MathWizard
formerly hh26
No bio...
User ID: 164
MathWizard
formerly hh26
8mo ago
The pro-life maneuver with the highest expected value, as measured by abortion reduction multiplied by probability of actually getting passed in the legislature, is to promote free birth control. Most people on the left already want this, so it shouldn't be hard to get bipartisan support. Then way more people will use it, way fewer accidental pregnancies occur, and actual abortion rates plummet regardless of whether it's legal or illegal.
This might have the bonus affect of making it much easier to pass restrictions on abortion afterwards. If fewer people have needed one or known someone who has needed one, and the only people who ever get abortions are morons who forgot to take their free birth control, people in general will be less sympathetic. Lazy people just using abortion as birth control will have cheaper alternatives and so care less. People worried about being forced to give birth to an unwanted child in some hypothetical future will be less worried because they can just use their free state-provided birth control. And the messaging that pro-life people just want to enslave women as breeders forced to give birth against their will just dissolves away because we're actively trying to prevent them from getting pregnant.
But even if nothing else changes legislatively, even if the silly pollitical warmakers would consider this a loss because the pro-choice get everything they want, this would be a massive win for pro-life and effective altruism. I don't think people trying to have tons of promiscuous sex "deserve" to have their degenerate lifestyles subsidized by my tax dollars, but I'm going to offer it anyway because "deserves" matter less than saving lives.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
I don't see why that would always be true. I would expect red-leaning judges to be biased towards the red states, while blue-leaning judges would be biased towards the blue states.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
8mo ago
Are you talking about like the morning after pill? Because those are bad, but I'm referring to the ones that prevent women from ovulating during pregnancy so they don't just keep conceiving babies month after month while already pregnant. I know they make IUDs that do that, but there might be pills for it to.
I actually am not super familiar with the habits of promiscuous people and their typical birth control preferences, so "most" might not be the right phrase to use here. But if it turns out that most forms of birth control are abortive, but some aren't, that just increases the potential benefit of a pro-life promotion and subsidization of the ethical ones. If someone can pay $10/month for abortion pills vs $20 for non-conceiving hormones, and they don't think fetuses are people, they're likely to take the abortion pills. If someone can pay $10/month for abortion pills vs $0 for non-conceiving hormones because the government and/or pro-life charities pay the $20, then no child gets conceived in the first place, and thus none die. Assuming that the goal is actually to prevent the conception and subsequent deaths of fetuses because they die, and not just to increase the number of childbirths, this seems like a massive win to me.
Now maybe it would be healthier for society and relationships for people to just not have promiscuous sex in the first place, but that ship has sailed, pragmatically there's nothing we can do to fix that, and it seems much less of a priority to me than the millions of deaths at stake that free non-abortive birth control could prevent.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
10mo ago
I agree, but I think the rape affect is appropriate, at least with regard to trans issues. Medical transitions are a form of genital mutilation which cause massive harm similar in kind but greater in magnitude to rape. I would rather a child be groomed into sex with a pedo than groomed into undergoing medical transition, because the former would leave fewer long term irreversible trauma and could hopefully eventually be healed and recovered from.
With regards to LGB, grooming is only an appropriate accusation if the ideologues are trying to convince the children to be more sexually explicit, promiscuous, and/or think sex with adults is okay (things which would be a prelude to pedophilia). Almost nobody is accusing normal LGB people of being "groomers", and I disavow the ones who do. The efficacy of "groomer" comes from the rape affect, and in order to preserve that as a useful tool we need to use the word only in cases where that implication is accurate.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
9mo ago
Yeah. I wouldn't mind some high effort white nationalist posts so their points can be addressed and discussed and possibly rebutted in an intelligent way.
And to some extent, forcing high quality posts from people with misguided views may force them to educate themselves and accidentally de-radicalize in the process.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
2mo ago
Yeah, we definitely need to move in a more libertarian direction than we are now. It's just that an awful lot of Libertarians claim things like "we need to remove literally all regulations", and I'm like "no, the anti-monopoly, anti-cartel ones are pretty good and we should keep those while we strip out the bad ones."
MathWizard
formerly hh26
5mo ago
I think there's a difference between being enemies as a result of material circumstance, which can allow for mutual respect, versus fundamental ideological differences, which I don't think do, or at least severely cap the amount.
Like, if I found myself in a family/tribe/guild/nation, and someone else is in another, and we both want the same land/resource, or are fighting for sovereignty or global hegemony, then we could have approximately the same values but still be at odds against one another, because we each want what's best for our own group to the exclusion of what's best for the other group. Similarly, I can respect an opponent who has different factual beliefs (provided they're not absurd and obviously false such that no respectable person would be wrong in the way they are). Maybe we both want what's best for everyone, but disagree on what course of action is best to do that. Or even with slight ideological differences there can be mutual respect. Like, if there's an opportunity to tradeoff freedom points versus security points at a 1:1 ratio, and I value freedom at 6 utils each and security at 4 utils each, while person B values freedom at 4 utils each and security at 6 utils each, then we're going to end up on opposite sides of the issue of the tradeoff despite both valuing freedom and security. Ideally, neither of the latter two scenarios would lead to war, but maybe they would.
But if the other person's ideology is just straight up evil then no, I can't respect that. Or rather, the sum of my respect would be all of the other traits about them that might be respectable, minus the massive loss from them being an evil person. I don't think it's respectable to be evil, even if you're loyal and devoted to your evil ideals. To the extent that Rommel wanted what's best for the German people and genuinely thought that he was helping them, I can respect that. To the extent that Rommel turned a blind eye to genocide in as a sacrifice towards that end, I lose a decent amount of respect. To the extent that Rommel might have genuinely believed in genocide as a means itself, if any (it's not entirely clear) I would lose a ton of respect for him. I would have much much more respect for a counterfactual Rommel who had pulled a coup on Hitler, stopped the genocide, and then tried to conquer the world, because it would have shown more moral fortitude than someone who's blindly loyal.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
8mo ago
Maybe I should clarify my position as someone who is both pro-life and utilitarian. It is about "harm" for me, and a non-negligible proportion of pro-life people I have encountered. Human fetuses are human and alive, human life is good, death is bad. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Of course for a different non-negligible proportion of "pro-life" people it's about punishing people for their sins and forcing people to bear the consequences of their premarital sex.
I just wish my... subfaction? were more influential than the latter so we had more control over the movement and its messaging.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
3d 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
14d 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
6mo ago
But it specifically applies pressure against negative behaviors, at least according to the subjective perceptions of the mocker. X behavior is stupid/bad -> Y group of people mock it -> Z group of people care about Y's opinion and/or avoiding mockery in general and do X less or fail to start doing X -> less X exists. If the mocker has good subjective opinions and targets, then this is a net positive since it reduces the prevalence of stupid/bad behaviors. If the mocker has bad subjective opinions and targets, then this is a net negative since it reduces the prevalence of good behaviors that have been mislabeled.
Speed running.... makes speed running look cool? Like, maybe it encourages people to try really hard and dedicate themselves to a task, or peer into the underlying mechanics of games and pedantically look for flaws that they can exploit which maybe increases their ability as a hacker/programmer/anti-hacker? But the most likely outcome is that it makes people more likely to become speed runners. I suppose one could make a similar argument about a lot of hobbies, but a lot of hobbies have depth or broadly interesting components, while speedrunning is about pedantic details and weird edge cases.
Like, if someone has a hobby of using tweezers to arrange tiny colored grains of sand into beautiful artwork, that's kind of cool. I wouldn't do it, it seems like more time and effort than it's worth to me, but if someone else wants to do that good for them, and maybe at the end I'll look at the picture they make. If someone has a hobby of using tweezers to arrange tiny grains of sand into binary representations of the code to retro videogames, that's stupid. It takes similar levels of pedantic effort to perfectly arrange each grain of sand into the right shape, but in the end you have a bunch of dots of sand and the binary representation doesn't do anything because operating systems can't read sand, so it's functional equivalent to a random arrangement of sand. I suppose if someone had some property of their brain that makes this hobby enjoyable for them I'm not going to say they're not allowed to do it, but to me it's boring both to do AND to hear about or watch, while the colored sand piles are boring to do but might be worth watching a little bit. I feel that videogames are more analogous to the colored art sand: pragmatically useless towards survival in the real world but interesting to experience or view, while speedrunning is analagous to the binary representations: similarly complex in function but more pedantic and way less interesting.
All to say that pressure towards making people more interested in speedrunning is negative because it increases the amount of people with boring hobbies, which funges against more interesting hobbies that they could have. And while this is mostly a subjective opinion from me as someone who thinks speedrunning is boring, I think there is some way in which speedrunning is objectively worse than most hobbies, including broader videogaming, although I'm not entirely sure exactly how to formalize, hence vaguely gesturing at it via the above analogy.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
7mo ago
I'm not sure that's stable though, because it may inevitably slippery slope its way into progressivism. That is, this optimal state depends on universal but not-common knowledge: the utilitarian version has to actually be a secret. Because if you are publicly insisting on ignoring group memberships and everyone knows that person A is discriminating against group X in a not-secret way, then the public persona is forced to denounce them as a X-ist in order to maintain consistency. But if everyone using the utilitarian version in practice, then it's hard to keep that a secret from everyone else (who is doing the same thing). And if only the smart well-behaved rationalists who can be trusted to discriminate responsibly use the utilitarian version while everyone else uses the liberal version, then a higher fraction of smart well-behaved rationalists would be discovered and denounced as X-ist creating a stereotype against them.
Maybe it works if you restrict the secret utilitarian version to only cases where there's absolutely no conceivable way of being discovered.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
7mo ago
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Does this suggest that if such an obnoxious rational person does have the statistical sophistication to draw such distinctions and make decisions in secret, then it's okay? That is, stereotypes are bad in general if widespread because normies will abuse them, but the actual rational analysis is fine if used in an isolated and secret way that normies don't find out about?
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What defines "obnoxious" here? Is rationalism itself defined as obnoxious because it cares about pedantic details that normies don't? Or is it merely the social obliviousness of nerdy rationalists who oversimplify everything and miss the forest for the trees, such that a more sophisticated rational intelligence that understands and compensates for normies would not be obnoxious?
MathWizard
formerly hh26
8mo ago
If strong-arming them works to reduce abortions then do that. And quite a few adults are bad at calculating risk and dislike condoms, so strongarm them too. Somewhere around a million abortions happen each year, which means millions more are not using birth control. Whether that's from "access" or cost, or social acceptability, all of those are levers to push.
The point being, more birth control usage = fewer abortions = good, and most pro-life people are leaving hundred dollar bills on the floor by ignoring this avenue for solving the problem.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
8mo ago
But if the Evangelicals unilaterally decided to support free birth control then, with bipartisan support from pro-choice people, it could get passed without requiring the Catholics to get on board. Maybe they'd perceive it as a betrayal or something, but they could still stand united on the abortion bad part.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
11mo ago
The standard response to inconvenient truths, at least as far as I can tell, is to change the subject and not talk about them, not to actively deny them. The only time I've ever told someone to their face that I'm smarter than them was when having petty arguments as a child, usually at some point where it escalates to them calling me an idiot and me going "well actually..." and bragging about my grades and advanced math.
But I have never never never pretended to be the same or lesser intelligence than someone I'm not. Nowadays when I get complimented for being smart, I get embarassed and shrug it off as unimportant rather than bragging, but I never never never lie and pretend that it isn't true when we both know it is. There's a difference between choosing not to actively announce certain truths to avoid conflict, and lying about them to protect yourself when confronted by a hostile crowd. And there's a vast gulf between that and actively opposing and arguing against people saying the truth that you yourself secretly agree with. I'm not saying it never happens, but it's way more rare than strategic silence.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
11mo ago
Where were you fifteen years ago when I needed this advice?
I am frustrated that all of the social and romantic advice that I received from adults as a kid was inscrutable and unquantified and vague normie intuitions that I didn't understand. I always knew I was doing it wrong, but couldn't figure out how or why, and nobody could explain it to me. And only since I discovered rationalist and rationalist adjacent spaces did I start hearing coherent logical explanations that I could use to actually figure out social situations and figure it out. And these are verbal descriptions! It's not just that I'm older and wiser and have learned from experience lessons that cannot be taught by words. If I had heard these words fifteen years ago I would have understood them and been able to adjust my behavior!
And the worst thing is that all the normies probably understand all this already and if you told them this they'd be like "yeah that sounds about right", but when they give their own version of the explanation in their own words it's just incoherent nonsense.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
22d ago
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).
MathWizard
formerly hh26
22d 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
1mo ago
Oh hey, I've been playing a bunch of Warframe and Factorio as well. I can't get enough of games with in-depth crafting systems.
Do you know of any other games with similar progression systems to Warframe? Monster Hunter is kind of similar in crafting, but I'm more interested in the mastery system: "do all the things, collect one of every single weapon/armor/companion etc, and each thing you collect adds to your exp even if you never use it."
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
It might be appropriate (or just tempting) to have some level of discussion, at least on the meta-level, regarding whether other people agree or disagree with the request or potential difficulties they anticipate arising from it or something.
Like, literally right now, you have in this post made a suggestion and we are having a meta level discussion about it, though it's about site content rather than a specific CW topic. As long as the discussions remained brief and meta level that would be fine, but when it comes to CW topics that's always a slippery slope.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
3mo ago
If you're sufficiently loose with your criteria for a scenario where reward is involved, such as a desired endgoal or outcome, then literally all rational behavior is driven by reward, because that's the definition of rationality. And not in the broad logical scale of rationalism, but in the colloquial someone acting with no goal is being purposeless and irrational. Why would you do anything at all if there wasn't some point? And then you can consider that point to be a "reward".
So unless you have a narrower definition of reward in mind, then regardless of whether learning is involved or not, the only case of behavior I can think of which is not tied to a reward is irrational behavior, and people with involuntary tics, and stuff like that.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
5mo ago
I think this still demands a distinction in different contexts, especially between respect in ones physical capabilities, and one in their mental capabilities. I respect a lion as a powerful beast and I would avoid trying to fight one in unarmed physical combat. I do not respect a lion's intellectual abilities, and would happily trounce one in a game of chess if I could play in safety from its aforementioned physical prowess. Further, I do not respect the physical abilities of lions as a whole in comparison to humans as a whole, because we have guns and missiles and they do not. They simply do not pose an existential threat to humans as a species, while we do pose such a threat if we cared to wipe them out (and maybe even if we half-heartedly try not to).
Bringing this back then, I respect the physical threat of a jihadi in a similar way to a lion, they're extremely lethal if you face one underprepared, and I would personally try to avoid them, but I do not respect them as an existential threat to my people, we have nukes and they do not. But this is a separate consideration from the original issue of respecting their conviction. On the moral front, I do respect the specific integrity of standing up for one's beliefs, but overall do not respect their general moral character, because their beliefs are evil and selfish. Even from a classical sense, they don't exhibit honorable behaviors worth respecting. If they stood and fought against overwhelming odds and died for their beliefs, I could respect that more. But guerilla warfare, hiding behind civilians, and terrorism are incredibly dishonorable and unrespectable. If their beliefs tell them to do that, then they're just standing up for dishonorable beliefs. If you're going to respect that you might as well treat the hypocritical Christian as someone who believes in being a hypocrite and respect them for being so good at it.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
7mo ago
I wouldn't straight up cut someone off if they were already a friend for other reasons and that was the only thing about them I disliked. But it would be a yellow flag which would make me less comfortable around them. Because stuff like that rarely shows up in isolation. I've never actually had the issue show up, because the type of people I typically hang out with are so far from that archetype that it's not even a remote possibility.
"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.
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