MathWizard
Good things are good
No bio...
User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
And yet, some proportion of rapists are 6'5 attractive sociopaths who go on romantic dates with women and then rape them. And probably don't marry them afterwards, if they were interested long term they'd probably be patient. But I assume that people not being traumatized and therefore not reporting it to the police would cause a rapist to keep going and thus become disproportionately prolific than some disgusting homeless person who gets reported and caught quickly.
Also, I'm not at all suggesting that this is typical or average. It's an exception, I'm just wondering if maybe it's on the order of 1-5% rather than 0-0.01% mentally ill people that society's failure to entertain it as a possibility would imply.
MathWizard
Good things are good
21d ago
The ideal temperature for human comfort is around 20C, which is why people set their thermostats around there. Anyone setting their thermostats to anything meaningfully distant from ~20C is doing it to save money. If you're outdoors, you maybe want a bit more if it's windy, or a bit less if it's sunny or you're doing a lot of physical activity, but you want the sum of all effects to average you back so your individual subjective feeling is around 20C.
Whatever combination of sunny/cloudy/rainy gets you closer to 20C is the ideal weather for your region.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5mo ago
I've heard this "liberalism doesn't work" idea before, but never really been convinced by it. Equality of opportunity doesn't need to be taken so literally that you toss it all away when one person is born with 1 IQ point less than another. Treat people equally before the law, and generally socially and culturally. Treat people according to the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Most of the "counterarguments" I've heard are that if people are born with different talent or even just different inherited wealth from their parents then this doesn't work because they don't really have equality of opportunity, but... so what? If people are born with different circumstances then equality of opportunity doesn't inevitably lead to equality of outcome and that's okay. Set up a society in which everyone has an opportunity to thrive and carve out a happy healthy life for themselves, and let them sort themselves out. Maybe the 70 IQ person have a small apartment and a job at a fast food place while the 130 IQ person lives in a fancy manor and works at Google. Let them. I don't see how liberalism or the enlightenment prevent this. Instead, it is the regression from this ideal that wokeism represents that is the problem. We went from "people of the same skin color should share the blame and credit for each other's actions" to "people should be treated according to their own actions" back to "people of the same skin color should share the blame and credit for each other's actions". Wokeism is explicitly illiberal, not a failing of liberalism.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7mo ago
Sure, but my example is basically a disproof by counterexample. In this example, prices don't match utility, therefore, the statement "prices always match utility" is logically false. It's really easy to disprove an "always" statement with a single example, even a hypothetical one, because an "always" statement is such a strong claim that it's almost never true. Utility value and market value are different things: sometimes they will be equal, sometimes they will not. I'm not saying they're never equal, I'm not saying they won't usually be close, especially in an efficient market. My point is that markets in the real world are not always efficient, therefore the two values are not always equal in the real world. This should not be controversial.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
If each and every one of the twelve "normal" dudes is actually normal, middle of the bell curve in terms of criminality, then yeah it's going to be much safer, although it's still a non-negligible risk factor. Ordinary people can get violent if they're acting to protect their children from what they perceive as a threat (and rightly so in many cases). If instead they're chosen randomly from the distribution, then out of a dozen men you're going to get several on the low end of the bell curve. Given that 9% of men end up going to prison, you're likely to get one being an actual criminal who just hasn't been caught yet. Who might then act violent towards the others and get them pulled into trying to fight back in an attempt to protect themselves, the woman, and/or the child. Modify this again by noting that the subset of men who are likely to fall for a stunt like this are going to be below average in intelligence and general quality, so you're very likely to be pulling from the lower end of the bell curve repeatedly, even if not quite at the depths that prison would be.
It's still qualitatively the same risk scenario, the prison part does make it worse but it's merely an amplifier to the pre-existing risk.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5d ago
Clear away the flammable shrubs
Ironically, my understanding from reading on the internet is that this is actually the problem. They DO clear away flammable stuff, at least the small stuff that's feasible to clear, which means regular small fires don't happen and so larger flammable stuff accumulates and accumulates so when a fire does break out it's super crazy bad. While if they allowed small fires to happen and eat whatever has accumulated then it would be more manageable.
MathWizard
Good things are good
14d ago
No, it's the limit on the amount that Carlos's insurance would cover.
My bad, that's what I meant to ask but got their names mixed up.
To clarify: This situation arose solely because Keith was impatient. He asked the two judges to impose the 200-k$ limit because he wanted to get his money ASAP, without waiting for the bankruptcy proceedings to finish.
But why was that necessary? Shouldn't there have been an option to do the thing he tried to do? That is, have his case proceed but, because the accident occurred prior to the bankruptcy, anything that exceed the insurance value can retroactively be voided by the bankruptcy? Or is that not possible because it would make him a creditor and the bankruptcy has to figure out how to pay those out?
Wouldn't it make more sense to put a hold on the bankruptcy proceedings and handle the lawsuit first?
MathWizard
Good things are good
29d ago
I see where you're coming from. On a gut level I immediately want to retort that punishment and forgiveness should be equally affected by your smallness and anonymity. If you're just one of many people such that your forgiveness barely matters, then your punishment barely matters too, especially since the external outcome of your forgiveness would be the cessation of your punishment/shaming.
But since it's also the case that
A: Punishments are applied in a decentralized way, with each person using their own individual criteria for what should receive shame
B: The impact of punishment via shame is nonlinear. Getting 20 death threats doesn't actually feel twice as bad as getting 10 death threats, so reducing the number of shamers by 50% doesn't actually help all that much.
Your point probably stands. Aella could repent and change her ways, and maybe 50% of people would forgive her and the shame would go down, but the other 50% would continue And also probably a bunch of sex-positive people would start shaming her and it might even end up worse. So then she's paid the massive social and lifestyle costs of repenting without actually solving the shame. Without a near-universally recognized authority who can forgive her and enforce other people's forgiveness (in deed, even if not in belief), she has no incentive to repent (beyond a genuine realization of being wrong and a self-sacrificing desire to do the right thing despite the costs).
Which in turn massively decreases the pro-social utility of shame. The point of punishments is to disincentivize the punished behavior, both on the part of the person being punished, and other people who witness them. But we've essentially lost half of that. If we make her miserable enough maybe we'll scare others away from following her example, but sometimes young people are stupid and do stuff before they realize the consequences. And anyone who does and then changes their mind is just stuck in a world where they can't be forgiven. Or more likely, doubles down on the side they're already on because they know they can't go back.
I don't know that we can do anything about that. But it still kind of sucks.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2mo ago
In most non-rpgs clothing doesn't imbue stats, so you can just wear whatever you want and there's no dilemma to fix.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5mo ago
Example 4 shows that to be an "oppressed minority" it matters that the overall sentiment of society is against you, rather than just anyone. Thought I also argue this above, example 5 shows us that in order to measure the disadvantage you hold in society, you have to multiply the amount of people who are against you by the extent to which they're against you. You should also multiply this by how powerful they are (if those against you are 10 times more powerful, they count for 10 times more). Now, simply find out if the sum of the sentiments in your favor minus the sum of sentiments against you, is bigger or smaller than 0. On the makro scale, this decides if you're oppressed or not, and the average sentiment is necessarily going to be the opposite of what it claims unless it's exactly 0 (If society as a whole arrives at the conclusion that society as a whole is against you, we arrive at a contradiction).
If you define this too strictly then it becomes tautologically true but meaningless. One could never know whether one is an "oppressed minority" unless one first painstakingly computes this sum, find it less than zero and then, having done so, can generalize it no further than saying that the sum is less than zero.
This only matters if it affects things we care about. So heuristically I mostly agree with the general mathematical framing, provided we are careful to measure the "extent to which they're against you" by actions more than words. Words probably count a little bit since they affect social outcomes and psychological well-being, but things like violence or job opportunities matter much more. Here then is I think where the apparent "paradox unravels", in that the internal sentiment of people materializes at different rates in the realm of socially expressed sentiment and actual material outcomes. In a phrase: "talk is cheap". Zooming in on Example 3, we have a world where 90% of people say they support C, they get angry when B do terrible things to C. If they witness a discriminatory event in person they probably get upset at the B who did it, yell at them a bit, and then go make a social media post about how awful B are. The apparent social sentiment is overwhelming in favor of C, and thinks B are horrible ignorant scum. But if they don't actually do anything about it, then it's all just surface level talk and C continue to get discriminated against while B are fine as long as they make do a little bit of op-sec so they don't get witnessed discriminating too publicly.
If your model defines "oppressed minority" using apparent public sentiment in the equation, it will classify C here as "not oppressed", and fail to recognize a scenario which, while not a central example, shares a lot of the bad features associated with being an oppressed minority. At the very least, some new term needs to be used to describe this and a problem needs to be solved, rather than ignored because it's "not real oppression".
If instead your model defines "oppressed minority" using actual behaviors in the equation then you have a major legibility issue in that it's really really hard to measure. You can easily have a society in which apparent public sentiment is overwhelming in favor of one side but they're still an "oppressed minority" because the behaviors skew the other way.
In either case, the map is not the territory. Whatever word you use for it, it's entirely possible to have a society in which the majority of public sentiment skews one way and the majority of actionable offensive and defensive behaviors skew the other. It's rare, because public sentiment and behaviors are correlated, and I don't think it's the world we live in (in the U.S.) but it's logically possible.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5mo ago
In some sense this proves the point though. You stopped playing. It's not that social validation is the only thing these games could provide in theory, but that due to selection effects people who like the social validation and the joy of destroying someone who was just trash talking you are the people who play obsessively play these games, while people who find it toxic and unenjoyable stop.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5mo ago
It requires belief in oneself, a firm hand, and commitment to the ideal.
How do you keep untalented people who just happen to be minorities from crying “discrimination” when they’re passed over for promotion or don’t get into the college they want to etc.?
You don't prevent them from crying discrimination. They're allowed to speak. And then you investigate in a fair and unbiased manner that neither privileges them nor disprivileges them in comparison to other races, and upon finding a lack of discrimination you dismiss the matter. If they keep whining you ignore them. They're allowed to whine, you're allowed to ignore their whining. Same way the law does when white people whine now. There are no exceptions to the rules.
How do you keep the government run by politicians running for office from turning directly to the racial spoils system and promising all kinds of set asides, promising to appoint a given group into high positions?
In principle, you continue to hold to the ideals. Racial spoils are discriminatory and racist. Don't do that. In practice, it seems hard, but no harder than it would be in any other kind of system. How do you prevent the pre-enlightenment government from doing the same to their preferred demographic? I'm not sure how pointing to a flaw where the current system is being illiberal and say "see, liberalism doesn't work". Obviously we need more color-blindness not less. There are no exceptions to the rules.
Islam is especially illiberal and discriminatory and bad. The solution is to call them out and push them back instead of treating them as special victims who can do no wrong. Liberalism doesn't mean never being harsh to anyone, it means being harsh to someone if and only if the content of their character demands it. There are no exceptions to the rules.
The problems with wokeism are the abandonment of liberal ideals, not their continuation. I don't think this was inevitable, I don't think the seeds were planted long ago, and I don't think it's unavoidable. You simply do what liberalism actually says to do and don't be a hypocrite or a grifter. Now in practice convincing and/or forcing other people to go along with this is hard, but no harder than convincing and/or forcing people to go along with anything else that isn't immediately self-serving. So unless your proposed alternative is anarchy or some Randian "everyone act according to their own self interest at all times", it will run into the same problems of people trying to defect and exploit it for personal gain.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5mo ago
Do you have a link to people discussing and/or providing evidence on outer wilds? Because I definitely found it weird how he kept abandoning trails and ignoring leads but stumbling onto important locations anyway, but at the time chalked it up to some combination of luck and intelligence.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7mo ago
Fine. It sounds like we don't disagree about any object level issues, just the meaning of certain words and phrases. I don't think what you said originally properly conveys the nuance of what you're saying now, but I understand you now and I don't disagree.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
That's an interesting perspective I hadn't considered before. But if you dig into that it's kind of like inflicting psychological punishment on someone for their own good. Like if a kid is picking on their siblings, and they don't really understand the long-term adult consequences of being a jerk (nobody will like you and you will have no friends and be lonely), so you spank them so that they learn to associate the bad behavior with pain. You are inflicting pain that previously didn't exist, and could be avoided on the first order simply by not punishing them, because you expect that in the long term it will improve their behavior and make them better off due to second order effects.
Except in this case instead of a parent it's all of society inflicting the punishment, and it's inducing psychological trauma into them instead of physically spanking them, and they're adults instead of children. But it is still supposed to be for their own good. I'm not sure how I feel about that. And as a side effect you also end up inducing trauma into the subset that genuinely tried to avoid being raped, will try to avoid it in the future, but happen to be tough enough not to be traumatized by the experience unless society induces it into them. And those people may be more common than the sort who irresponsibly set themselves up to get raped semi-on purpose.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
The instance I'm imagining for the inverse is more latent. A woman who doesn't consciously realize she has a rape fetish, or enjoys porn of that sort but doesn't think she wants it in real life, or has it but thinks that's bad and feels shame and tries to suppress it. Therefore isn't sending off signals to get it, and if someone tried to rape her she would try to stop them. But then when it happens she realizes that it actually is fulfilling and enjoyable and she retroactively changes her mind.
This would be quite rare, and there's probably less contrived scenarios, but this would definitely count as rape because whatever implicit consent would only apply retroactively.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
I think there is a substantial conscious and voluntary component to the thing we mean by consent, and for legal and social purposes that's the only part we as third parties can/should use as inputs into decision making processes. A law saying "If you have sex with someone and they are traumatized afterwards then you get 20 years of jailtime, but if they shrug it off then you go free" is a terrible law because people choosing to have sex with someone else can't entirely control the other person's reactions. So legally rape should absolutely be defined by visible and mostly unambiguous signals. Similarly, a social convention of "If you have sex with someone and they are traumatized afterwards then you are a bad person and everyone should shun you, but if they shrug it off then you're fine." is... more reasonable, but still dubious, because if you're so bad at a sex you traumatized someone then clearly something is wrong with you. But again, if you force sex on someone and they shrug it off you're still a horrible person because that is an action with very negative expected outcome. If you shoot at someone with a gun, maybe you don't actually hit them and wound them, and maybe you don't get convicted of murder, but you still get convicted of assault, because you easily could have hurt them.
So there's the legal definition, and the social definition, and the moral definition. And the moral version of consent involves internal thoughts and feelings, the legal one does not and should not, while the social one is probably somewhere in between. And all of them are meaningful and useful, and mostly referring to the same thing even if having different words for them might make it easier to communicate the distinctions.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
Do some people enjoy being raped?
I normally don't wade this deep into controversial gender stuff, but... once I had this thought it won't leave my head. It's super anti-memetic, the sort of thing that if true nobody would want to admit and everyone who found out would suppress other than misogynists who people would ignore. If it were known to be true and widely admitted then rapists would just use it as an excuse, therefore the media/scientists/everyone lie and say it's not?
A bunch of people have rape fetishes. They are aroused by power and strength, or the courage and audacity to defy social conventions, or the idea of being so desirable that they drive someone insane and make them lose control. Or I've heard someone describe being raised in a super conservative household where you need to be pure and chaste, but they secretly want sex, so fantasize about being raped so that they could experience sex but it wouldn't be their fault and they haven't done anything wrong. I personally can imagine scenarios in which as a teenager a hot girl could have offered to have sex with me and I'd say no because I was a good boy who didn't do that sort of thing, but maybe would have ultimately been happy if she had forcibly insisted? But that never happened so I don't actually know.
Now of course, fantasies are not reality. Actual rape is going to be more violent, less perfectly tailored to someone's ideals, more terrifying, and probably with a much less attractive person than in an imaginary hypothetical. Lots of people have fantasies that they wouldn't actually want to carry out in real life. But it seems like the translation should be nonzero. And the translation of that it actual rapes is also nonzero. That is, if the proportion of people with rape fetishes is A, the proportion of those people who would enjoy actually being raped is B, and the proportion of those people who experience rape is C, and if all of these proportions are nonzero (and not so tiny as to pragmatically be zero), then the product, ABC is the proportion of people who have actually been raped and enjoyed the experience.
And it seems like they would experience an entirely different set of issues than normal rape victims. On the one hand, the experience is going to be a lot less traumatic: Instead of a horrifying and degrading experience they got to have an enjoyable if unexpected sexual encounter. On the other hand, they probably feel guilt and shame for their feelings, which they cannot voice without severe backlash from society. Rape is "the worst crime" possible, it's victims are permanently "Victims" and "Survivors". Its existence is a weapon to bash men and promote women. Mainstream culture is super well equipped to support and assist typical rape victims, at the expense of absolutely silencing and shunning anyone who might have not had a terrible experience and not been traumatized by it. And that itself might just amplify the shame and guilt and trauma for this subset of people. Like the kid who doesn't cry until they know someone is watching, I suspect that this subset of rape victims might not be traumatized from the rape itself, and wouldn't ever be traumatized in a different society, but are traumatized by our society's reaction to them and the need to stay "in the closet" so to speak, because of the backlash they'd receive if anyone found out the truth.
I'm not crazy, am I? Is this secretly a thing that nobody is allowed to talk about? I'm not sure it's really actionable if true. I don't think it makes rapists less horrible people even if they get lucky and target someone who secretly enjoys it, because the expected value of their crime is still catastrophically negative. So it wouldn't indicate reducing criminal or social penalties for rapists. And I don't think it would indicate reducing support or funding for rape victims, a majority of which are still traumatized in the normal way that everyone thinks they are. But maybe it would suggest something along the lines of... giving people the benefit of the doubt? Having more options for how people are allowed to cope with rape on their own terms without assuming they are "victims" when they might just be fine? I'm not sure this makes much difference, but I'd like to hear thoughts and/or statistical/scientific evidence for or against this (if that's even meaningful given the massive reporting biases this would create)
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
I'd guess that the single highest value per effort is probably in choosing the right plants. If you can find plants that thrive in your garden you'll get a much better result for less effort than any amount of techno-fixes being spent on the wrong plant.
How do I figure that out? Do I try to google a database for what plants grow optimally in my region? Or do I have to trial and error if soil quality and sunlight amounts vary enough such that my yard is somewhat unique?
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
No more or less than the man who yells "Trump deserves to die" and then doesn't shoot at him is politically irrelevant rather than an extremist. I'm not a political activist, but neither are the vast majority of people, and yet all the voices do add up. An awful lot of activists and politicians and media are emboldened by the prevalence of people supporting them and saying the same thing. Rather than being one more of the millions of voices shouting "you're scum, you deserve to be killed" to their political opponents, I am one of the thousands shouting "No you. You are scum, you deserve to be shamed and mocked but not killed, not because of which side you're on but because you are an uncivilized thug who resorts to violence over words." If it were reversed, if there were millions of us and thousands of them, a lot less violence would happen because they would find less comfort and confidence and public support.
Activism is useless, and in many cases actively harmful, unless you're actually supporting the right cause. Even if my words turn out to be entirely useless because nobody listens to me, literal 0 is still higher than a negative number. And if I'm lucky then maybe my words and my sane representation of ideas that are usually misrepresented by insane extremists will help people realize that their political opponents aren't all nutjobs, even if some of them are, and be less violent and more forgiving as a result.
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
But this would require skill and insider information and subjective analysis. Having a deterministic, mechanical process with known inputs that can process this data goes a long way towards preventing someone from corruptly picking and choosing which places they count as "high risk" and which they don't. And lowering variance, since some individuals are going to be better at doing this sort of subjective guesswork than others, while the AI can have its performance actually tested.
And goes a long way towards laundering this in the public perception. Even if everyone "knows" that this group is high risk, having an AI with testable metrics say so is probably going to be easier to sell (in the long run) than having human beings say so.
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
I felt the same way about 8.1 vs 10. But if I go to 10 I'm going to run into the same issue again in half the time.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5d ago
People like this generally do, although they rarely ever say what they mean in non-euphemistic terms.
Which makes sense. If you have the option, reducing population via less population is going to make less suffering than going around violently murdering them. It's still a form of genocide, but from the perspective of someone whose utility function literally only counts negative values it would be the one to choose.
But in terms of feasibility in the real world, unless you can manage to genetically engineer some virus that can seek out and neuter all life forms of all kinds, murderous genocide is likely to be much more feasible. An "effective negative utilitarian" should probably be trying to manipulate governments into starting WW3 in order to create a nuclear winter that blocks off the sun and "prevent food energy from being created" globally. Even if the war and starvation create more suffering in the short term, preventing new life would massively outweigh that in the long term. Kind of a... reverse repugnant conclusion.
I don't think most negative utilitarians would explicitly endorse this (though most traditional utilitarians don't endorse the regular repugnant conclusion), but given that they DO want to depopulate via non-violent means, I think it's mostly due to hyperbolic discounting.
MathWizard
Good things are good
15d ago
Is $200k the limit on the amount that Keith's insurance would cover? If not then Keith is entirely in the right here, and the bankruptcy judge should not have required the limit of 200k in the first place. There's no reason the amount should have been relevant for this ruling except if it would be dis-chargeable via the bankruptcy.
If it is the insurance limit then the best outcome would be the $1.6 M being the official amount awarded and the $1.4 M being retroactively discharged by the bankruptcy.
It's unfortunate that the laws aren't smart enough to do the obvious thing.
I think that's the meat of my claim/conjecture though. Not just that it feels physically good in the moment, but that they literally are happier as a result of the encounter than they were before. Or at least would be absent the social ramifications. You can imagine it happening for any type of crime, but it seems highly implausible for most crimes, but rape seems like the scenario where, because things are so complicated and unstraightforward, you'd have more variance: with some people being damaged by it way more than something simple like being mugged, but some being damaged way less and possibly negative.
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