MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
2d ago
Here’s another graph where the benefit of other people caps out at 50% of them going outside. The situation is much better! Your couch can be pretty great before the activity starts seriously dying off. But again, just like before, once it reaches that critical threshold, average happiness gets worse for a bit before it gets better again in the world of only shut-ins.
[Insert Graph that looks barely at all like the first one]
So the moral of the story is, to avoid isolation and depression, move to a big city, pick popular hobbies, and if someone asks you to go caroling this Christmas, go even if you don’t want to, because it will make the experience better for everyone else.
I was with you up until this conclusion. How on Earth do you look at that second graph and draw that moral from it. The existence of a tiny window where happiness is a decreasing function while being increasing in the vast majority of space suggests that the moral for the second set of parameters is "we should prioritize making indoor activities more fun because in almost all cases it increases happiness. Also we shouldn't pressure introverts to participate in social activities because they're clearly enjoying themselves more via their revealed preferences."
We get very different conclusions for the first and second set of parameters if we're being honest instead of using motivated reasoning based on a pre-supposed moral. The actual moral for the overall model should probably be something like "this deadweight loss phenomenon appears under some model parameters but not others, so the applicability of this to the real world depends a lot on the circumstances and we need to measure and investigate further to determine which world we live in, but it's an interesting possibility especially in less crowded spaces such as rural areas."
MathWizard
Good things are good
3d ago
A more charitable read would be that by blithely denying the label and then agreeing dismissively and moving on he demonstrates a level of disdain/apathy for the label. He doesn't care whether he technically meets the dictionary definition of the word "racist". It's a word. He cares about [crime statistics] and object level concerns. Having the confidence to take one for the team and say "if you're going to derail the object level debate and go on some unimportant tangent about whether I'm a "racist" then fine, I'll let you win this point, since I don't expect any of my audience to care anyway, so we can move on to something worth talking about."
He's not taking it seriously, but in 2025 taking a debate about whether someone is "racist" or not seriously is pointless. Everyone just uses it to mean people they don't like. I would argue that Morgan defected first by bringing it up in the first place, so a sarcastic dismissive reply to that particular point and then a transition back to something that actually matters is an appropriate debate tactic that doesn't make me trust him less.
MathWizard
Good things are good
15d ago
This is a really bad take. It's trivial to conceive of a preference ordering consistent with any standard, being:
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Having a partner who adheres to X standards
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Having no partner
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Having a partner who does not adhere to X standards.
As a typical example for non-strict standards, consider X = "does not regularly smear shit on themselves". Most people would rather die alone than live their life with a shit-smearing partner, but still would like a partner in general as long as they can find one that meets their standards. If these standards are stricter then they're making a larger trade-off: stricter standards are going to drastically lower the probability of finding someone who meets them, but presumably increases the value of finding such a partner.
So if they have a strict set of criteria and stick to it anyway despite knowing it reduces their chances, it means their preference for those standards is stronger than their preference for having any partner, which is nonzero evidence that their preference for a partner is small, but it's absurd to extrapolate from that to concluding that their preference for a partner is negative. That scaring off most potential partners is actually the goal rather than an unfortunate side effect. If that were the case they could just call themselves asexual and not mention standards at all.
Small non-negative numbers exist.
MathWizard
Good things are good
17d ago
If you pay each employee a generous $100k/yr then you can easily do that with 1/3 of your money. I'm not able to easily verify prices, but AI suggests that the apartment or house would be somewhere around 30k-100k per month which... on the lower end would eat up a large chunk of your money, but is still in the right ballpark and order of magnitude, so you could probably afford one but not both.
Inflation is not uniform. And land in particular is especially resistant to technological improvement, so it makes sense that its relative price has increased much more (as population grows) than most other things. Meanwhile stuff like super fancy technology is much cheaper than the equivalent in the 1950s, and those all averaged together produce the effective inflation rate. So the modern version would give you have a smaller house but with fancier computers and smart technology, which is either better or worse depending on your preferences, but should average out to about the same.
Or, another way of thinking about it is that the $1.1M person is less rich today compared to everyone else than the $100k 1959 person would be, but in a world with cheaper and more plentiful goods and services their purchasing power is similar (greater among goods and services which have gotten much cheaper, but lesser among things that haven't because they're not actually as rich as the 1959 person)
MathWizard
Good things are good
17d ago
Is that relevant?
That's not how inflation works. Inflation has already taken that into consideration. $100k in 1959 would be the equivalent of $1.1 M today. If that's your annual salary, you could be hiring maids to drive to the grocery story and do your shopping for you, personal chefs to make whatever you want out of whatever recipe cookbooks you got for them, foreign or domestic, and delivery drivers to do your shopping while you sit in your home cinema.
Yes, you wouldn't have smartphones or modern medicine, but you'd have the best things available to anyone at the time. This is a bad thought experiment comparing middle class now to middle class 1950s. The entire point is that you would not be middle class, you would be rich. Why would a rich person have a little TV set with a fuzzy picture?
Yes, I would rather be rich now than rich then, if I could choose between $1.1 M now or $100k in 1959. But that's not what he said.
MathWizard
Good things are good
19d ago
It seems obvious to me that whatever default/inherent level of humiliation a minor engaging in vanilla sexual activity on camera entails is what laws against child pornography are already designed to punish. It is with very high probability some level of humiliating/traumatizing, especially in the "minutes, hours, or days following the sexual misconduct depicted in the material". That's what the 14-18 years are for. That's a harsh punishment for a nasty crime. The enhancement is for people who are coercing them into sadomasochistic things that cause additional pain or humiliation and make the crime even worse than usual: a special subset of child porn. Not "masturbation". In no world would anyone describe "masturbation with a marker" as "sadomasochistic". If that was not a child, nobody would blink an eye. It is a child, so we should punish it according to the normal laws for "normal" child porn, in-so-far as it's vanilla sexual behavior and the the person's age is the only reason note notice at all.
MathWizard
Good things are good
23d ago
Does the goyslop make the human detritus?? These seem like mostly orthogonal issues. Food is food, you need it to eat. Yeah trash people like Oreos, because they are human and almost every human likes Oreos. They're filled with sugar and delicious. When I see a trash person they aren't that way because "they shop at Walmart and buy Oreos", but things like "they have nasty tattoos on their arm and look like they beat their wife" or "they are dressed like a prostitute, and have 4 children with 4 different fathers by the age of 23" or "they have no teeth and are 400 pounds with their gut spilling out of their crop top while they waddle around".
Yeah, maybe I bought a case of Dr Pepper and a pack of Oreos, but I also got fresh veggies and chicken as my main course, while the 400 pound hambeast got 5 cases of Dr Pepper and 8 packs of Oreos. It doesn't matter if they like some of the same things I like, they also lack impulse control and executive function and THAT is what makes them trash. If these people suddenly started shopping at Trader Joe's nothing would change and I'd just feel superior to them for having better financial sense because I'm not overpaying on groceries. Walmart is popular because it's cheap and efficient.
Hitler liked animals. I like animals. I'm not going to change my behavior or preferences just because they have an overlap with people I dislike for different reasons.
MathWizard
Good things are good
24d ago
I liked that one too. I am too picky about games and don't have friends who know my tastes well enough for me to blindly trust their judgement, so I never play any games completely blind. But just knowing the basic premise (of both of them) is probably fine. The first hour or so might be even better completely blind, but the majority of the gameplay is the same.
MathWizard
Good things are good
24d ago
Outer Wilds does a great job of curiosity/mystery, as well as some other feelings. I hesitate to describe more because the fewer spoilers you have going into it the better.
A lot less than 100 hours though, so it won't fill up all that space, but would slot nicely between other things.
MathWizard
Good things are good
29d ago
As a centrist and a believer in horseshoe theory, I will admit that right-left doesn't cleanly split into chaos-order, because they're orthogonal. Right and left are more flavors of how the law should be applied. The typical rightist wants the law to control culture and behavior while keeping the economy free, while the typical leftist wants to use the law to control the economy while keeping culture and behavior free. The extremists on both ends want the law to control both absolutely everything, while only differing in what form they want it to take. The opposite extreme, the maximal libertarian, wants chaos and to just let everyone fend for themselves and hope it turns out okay."
From my perspective as a centrist, I think we need balance between all of these. And for the past 50 years or so there has been too much order and not enough chaos (on average, there are exceptions here and there). So the Order people on the left and right are the villains, trying to oppress their chosen hated group (whites or non-whites depending on which side), or just genuinely trying to do the right thing but failing miserably because their authoritarian policies cause bad outcomes when pushed too far. While the chaos people are trying to make us more free and marginally improving things when they manage to gain a little ground (even if they would cause problems if they took it too far).
I'm not fully satisfied with this breakdown. I think the elf/dwarf thing also makes sense to some extent, and probably does a better job of explaining the cultural differences between right and left. But I don't think it's the true driver of the conflict. Moderate right people and moderate left people are capable of getting along and compromising with each other. And if both were laissez-faire about letting each other live their own lives then they could live next to each other in harmony. The conflict is driven by the hatred between the authoritarian right and the moderate left, and the hatred between the authoritarian left and the moderate right. Because the authoritarians won't leave the moderates alone, so they are forced to participate in the culture war whether they want to or not. The broader left-right divide is then caused WW1-style via alliances: the ally of my enemy is my enemy.
Sure. But then the second graph demonstrates the sensitivity of the model to this assumption. This turns out to be a critical assumption that heavily influences the results, at least the part of the results we care about. Therefore any conclusions/morals/takeaways need to emphasize this caveat.
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