter lack of evidence, everyone is going to stick to their priors and this is the rationally correct response.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
My guess is that they're being attracted to the silliness part of it and attributing the lack of intelligence as a cause of the silliness. Which potentially has some merit: I think there is a negative correlation between intelligence and silliness on average. I could be wrong, some people do just want to be way smarter than their partner, as some combination of pride and the ability to win arguments and control things, but I think most of it is correlations and stereotypes connecting intelligence to other things. If I had to choose between an intelligent bitter feminist constantly comparing everything I do to a historical dictator, and a sweet highschool dropout country girl with rocks for brains and a heart of gold, I'd choose the latter. If for some reason I was convinced that intelligence inevitably produced the former and wasn't aware of the exceptions I would have been tempted to join more unintellectual activities to try to find unintelligent women. Or just despaired and given up because I don't think they would like me even if I did like them.
The point being, I think some men do think this way. And I think statistically they're partially correct but missing plenty of exceptions.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
In general I think AI content belongs in separate designated zones. If not its own website, at least a dedicated section. AI fiction should be found in the AI fiction section, not mixed with the regular fiction. AI art belongs in the AI art section, not mixed with the regular art. AI non-fiction... probably doesn't need to be posted anywhere. It's going to end up some combination of wordy filler and stuff that's already been said somewhere else. Basically a super fancy version of a google search. If you're not prompting it yourself such that you want a super fancy version of a google search, reading essays someone else told an AI to make is unlikely to provide value.
A general exception to this is AI content which is supplemental in support of a greater creative work. If you're designing a game and the primary design and development is original work, but the art assets and/or music are AI generated that's probably fine. They're there to maintain immersion for the game. Or if you're writing a novel and the cover art is AI generated. I think this is an excellent use to allow AI to cover for your weaknesses so that you can play to your strengths. If the majority of something is AI generated then it belongs in the AI generated section so that people can voluntarily choose to engage with it with that in their mind.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
The best partner is both, imo. Half my jokes are silly stupid nonsense (I can't even count the number of times my wife and I have accused each other of being a "Sneef Snorf") and the other half are clever and elaborate constructions designed to sound like something reasonable and/or intelligent until they think about it for several moments and untangle the hidden meaning: which turns out to be silly stupid nonsense. I once wrote a two page short story with seemingly arbitrary fantasy and fairy tale features all to build up to the conclusion which was a sentence consisting of weird typos my wife (then girlfriend) had sent me while drunk the previous night.
I suppose someone less intelligent could still have appreciated the goof, but probably not to the same extent. Or wouldn't have taken the teasing in as much fun, as part of the embarrassment at her misspelling is because she ordinarily spells things correctly while sober. And someone less intelligent probably wouldn't have been able to respond to my hack MSPaint "photoshops" of our cat's head onto movie characters with an even higher quality photoshop of her own. And someone who took themselves seriously just wouldn't have appreciated the goofs at all.
You need both.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
I would broadly agree that glory as a motivation is easier to follow, as it's more inherently rewarding. While love for others is less inherently rewarding and thus a larger sacrifice. Which in turn is why it is MORE good. It is... easy is not the right word... easier to follow glory, to do good things which will give you glory, than it is to do good things which will merely help others but not yourself. Someone who is filled with a desire for glory but not a love for their neighbors might do all kinds of things, and only by sheer coincidence will those things be truly good, while someone who is filled with a love for their neighbors and no desire for glory will live a humble and self sacrificing life doing small amounts of good. Although someone with both will do large acts of good that help many many people, and thus is even better.
A motivation for glory is a smaller, easier stepping stone to reach. A motivation of love for humanity is a greater goal which is much much harder to attain but of greater value if attained.
If Christ’s motivation was glory, both for his Father and for his divine family and for himself, then we would likewise imitate this, and this would lead to glorious moral acts. But if Christ’s motivation was pure and uncorrupted “love for humanity”, then we will only feel a gnawing discomfort at the impossibility of our ever replicating this motivation in any legitimate sense.
It's axiomatic that no human can possibly reach the true goodness of Jesus. We are imperfect sinful humans. So you have to figure out how to not despair at never reaching the goal, and do your best anyway. Again, I think that on a fundamental level there isn't truly a distinction between actions which glorify ourselves, actions which glorify God, and actions which show love to humanity. They're the same actions. There are things which people might define as "glory" which harm people like being a murderous conqueror, but don't give true glory because they are evil and sinful. Ultimately true glory comes from doing the most good. So you don't really have to choose, just do all the good things for all the good reasons. But I think love for humanity, although harder to attain, is harder to corrupt once present. Still possible, but harder. There are fewer examples of actions which superficially seem loving but are actually evil than there are actions which superficially seem glorious but are actually evil. But in the end I think Jesus was motivated by all of them, so imitating him by yourself following all of the motivations seems like a more robust way to do good than following one of them to the exclusion of the others. You're more likely to notice when you're being led astray when the motivations appear to diverge instead of converge like they're supposed to.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
Maybe this is just the consequentialist in me, but it seems like love for humanity and the enabling of their salvation has to be the overriding one. Suppose that you literally had to pick one:
1: God will get glory equal to saving all of humanity, but you will not be gloried, and humanity will not actually be saved and they'll all go to hell
2: God will not get glory (at least, not any extra from your decision), but you will get glory from God as if you had saved humanity, but humanity will not actually be saved and they'll all go to hell
3: God will not get any additional glory, and you will not get any personal glory or credit, but humanity will be saved (or at least, have the ability to repent and be saved if they so choose)
Setting aside the inherent contradictions (because it would be unjust for God not to glory you or himself for saving humanity) for the sake of the thought experiment, it seems to me that the actually most good action would be 3: save the people. And this is in line with everything else Jesus preached. You do good works, even at the cost of your own material well-being, and then this automatically glories God and yourself automatically as secondary effects. But you have to actually do good.
Now, in reality all of these are inextricably linked: God only gives commands iff they are good iff they benefit people iff they glorify Himself iff they glorify the person who does them. I think that on a fundamental level there isn't even a meaningful distinction between "doing good" and "glorifying God", otherwise God would have said different things until they became the same thing. So I strongly suspect that Jesus had all of them as equally strong motivations because they're all the same thing if you have true understanding (which he did). But in-so-far as you consider them to be distinct, I think the saving of humanity was the primary motivation (but this might just be my perspective as a selfish human who loves being saved more than I love glorifying God)
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
See, that would have made sense. Assuming the magic sex change spell carries fertility with it (not sure how that interfaces with chromosomes, but maybe you can handwave magic that), I can easily imagine oppressive social norms that forces everyone to do like a clownfish thing. They have to be female in their late teens and early twenties to have a bunch of kids and then when they get older they turn male and go off to war to protect the society, with the most successful (and surviving) war heroes getting rewarded with breeding the younger females. Oppressive and constricting to be forced into as a citizen, but super beneficial for the society and the people ruling it since you get the advantages of both sexes, and maximizes chances of survival against an enemy force that outclasses you. (It especially makes sense in a LitRPG context where you can do easy fights and level up while young and will be multiple times stronger when you're older)
I'm not saying the author needed to make it be a rationalfic and actually do that. I can suspend disbelief enough for them to have a relative normal medieval culture or something close. But it makes no sense to make everything about the world gritty and harsh except for their gender norms.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
Related to the above, modern progressive attitudes everywhere. Of course men and women are exactly the same. Of course everyone is having casual, consequence-free sex. Of course anyone who finds meaning in faith is secretly cynically corrupt or else a psycho child molester.
There was this one story where it was like a dungeon/system apocalypse sort of thing. Dude ends up in a world where monsters and dungeons are gradually expanding in power and humanity is being driven back further and further, the population dwindling over the course of centuries as the monsters continue to gain in power.
And then the characters make some offhand comment about a magic spell that lets you switch gender which certain people who were "born in the wrong body" use to cure their condition. And then MC from Earth explains how in our world those people are oppressed and everyone shakes their heads about how unenlightened that is. Now, on an object level it makes sense that if such spells were available people with gender dysphoria would want to use them. But the language was very obviously dated as 2010+ progressivism, which would have no way of being the same in some fantasy world. And more importantly there is no way a world on the verge of extinction with massive attrition due to a constant multi-generational war against monsters is going to end up progressive, especially with regard to gender roles. They are going to want women pumping out as many kids as possible so they don't go extinct. Or rather, any subculture which chooses to be progressive in any way that reduces birthrates (as opposed to some free-love variant that encourages promiscuity but discourages birth control) will quickly die out and be replaced under such strong selection pressures.
I made a comment to this effect, to which the author replied "my world, my rules". So I stopped reading.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
I was pointing towards the general concept (disproportionately high rate of incidence) not the specific numbers involved. I suppose 13 52 is a minority -> majority not a minority -> higher minority, so maybe a bad example.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
He also thinks gay men are unfairly blamed for both HIV and monkeypox, and claimed that heterosexuals now acquire both at higher rates while gay men are just more honest and tested more. I had strong reservations about that claim, and made a note to check later.
My understanding is that it's a 13 52 kind of situation. On a per capita basis gay men are way more likely to catch and spread it, but in absolute numbers there are more heterosexual cases because they are the vast majority of the population. If you're outnumbered 20 to 1 then you can have up to 19x the incidence rate and still have fewer total cases.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
Or take the stock market. Nvidia has a net profit of 76G$/year and a market cap of 4T$, so it is worth about 50 years of profit. If there was less capital around to be invested, it might only be worth 2T$ instead, but I fail to see what would be so bad about that.
Tiny probabilities of huge profits are what drive Venture Capital to take risks. If a Venture Capitalist sees a chance to spend $10 billion for 10% chance of $90 billion, they don't take that risk. If they see a 10% chance of $180 billion they probably do.
Nvidia is currently planning to invest $500 billion in new infrastructure over the next few years. If hypothetical Mvidia startup entrepreneur sees that and thinks they have a 20% chance of rising up to compete with them to also be worth $4T (average output $800b), investors will throw those dice and happily pay $500b. We end up with more competition and diversity, lowering prices for consumers. If taxes go up and Nvidia and hypothetical peers are worth $2T, the dice odds don't look so good and there's more of a monopoly (unless someone is so confident that they can compete with 40% odds.
For any marginal tax increase, the cost/benefit ratio for new competitors shifts and it requires greater odds and more monopolistic profits before you get more entrepreneurial competitors. This leads to more monopolies, higher consumer prices, and people working for megacorps instead of starting their own small businesses.
I don't think there have been any prominent "calling it" moments like this. The four most similar cases I can think of where someone is/was crying wolf about their assassination and it didn't happen, but if they had died (or do die) there would definitely be retroactive conspiracy theories are Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Julian Assange, And Edward Snowden. So if you're being maximally harsh you could call it 1/5. But none of these have had quite the same level of strength. Everyone believed that Epstein had dirt on prominent politicians that he had not yet spilled, which made getting rid of him quickly a priority. People hate Trump and Musk for public reasons and while killing them would remove them as an annoyance, it wouldn't keep any politicians out of jail. Assange and Snowden already leaked their secrets and assassinating them would just be petty revenge, it wouldn't unleak the secrets. Assassinating any of those four would increase the risk of a politician going to jail, not decrease it as in Epstein's case (conditional on the probability of getting caught being less than the probability of him spilling the beans). Additionally, the U.S. government has never had one of those four in custody in a way that would provide such an easy opportunity to off them. And, while I don't pay a ton of attention, nobody has been warning about the potential for assassination attempts on these four except for Trump, who has in fact been the target of attempted assassinated multiple times (though not necessarily by a conspiracy unless you count stochastic terrorism). So depending on how you categorize it we're either 1/5, 2/5, 2/2, or 1/1. Personally I'd go with 1/1, since Epstein was (as far as I know) unique in circumstance of being in a prison with known incriminating evidence on (probably multiple) politicians.
The biggest argument in favor of EDKH, and the reason I endorse a (mild) version of it, is that it was predictive, and already existed prior to its occurring, giving the authorities every opportunity to prevent it. Almost all conspiracies are post-hoc rationalizations that look at the facts and then concoct a theory to retroactively explain the events. But EDKH predicted it ahead of time. Everyone knew that Epstein had dirt on famous and powerful people. We still don't know exactly who, you can't point to any one specific person and say for certain that they went to Epstein's island AND committed crimes while there: anyone who visited might plausibly not have known exactly the details (they might have come expecting sexy 18 year old prostitutes and been shocked and offended when offered an underage one, or Epstein might have known their temperment and offered exclusively legal and willing prostitutes to certain members.) In fact I would be shocked if there wasn't at least one person who physically went to the island and yet committed no crimes there. But there were lots who did, and some of them are probably politicians, and each has a large incentive to want him dead before he can spill the beans. And we knew this and they should have had him on extra super suicide watch as a result. He was one of the most at risk and most important prisoners in the last century. I don't care if they had to have a guard paid to literally sit outside his cell and watch him 24/7, it should have been completely and utterly impossible for him to die via any cause, even a heart attack, without immediate intervention.
The reason I believe EDKH conspiracy is because Epstein is dead, and if there wasn't a conspiracy he should be alive. Now, in a literal sense I think the most likely scenario is that Epstein physically did kill himself with some sort of deal with the powers that be regarding his legacy or heirs or something or other, and then they had the prison warden turn a blind eye. The reason I don't think this falls afoul of the Basic Argument Against Conspiracy Theories is exception D that scott points out in his article:
D. All else being equal, small conspiracies are likelier than big conspiracies. A cult may take over a town without the average person knowing it; it would be more surprising for them to take over a country.
I don't think this requires a lot of people to actually be in on it. Possibly as few as three: one politician, one highly ranked prison officer (not necessarily the top, but high enough to pull some strings), and Epstein himself. Politician gives the go ahead wink wink nudge to the officer, officer arranges the schedules, residence, and guard patrols, and temporarily disables a camera, and then Epstein hangs himself with no witnesses in exchange for whatever the politician promised. It's likely that it was a little more involved, there were probably a lot of politicians on his list who gave tacit approval or wink wink nudge nudge when big politician says he'll "handle it". A bunch of guards might have been suspicious about the slightly unusual orders they received. But most of them don't need to be directly involved or have any incriminating details with which to whistleblow, just conspiracy theories of their own. Even the stronger version where Epstein was literally murdered only requires one additional person: the assassin, who has obviously strong incentive not to whistleblow themselves.
This is important because Epstein had important information. I firmly believe that the real Epstein list was in his head. Any physical list is going to be something like "visitors" to the island which is suspicious but not incriminating enough to act on. Without Epstein's testimony we have no way to distinguish stupid people who wanted to have creepy but legal fun with young adult women, sex offenders who had sex with underage girls, and national traitors who had sex with underage girls and then got blackmailed by Epstein into abusing their political power for him. They're all going to get away with it. Even if his death involved no conspiracies at all I still want everyone we can possibly verify as responsible to at minimum lose their jobs, and probably go to jail for criminal negligence. He should not have died and we knew he would anyway, before it happened, and yet it still happened. That's why you should care.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
I'm generally sympathetic, but even if your utility function has a straight 0 for the welfare of bums, you still have to account for second order effects of any policies you implement on ordinary people.
Simply displacing them immediately runs into public goods dilemmas. If you don't want them in your neighborhood so you bus them a couple miles East, then they start harassing the people who live there. But then your neighbor doesn't want them in their neighborhood so they bus them a couple miles West and they're your problem again. Now you both have the same number of bums but you're both paying extra for wranglers and bus fares for no net benefit.
Massive jail terms for small misdemeanors runs into issues with non-bums who occasional have small misdemeanors. You get drunk at a bar and your asshole buddy who's supposed to be the DD bails and leaves you stranded so you try to walk home but fall asleep on the sidewalk. Or your spouse cheats on you and you find out while in public and start yelling at her. Or a bum starts assaulting you and you defend yourself but the police end up arresting both of you and both end up in trouble. Ordinary and sympathetic people get in trouble with the law way way way less often than bums, but it's not unheard of. It's not as if the laws are perfectly just and you, by being a good person, are automatically immune to ever getting in trouble with it. If you get a 5 year jail penalty for something stupid it could ruin your life, which is why small things normally carry small penalties.
If you straight up genocide the bums you run into huge PR problems, human rights violations, and again, the opportunity for this to sometimes happen to regular people.
There are sophisticated, intelligent, and probably effective solutions that people are unwilling to do, such as escalating penalties for repeat offenders (much more than whatever they do now). But then it DOES matter what the solution is, because bad solutions are bad, even for you.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
My go to strategy as a kid was to walk through the library looking for Unicorn stickers (which signaled fantasy) in the children and/or young adult section (and later the adult section when I became a teenager). And then look at the cover, read the synopsis, and pick out books that sound interesting. (I eventually picked up intuition based on the cover art too, since that's correlated with... something something target demographic and sub sub genre, but I can't really articulate any of that in words other than to avoid books which look too much like other books you've read and disliked, and try to read books that look like other books you really liked).
However this was like 20 years ago and I have no idea to what extent the woke has penetrated fantasy. And also don't know what your niece's preferred genres are. So my actual advice is 1: have her just browse through the library and pick things out, and 2: don't be afraid to go slightly over age range. A Precocious 9 year old can handle books intended for 14 year olds, they're unlikely to have anything truly inappropriate, it's mostly an issue of word complexity and character age.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9mo ago
I score INTJ half the time and INTP half the time, so I'm like right on the threshold of J/P, but the INT are pretty strong.
It is obvious that it's NOT just pseudoscience (in the way that astrology is), otherwise we wouldn't see so many real correlations. Also every woman I've ever been seriously interested in beyond surface level attraction, including my wife, has been INTx.
What it isn't is some sort of scientific causal phenomenon where your brain is somehow biologically born as one of these types and they then cause you to exhibit external behaviors. It's a classification scheme. A compression algorithm. It asks you how introverted, extroverted, emotional etc etc you are in a bunch of ways and then condenses that into four letters so you can communicate more concisely without sharing your entire 50 question response with everybody you meet. I can just say "INTJ" and someone else says "INTJ" or "INTP" and I'm like "oh, we probably have a lot in common" and then we do.
Does nobody have respect for the rule of law? This seems related to the concept of incentivizing lying that came up again in the recent ACX review: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-participation-in-phase
If you have rules and laws and you consistently don't enforce them, then you reward and incentivize rule breakers and liars. We have immigration laws. First and foremost, we should enforce the immigration laws. Then, after doing so, if we find out that we don't have the optimal level of immigration then we should change the number of immigrants we allow.
If foreign manufacturers are forming plans to build facilities in the United States, they should form their plans with the intention of hiring primarily locals, with whatever management or trainers they bring in having legal visas. These plans should involve carefully screening hired laborers to make sure they are legal. If their plans have already factored in plans to hire illegals but are worried about getting raided and choose not to, then good. They should either reformulate their plans to follow the law, or take their business elsewhere.
If we establish a precedent of enforcing immigration laws, then investors will take them into account and the economy will equilibrize accordingly. If we then end up with more American factories, or foreign factories with American workers because a hole was opened up for them to fill, then good, and we have more jobs for Americans. If not, and there ends up being a shortage of factories because we genuinely need the foreign expertise, then we'll be able to observe that and stick some more visas in the immigration budget. And then they'll be legal, and we'll have control over how many there are.
In no world is "make harsh laws and then fail to enforce them because they are too harsh" the correct decision.
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