MathWizard
formerly hh26
No bio...
User ID: 164
MathWizard
formerly hh26
20d ago
Hence the word "relatively". All conspiracy theories carry some risk, via this sort of chaining, but the Flat Earth ones are indirect like this, while others like "the FBI is stalking me" have a much more direct path towards danger.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
12d ago
I've been doing it like that, where they're all together and reference each other, it's just that then when Agent has 15 methods because some of them are experimental variations on each other or niche things I wanted to do to see what would happen, then I make another class for graphing scatter plots, and I've got a bunch of methods for (Make a world, then modifier the parameters according to X, then execute Y, then graph the results, then repeat that N times) that would be nice to stick in their own class somewhere, and then I've got a bunch of useful static methods that do stuff like load and save data to CSVs that would be nice to have in their own class for organization purposes. And if I just lay them out linearly (which I mostly have, with a few rare exceptions that definitely have 0 recursive dependencies and I actually have moved them to their own .py file) then I have literally 2000 lines of code I have to scroll up and down just to find the right class whenever I want to check to see what the name of the method I want to call is or something, and then scroll back down to find the spot I'm working on.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
12d ago
Do you know if there's a way to.... I'm not even sure what the right language is here.... put different classes in different .py files, or at least different tabs, without running into recursive dependency issues.
Like, in Java, I can make a World class that contains a population from the Agent class, and models an epidemic going through them, and the Agents have a bunch of methods internally regarding how they function as they get infected and recover and stuff. And if I pass a copy of the main World to each Agent when it's created, then when they do stuff in their methods they can call back up to the World, usually for counting purposes, they say "hey I got infected, increment the total infection counter" or "hey someone was going to infect me but I'm already infected, increment the redundant infection counter".
As far as I can tell, in Python I can't do that nicely. If the World class imports Agent, then the Agent class can't import World. I can resolve this by defining both classes in the same .py file, but then all my code is arranged 1-dimensionally and I have to scroll through tons of stuff to find what I'm looking for (or use ctlr F). Whereas in Java each class has its own tab, I can open or close or switch to, so well-behaved ones that I'm not working on don't take up space or get in my way. I'm not sure if this is a Python issue or just a Eclipse issue. Is there a way to split a .py file into multiple tabs so I can organize better?
MathWizard
formerly hh26
19d ago
1: Outlaw abortion, provide free non-abortive birth control for everyone, which is mandatory for heterosexuals until they get married, or at least sign some sort of contract with their long-term partner about how potential children will be raised.
2: School vouchers, which includes subsidies for homeschooling, provided said schools and homeschools pass certain accreditation procedures so they are actually providing a legitimate education and aren't just scamming for money.
Actually.... you asked for things out of left field, and 2 seems too normal. So to play more into the thought experiment here, let's ramp it up beyond what I'd normally advocate. Massively subsidize homeschooling. Provide free teacher training for parents, with a specialization towards teaching in small classroom sizes of children who you get to see repeatedly year after year, in every subject, and teaching kids to teach themselves. Pay enough that families can go from living on a two-working-parents income to a two-working-parents-but-one's-job-is-homeschooling-their-own-kids income. It won't even cost money, just divert it from the public schools who don't need as much because many kids have moved to homeschools. Have economists figure out every possible way that bad-faith-actors could exploit the system and figure out how to prevent it.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
24d ago
/
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1d ago
That's almost a prisoner's dilemma, but I suppose technically counts as Chicken. You're doing a (very slightly) negative sum interaction in order to siphon zero sum rewards away from other people. Nash equilibrium, everyone does this and ends up worse off than if they just respected the queue. (Although I suppose queues themselves are a bit of a prisoner's dilemma with respect to arrival time)
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1d ago
"Destroy your opponent before they can destroy you" does not at all sound like the "reasonable answer". Especially since this won't literally destroy them, they'll still exist and be even more ravenous to seize the reins of power. It seems like the actually reasonable answer is to de-escalate and decrease the power and influence of the government so people can make their own choices about their own personal lives.
I don't even get why there are "sides". I don't care whether the meat I eat comes from a "farm" or a "lab", I just care whether it's cheap, tasty, and nutritious. Let them both try their best and we can judge them and eat them according to our own preferences. I'm on team freedom, and that means nobody gets shut down pointlessly just to "own" the other side.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
12d ago
Partly a response, partly hijacking this to ask a question of my own to everyone else: what are you using as a editor/compiler?
I programmed exclusively in Java for years, but my new boss wanted programs in Python so I've been doing that this past year. Using Eclipse, which is wonderful as an editor, since it lets me organize everything and highlights typos that I make and stuff.
Aside a whole lot of friction involving different conventions and abilities, I was annoyed that all of the Python editors people recommended seemed way less functional until I discovered that I can program Python in Eclipse if I do the right stuff. So I've been doing that.
I'm not sure what the general consensus is, because I'm mostly self-taught and program on my own, making mathematical models for research purposes that nobody else has to use or collaborate with, so I've probably got all sorts of weird habits that would make more sophisticated programmers cringe. So I can't tell how much of this is objective and how much is just me being used to Eclipse for so many years and having little experience with anything else. But I tentatively recommend looking into PyDev for Eclipse, because in my opinion it's nice.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
21d ago
I really like MTG Arena, because I am addicted to screens. In particular:
-
It's free to play. If you want to get all the fancy cards you have to pay real money, or play the game regularly in order to complete enough daily quests to get card packs, or be good enough at drafts that you can win more stuff than you lose. But if you're okay with being slightly-underpowered, or if you scrape together enough to make one good deck and keep playing that deck, you don't have to pay a cent. And I never have. Back when I played physical magic I had to pay real money AND be underpowered compared to my friends who paid more than me.
-
You can just pick up and play with someone, instantly, at home. As someone without a lot of friends, and who doesn't like going out and doing things, it's convenient to just feel like playing Magic on a whim and then a few minutes later after the game boots up I have someone to play against, and then I can stop when I'm bored, and then play another match a few hours later. It's really convenient. I guess if you and your son are playing together that's less of an issue.
But everyone is different and your situation is quite different from mine.
As a side note, how do you make things fair when playing against your son? Do you just go easy on him? Do you give him a way better deck than you and then trying to overcome the difference? My fiance and I have not had much success playing together because I've played a ton and she's played almost none and I'm too much of a tryhard I can't figure out how to avoid utterly destroying her except with incredibly patronizing handicaps, and it ends up no fun for either of us.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1d ago
I don't think anyone has meaningfully decreased the power of the government in decades. Maybe a couple overreaching laws here or there got repealed, but plenty more came along, and the government just keeps doing whatever it wants with whatever justification they can make up ad hoc to justify the thing they already decided to do.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
8d ago
Seems like this depends entirely on what aesthetic the game is aiming for. Would The Matrix have been a better film if it were in the style of a Miyazaki film? Or as an animated version of a Leonardo da Vinci painting? From a certain perspective you might consider the Mona Lisa to be "better art" than The Matrix, but being real people with some minor CGI added worked for what it was going for and made a fantastic film.
We're not there yet, but if we can reach the point where hyper-realistic faces in games can actually be mistaken for real actors, there's a huge range of applications where it would actually be useful and better than a stylized game character because it fits the aesthetic the game intends, even if such situations are the minority.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
14d ago
In the original construction, you win if you choose the absolute best partner, you lose if you do not, so the 75th percentile is a guaranteed loss, no different from the bottom 1 percentile. You only want to maximize the probability of getting the actual best, so it has to be better than anything you've seen so far or there's no chance and no point settling.
However, you are right that in this modified version trying to maximize utility this no longer applies, and a proper optimal strategy should probably be a function f(n,d) describing what percentile you're willing to settle on as a function of what time step it is (n) and what your estimate of the distribution is (d), depending on what you've seen so far and your meta knowledge.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
14d ago
It seems to me like the best way to model this would be to have some multiplicative scaling factor on utility that diminishes over time, since 50 years of your life with the second best suitor is (probably) going to be better than spending 20 years of your life with the best suitor. Perhaps a linear decay to simulate amount of lifespan remaining, so the utility of choosing the nth suitor is their actual quality multiplied by (1-0.01n). Or maybe weight it more towards the beginning to account for youth and childbearing years, like (0.99)^n or something.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1d ago
It is material in-so-far as it modifies their branding/camouflage, tactics, targets, methodology.
It's not "just" corruption. A cop explicitly asking for bribes in America is going to get fired and prosecuted instantly. There are a lot of things cops can and do get away with, but explicit bribery is not usually on the list, with rare exceptions. But if they camouflage it, it's more possible and likely. Call it "asset forfeiture", make excuses for why it doesn't count as theft, and then target poor people with drugs that don't evoke sympathy from the public. It's still a form of corruption, but it's a very different form of corruption than the DMV official demanding an extra $100 to expedite your paperwork or it will get lost for 6 months, or a police officer pulling you over and threatening to write you a ticket for made-up charge unless you slip them $50. Just using the word "corruption" doesn't tell you the difference, or orders of magnitude, about what to expect to have to pay and how to avoid it.
Similarly, woke progressives are not going to pull over your car and extort $50 from you, nor will they arrest someone with marijuana and snatch all their money. They worm their way into industries and beurocracies and government agencies, then hire friends and family and like-minded people who look and act and speak like them, fire people who don't, and divert funds away from productive uses and towards spreading more woke-ism and getting cushy jobs for themselves and their friends. And they use nice-sounding ideals as a cudgel to choose who to attack and who to let go. I agree that this is a form of corruption, but it's a very different form of corruption than most other forms. And it's very very very good at masking the corrupt parts of itself and pretending to be good, and thus skates by unnoticed and in fact praised by so many people.
Calling it "corruption" is not wrong, but there's so much nuance it misses.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
5d ago
It's unclear what he'll use as a replacement for it in the likely event that Trump sits there next year
Does he need a replacement? If Trump stays on the same side, at least with respect to the culture war, then there won't be anything he does that Texas would feel the need to nullify. Any overreaches of Presidential authority that Trump makes will probably be in favor of the right and against the left. At which point left-leaning states may try to pull the same stunt using these incidents as inspiration/justification. But as far as Texas is concerned they'll probably just cheer on whatever he does as something they were doing anyway or would like to do.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
18d ago
My guess, extrapolating from my own similar albeit weaker feelings, is that it's something along the lines of corruption of virtue. Taking what should be positive qualities and wasting them or subverting them. Similar to a beautiful delicious barbecued pig falling into the dirt and feeding the flies and germs instead of a person. Turning from something nourishing and healthy to people into something that only feeds rot and disease.
That is, kindness has the potential to do good things and have value and make the world a better place. But misplaced kindness that rewards bad behavior will incentivize them and make them more prevalent. The vast majority of toxic behaviors we see in society are there not because the people who do them are stupid people who can't figure out how to be kind, but because they have been systematically rewarded for those behaviors in some way or another. Being toxic works, at least on some level for some people. To the extent that toxic behaviors are analogous to disease, systematically feeding them with misplaced kindness is comparable to someone going out and feeding expensive high quality meat to a wild rat colony, or a beautiful woman allowing mosquitoes and hookworms to feast on her blood. Not only are they wasting something good, but they are actively allowing badness to reproduce for everyone else to have to deal with. It's disgusting.
I feel less scorn and revulsion for people who do this accidentally than I would for someone doing this on purpose. And less for people doing this on a social level than with literal diseases. But it's still gross in a similar way.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
22d ago
I read a comment on Reddit by someone who talked about posting Flat Earth stuff as a creative writing exercise. You get to think up clever arguments and find loopholes when arguing against people who are objectively correct, and not worry about getting your ego hurt if you're proven wrong because you're not actually taking it seriously. I browsed the Flat Earth sub for a bit after that and tried to figure out who was serious and who wasn't, though with no way to test that I have no idea how successful I was.
I think the main issue I'd have with actually participating is the propensity to delude naive and mentally ill people into joining unironically. The more people who are involved and having fun and aren't lunatics, the more legitimate the movement seems. Although on the other hand it's a relatively harmless conspiracy for people to believe, so maybe it helps steal thunder away from more dangerous conspiracies that mentally ill people might fall into, so maybe it's useful, I dunno.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
29d ago
Nope. Controversial opinion here, I think coffee is a flavor not a real beverage. I absolutely love coffee-flavored desserts, ice cream, mocha, stuff like that. The only time I'll drink actual coffee is if it's in a super-sweet latte or something, with more milk and sugar than actual coffee. Essentially a warm coffee-flavored milkshake.
Or, if I'm trying to be responsible and not drink a meal's worth of calories in a cup, I'll just drink water.
I just don't get proper coffee just brewed in water with nothing or very little else. I don't think it tastes good, it's like stirring spoonfuls of cinnamon or nutmeg into your water. They taste good when combined with the right stuff, but not by themselves.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
2d ago
Precisely. The government's one and only legitimate role in this would be to mandate that it has to be labeled correctly and can't be falsely advertised as ordinary meat. Other than that, they need to stay out of it and let the people make up their own minds on what they choose to purchase.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
29d ago
Because the test wasn't supposed to be painful, and if he did show his pain, that would be interpreted as an intentional clinical sign by the examinees, who not having access to the script, would then promptly jump to the wrong diagnosis and thus immediately fail the station.
Is that a bad outcome? If the examinees are conducting the test incorrectly such that it caused pain, and then jumping to incorrect conclusions as a result, that is something that will lead to incorrect conclusions when done in the real world on real patients, and deserves to be flunked.
Unless what you mean is that the test "officially" doesn't cause pain despite frequently causing pain in practice even when done correctly, such that the students are not to blame for the inevitable mis-diagnosis because the expected exam answers are flawed.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1d ago
It reads like a joke that someone forgot the punchline to and butchered the delivery. Would have been much better if they had figured out how to get it in the correct order.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
10d ago
Small-scale shower thought, since I don't want to wait until Sunday
You do realize that you're allowed to post in the existing thread, right? It still exists, it doesn't expire on Monday, it expires next Sunday when the next thread comes out.
In terms of scale it involves more people, but in terms of perceived threat and actionable measures it seems less threatening.
Like, JFK was assassinated. This is immediately violent. Believing that the government/CIA assassinated the president makes them dangerous bad guys who are willing to assassinate people they don't like, and potentially justifies violence against them in retaliation and/or self defense. 9/11 likewise killed lots of people, making the perpetrators dangerous and worth retaliating against (even ordinary non-conspiracists can get behind this, which is why there was so much support for military intervention in the middle east after 9/11).
The most likely response to threats of violence are accumulating weapons to defend oneself and possibly pre-emptively strike using violence. If someone points a gun at you, you point one back.
Vaccines and Flat Earth are about scientific lies. They say that the leading scientists and media are corrupt and in the pocket of the government or whoever is leading the conspiracy, and the things they say cannot be trusted. Nobody needs to die to cover up the truth, because they can be paid off instead. Now, maybe some of the variants of vaccine and Flat Earth conspiracy theories do involve the government murdering people to cover up, and those ones are potentially dangerous, but I have never heard a Flat Earther talking about assassinations, so I think it's uncommon.
The most likely response to media and scientists lying is to not trust them, and possibly have this mistrust bleed into other domains. If they're lying to you about X, why should you trust them about Y? Now this can lead to some harms such as people refusing to vaccinate themselves or their children, but this is significantly less dangerous than actual violence. If someone lies to your face, you lose respect for them and possibly try to avoid them, but very few people would respond with violence (except in weird edge cases, where it's probably not about the lie itself but about the underlying thing they were lying about).
More options
Context Copy link