MathWizard
Good things are good
No bio...
User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
18hr ago
That's as good an excuse as any to end the whole series, then.
I greatly enjoy this series and appreciate you doing it and, prior to seeing the mod comment, was wondering if there was a way to report a series of posts for "quality contribution", because while I don't think any individual one of these posts rises to quite that level I think the series in aggregate is worth that.
I think you're being a little overdramatic here. This post has 4 stories in it, you could easily have included only 3 of them and, while you'd have lost 25% of the available content, it also would have taken 25% less time to type up. It does seem annoying, and goes against the Motte's general anti-censorship atmosphere, but if I squint I can see their point in that this is "Friday Fun Thread" and not the culture war post. They're not just picking on you to be mean.
I don't know, ultimately you get to choose what you do with your time and whether you're willing to compromise. I just think that this is a fun feature of the Motte that you create each week, and would be sad to see it go.
MathWizard
Good things are good
4d ago
Definitely slop, but comparable to Netflix tier human-made slop and not the kind of garbage tier we'd have seen a few years ago. They're getting somewhere, but they're not there yet.
I actually wonder if the bottleneck on AI is eventually going to be high quality training data. If there's only 20-30 good 2D Disney movies, and the rest are mediocre, then AI might struggle to have enough data to generalize and make original movies in that style unless it borrows from the mediocre ones. If the majority of modern movies with high quality CGI have garbage plots filled with woke nonsense and bad characters, then AI might accidentally keep filling its plots with bad characters because that's what the humans it's trained on having been doing for the past several decades. Slop in, slop out.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7d ago
My Vanguard stocks are up 14% since this time last year. That's my lazy rule of thumb on how well the economy is doing, so that probably means the economy is doing well. There's a bunch of other possible explanations such as inflation, giant economic bubbles, or expectations that GDP will go up soon but hasn't yet. But the Trump administration faking numbers is unlikely to cause this, as the greedy and intelligent investors are unlikely to be conned so easily.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9d ago
I don't do this. I save my nighttime thoughts for later when/if it's an appropriate time/place to say them out loud, if they're worth saying out loud at all. I guess I only have a very small number of data points to work with, but I'm also extrapolating from the general stereotype of men being more stoic.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10d ago
Is this a thing for everyone? Because I have also observed this.
My guess is that it's the thing you do where it's late and night and your mind starts wandering about all sorts of heavy topics: plans, ideas, memeories, past arguments, regrets, etc. And women just have to say it out loud right then and there because that's when they thought about it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
12d ago
I would still consider a scenario that's like 90% socialist with 10% capitalist hack to be socialist, just like I'd consider a scenario that's 90% capitalist with 10% socialist hack (like universal healthcare) to be capitalist. I'd still consider a long-term successful example of that to be pretty surprising.
Unless it's like post-singularity with some genius AI overlord who can simultaneously solve the economy, efficiently produce tons of resources, and doesn't need much human labor so can just distribute them without much concern for proper incentive structures. But I'd expect such an AI to also be able to solve capitalism's problems and create libertarian capitalist utopia too. For now, when dealing with humans, you need the signalling mechanisms.
MathWizard
Good things are good
12d ago
Capitalism tends to produce more efficient/powerful/good outcomes than Socialism.
I can imagine a world filled with rational and/or kind-hearted beings who were able to cooperate together efficiently under a socialist system and share things with a lot less deadweight loss than a capitalist system where people keep trying to exploit each other for profit. I just don't think that's the world we live in, I don't think that's the kind of species we are. Capitalism's greatest strength is its robustness. It can take selfishness and wastefulness and corruption and theft and stupidity, and it automatically pushes back and has individual pieces break without destroying the greater structure, so it can evolve and become stronger. Negative feedback loops instead of positive feedback. Socialism allows corruption to fester and grow like a cancer. At least, that's the world I think we live in. If that were to not be the case and whatever excuses socialists make about why it's always failed were actually true it would change a lot of my beliefs about economics, politics, and human nature.
MathWizard
Good things are good
13d ago
The trial judge rejects the defendant's argument. In this case, defendant actively engaged in a fistfight with the officers, showing that he indeed was willing to carry out his threats to harm them. The trial judge imposes a total sentence of four years (with the possibility of parole after two years) for the two threats. The appeals panel affirms.
This creeps me out. The idea that he doesn't get in trouble at all for attacking people (which he did), but he does get in trouble for "terroristic threats" (I would not consider threats against a specific person to be "terroristic"), and the guilt is proven by the fact that he did attack people (even though he was acquitted of this).
Is this simply that the criteria for "assault" are strict and he didn't quite meet all the criteria? Because what this looks like to me is an ad-hoc "we think he should get a little bit of jail time but not a lot, so let's just convict him of something that carries a smaller penalty than assault." and abusing the law to get that outcome. Because in what world do you prioritize punishing words over actions?
MathWizard
Good things are good
14d ago
The treaty influences the interests that a power thinks it has. And the domestic and international support it gets. If Turkey suddenly starts bombing Libya with normal combs, the U.S. might not get involved. If Turkey suddenly starts gassing them with chemical weapons then the U.S. might get up in their face about it and either attack them or provide defense to Libya (possibly in exchange for concessions). It would have no bearing on the actual strategic value to us of invading Turkey or defending Libya, but politicians care about getting re-elected, and telling people "we helped defeat the evil chemical weapon users" sells a lot better than "we picked a side in a war".
Power is ultimately derived from strength. But power that does not move does not count, and treaties are an excuse to move for anyone who already wanted to but lacked a sufficiently official reason.
MathWizard
Good things are good
17d ago
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.
MathWizard
Good things are good
18d 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
19d 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.
Did you read the story? It was not a thirst trap, it was AI generated. She did not consent to this. If a girl sends nudes to a guy and he starts spreading them around, he's a jerk, but she made her own bed and she has to lie in it. With AI you can make convincing edits of literally anyone. Any picture of your face can be swapped onto a fake body. Any full body image of you can be nudified with realistic seeming body proportions. Even if you've never been online a day in your life a school photo in the yearbook or even just a quick cellphone pic someone takes of you without your knowledge or consent, and there you go.
This isn't sluts getting slut-shamed: as far as we know this is a completely innocent and pure 13 year old girl who was victimized through absolutely no fault of her own. Her only crime was existing as a 13 year old girl, and the only thing she possibly could have done to avoid this is to live in a bubble where nobody can see her face, or disfigure herself so horribly that nobody would want AI nudes with her deformed face on them. We're talking beyond Islamic levels of repression, since even a burka would reveal enough of her face to enable this.
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