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MathWizard

Good things are good

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MathWizard


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Good things are good

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 04 21:33:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Kind of. I guess it's Berkson's paradox applied to a specific class of cases where the the output is easy to observe (and often just "this is a big enough deal for me to have noticed it"), and the variable you care about is harder to directly observe than other variables.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This reminds me of a post I made about grassroots movements and the math of why that trait matters. If you have two variables x,y which combine to create some output f(x,y) which is increasing with respect to both x and y, (as a simple example, f = x * y ) then observing one of the variables to be large decreases your estimate on the size of the other one.  (Ie, if you know f and y, but can't observe x directly, you estimate x = f / y). Or more generally you construct a partial inverse function g(f,y), and then g will be decreasing with respect to y.


In less mathematical terms, you observe an effect, you consider multiple possible causes of the effect, then one of them being high explains away the need for the others to be high. In the grassroots example: there are lots of protestors, this could either be caused by people being angry, or by shills throwing money around to manufacture a protest (or maybe a combination of both), you observe shills, then you conclude people probably aren't all that angry, or at least not as angry as you would normally expect from a protest of this size (if they were, and you had both anger AND shills then the protest would be even larger).


In this case, you observe a post about a political event which is getting a lot of attention, f. This popularity could be caused by a number of things, such as insightful political commentary (x), or hot woman (y). You observe large y, this explains the popularity, your estimate of x regresses to the average. It need not be the case that hotness and attractiveness actually correlate negatively, or at all, for this emergent negative correlation to appear when you control for popularity/availability.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
All of those are strong possibilities that I think a lot of AI doomerists underestimate, and are the main reason why I think AI explosion to infinity is not the most likely scenario.


But I definitely believe that less strongly than I did 10 years ago. AI has improved a lot since then and suggest that things are pretty scalable at least so far.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


We've been trying to make ourselves smarter for a long time




What? We have basically no forms of self-modification available whatsoever. You can study and reason, I guess, which is vaguely like adding training data to an AI. You can try Eugenics, but that's highly controversial, incredibly slow, and has not been tried at scale for long enough. Hitler tried and then people stopped him before he could get very far. Gene editing technology is very new and barely used due to controversy and not being good enough and taking decades to get any sort of feedback on.


We have NOT been "trying to make ourselves smarter" in the same way or any way comparable to an AI writing code for a new AI with the express purpose of making it smarter. What we have been doing is trying to make AI smarter with more powerful computers and better algorithms and training and it has worked. The AI of this year is way smarter than the AI of last year, because coders got better at what they're doing and made progress that made it smarter. If you have more and better coders you get smarter AI. We can't do that to humans... yet. Maybe some day we will. But we don't have the technology to genetically engineer smarter humans in a similar way, so I don't know what sort of comparison you're trying to make here.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not sure how you could be confident of that because the entire point of "fast takeoff" is the nonlinearity. It's not saying "AI is going to improve steadily at a fast pace and we're going to get 10% of the way closer to lightcone speed each year for 10 years. It's "At some point, AI will be slightly smarter than humans at coding. Once it does that, it can write its own code and make itself smarter. Once it can do that, growth suddenly become exponential because the smarter AI can make itself smarter faster. And then who knows what happens after that?"


I'm not 100% convinced that this is how things play out, but "AI is gradually but slowly getting better at coding" is weak evidence towards that possibility, not against it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not going maximally extreme and saying it "nullifies the agent's right to self defense". But I'm pointing out that they seem to be deliberately exploiting the right to self defense by putting themselves in danger in order to be allowed to defend themselves. There's circular shenanigans going on here where they make themselves less safe, going against the spirit of the law (which is intended to protect them) in order to trigger the letter of the law and get what they want (the right to shoot the criminal if they try to flee, which the law ordinarily does not give). The agent violates their own rights in part in order to then recover them in a manner with useful side benefits. I'm not saying the law should say "if an agent stands in front of a car oops I guess they have to let themselves die now". But clearly something has gone wrong if the law intended to make them more safe is encouraging them to make themselves less safe.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There are a number of differences. First, the car is both the weapon and the means of transportation. The chef could easily drop the knife and then charge the police officer which, while they definitely should not do, would not be deadly force and not deserve death, even if it does deserve harsh punishment.


Second, the police officer has a legitimate means of stopping the chef by physically blocking the door. Because people can stop people, but people cannot stop vehicles. The police officer fully expects that if the chef comes at him he can physically restrain him. The police in front of a car does not intend this. The officer does not have any means of preventing escape other than their gun. Their body is not going to stop the car, they don't expect their body to stop the car. They do not intend to physically restrain the car, and they very dearly hope they don't have to try. If they did not have a gun or were not allowed to use it they wouldn't stand there in the first place because they're not stupid and they don't want to die. The only reason to stand in front of a car is to threaten the suspect with a gun. It is not a restraint it is a threat.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The difference is that an officer physically grappling them physically restrains them. The officer has a plausible means of preventing the escape beyond their gun. If the officer did not have a gun, or was not allowed to use their gun, a physical grapple is still a useful and legitimate means of restraining a suspect. A normal, non-police officer attempting to do a citizen's arrest might plausibly physically restrain someone this way because it literally restrains them.


In the car case, the officer does not have any means of preventing escape other than their gun. Their body is not going to stop the car, they don't expect their body to stop the car. They do not intend to physically restrain the car, and they very dearly hope they don't have to try. If they did not have a gun or were not allowed to use it they wouldn't stand there in the first place because they're not stupid and they don't want to die. The only reason to stand in front of a car is to threaten the suspect with a gun. It is not a restraint it is a threat.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not saying people actually have a right to flee. They're still breaking the law. I'm saying their fleeing is not equivalent to violence and deliberately booby trapping their flight path to be deadly is wrong. Ie, imagine the police officers were going to bust into a drug house but, before entering, they stick landmines at all of the doors and windows so anyone fleeing gets blown up. Yeah, the drug dealers should get arrested and don't deserve to escape. But if they try to flee they shouldn't die for it. I'm pro-death penalty for especially horrific acts of villainy. I'm pro police officers killing people if forced into a dilemma where it's their life vs the life of a criminal threatening them. I'm not pro killing literally any criminal for literally any crime. Consequences should be proportional. Fleeing is not proportional to death. Police officers endangering themselves in order to create an artificial escalation so that fleeing is proportional to death is not the fleeing criminal's fault, but the police's, so does not change the moral calculus here.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


You say this as if this is not already the case in our current reality. How exactly do you think that police use of force laws work? Because I guarantee you it's not the free for all that anti-police activists like to think it is.




The "almost" equivalent is the part where the neck garotte would probably be illegal in our world, but is legal in this hypothetical.




Nobody has a legal or moral right to flee from the police, nonviolently or otherwise! Preventing criminals from fleeing the police is a good thing! They shouldn't do that! Why do you seemingly care so much about making sure that criminals have a fair shot at beating an arrest?




I'm not saying people actually have a right to flee. They're still breaking the law. I'm saying their fleeing is not equivalent to violence and deliberately booby trapping their flight path to be deadly is wrong. Ie, imagine the police officers were going to bust into a drug house but, before entering, they stick landmines at all of the doors and windows so anyone fleeing gets blown up. Yeah, the drug dealers should get arrested and don't deserve to escape. But if they try to flee they shouldn't die for it. I'm pro-death penalty for especially horrific acts of villainy. I'm pro police officers killing people if forced into a dilemma where it's their life vs the life of a criminal threatening them. I'm not pro killing literally any criminal for literally any crime. Consequences should be proportional. Fleeing is not proportional to death. Police officers endangering themselves in order to create an artificial escalation so that fleeing is proportional to death is not the fleeing criminal's fault, but the police's, so does not change the moral calculus here.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's the far extreme on a spectrum of "deliberately put oneself in harms way that the suspect did not themselves intend to put you under". If you barge into a restaurant kitchen and the chef is holding a knife and you dive underneath him, he is not threatening you with the knife. You threatened yourself. Millions of people drive cars. Technically they are deadly weapons but they aren't generally going around threatening people with them. If you jump in front of a moving car then the driver is not threatening you, you are threatening yourself with it.


If you jump in front of an unmoving car then there's some ambiguity there. But if your goal of moving in front of it is with the purpose of threatening yourself with it (the police don't expect their body to stop the car, they expect their guns to stop the car) then something fishy is going on. From the misbehaving police officers perspective, the car's status as a weapon is a feature, and the policeman's vulnerability is being leveraged this way. If the police had magical invincibility powers that made them unharmed by getting hit by cars the strategy would no longer work. We want to incentivize police officers to keep themselves more safe, not incentivize them to endanger themselves to exploit laws intended to protect them. Clearly something has gone wrong when that has become the case.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not entirely sure where I stand on this issue, but to push back on the idea of it being a slippery slope, I think we can steelman the "fleeing the police shouldn’t be a death sentence" idea to something like "the police should not deliberately block off only nonviolent methods of fleeing in order to force an equivalence between fleeing and violence.


Imagine a dystopia in which police have a secret goal of wanting to shoot as many people as possible, but are legally prohibited from this because their laws are almost equivalent to ours: you can only shoot someone in self defense (or defense of another), but have some extra loopholes that allow the following scenario. The police always travel in pairs, and instead of normal handcuffs they carry one cuff with a long thin wire dangling off them. When a police officer cuffs someone it doesn't directly restrain them in any way, but the police officer ties the wire around their own neck. This means if the suspect attempts to run and gets far enough away, the wire tightens and slices/strangles the officer. The other officer can then legally shoot the suspect in order to save their partner's life. That is, the officer is deliberately endangering themselves in a conditional way in order to create opportunities to shoot people.


The steelmanned argument would then place "standing in front of a driven vehicle" in this same scenario. You are not physically restraining a person. You are not actually preventing them from escaping. Instead, you are creating a scenario in which you deliberately endanger yourself conditional on them fleeing as an excuse to shoot them. This is roughly equivalent to just training a gun on them and saying "don't run or I'll shoot you", which police officers are generally not allowed to do. This is a loophole in which they are allowed to do it. Saying "we should close this loophole, you can't just put yourself in danger for the express purpose of giving yourselves opportunities to shoot people" does not slip into "violence is allowed" because it's categorically and consistently anti danger/violence. It's not necessarily about deliberately giving people opportunities to flee, or even failing to close off opportunities to flee if you can actually do that, but it's a claim that abusing your legal power and using yourself as a hostage is not a legitimate means to close off escape.


Of course, I expect a large fraction of people do believe weaker versions of this and just hate police. But I think there is some legitimate point here in the stronger version.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The health of the market relies on the wisdom of crowds, which requires crowds of people to be able to reliably win from it. Insider trading is bad not because in some moral sense "unfairness" is bad, but because if it happens often enough that ordinary people learn that it's unfair they'll stop participating. Prediction markets are zero sum to begin with, so I don't expect them to survive long-term without subsidies, but what life they do have is built by the belief that smart people can earn money from their intuitions. If that fails to be true because insiders keep swooping in and snatching up all the money at the last minute, then fewer non-insiders will participate, and we'll only ever get accurate results when there are insiders.


This would be less catastrophic than if it happened to the stock market, since the death of prediction markets wouldn't ruin us the same way the death of capital investing, but it's still a potentially existential crisis within its demand. This isn't just about people's moral intuitions, there are stakes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The story is they took pictures already existing and nudified them. I highly doubt they were pictures of her wearing a burka.




The pictures could have been literally anything. Are you not aware of how powerful AI has become? I use the Burka as an example not because I think she was wearing one, but because that's all that would be needed. Boy gets picture of girl's face in literally any photo that contains her face, boy gets nude picture of literally anyone else that has nude photos, boy tells AI "put this girls face on that body". Boom, a "nudified" photo. It's not authentic, it's not her real body, but the AI's good enough to make it realistic enough that the boys can look at it and giggle and masturbate to it and tease her about it, and horrify her or anyone who cares about her if they saw it.


Or skip the second photo, just tell the AI "nudify this picture" and it uses the body contour lines and imagines a naked body of an underage girl with approximately the same size and pose embedded into the photo. Again, literally any photo containing her face, and I guess enough of a body (in any amount of clothing) that there's a spot to put the imaginary naked body.




just that it is expected of teenage boys.




I expect teenage boys to not care about the "authenticity" of a 90% exposed bikini-clad body in order for their nudification to count. I expect teenage boys to not need a thirst trap of a girl in order to get horny enough to want to see her nude. I expect teenage boys to just get horny. I expect teenage boys to see literally any girl and want to see her naked, even if she's ugly, if only out of curiosity. For all we know they could have gone "uggh, Jenny is such a prude, she never shows any cleavage and she always looks scornfully at us whenever we talk about girl's tits. We should make a nude picture out of her, wouldn't that be funny? Hah, and then make fun of her about it, she'd get so mad. Trololol."


I expect teenage boys to get horny, and to learn to control it and not victimize other people in the process. If one boy had, on his own, in private, asked an AI to generate a nude of her and then he masturbated to it and never told anyone, I would have no problem with that. Yes, it probably counts as child pornography in a technical and/or legal sense, but if she wasn't actually involved in the creation of it and she never finds out about it then nobody would be harmed by its existence. Heck, if every single boy at her school entirely on their own initiative had AI generate a nude of her and masturbated to it in private and never told anyone about it and nobody ever found out, this would still be fine. The problem is the social dynamic, the sharing, the teasing, the humiliation. Shame is a valuable tool that society can wield in order to disincentivize anti-social behaviors that the law either can't or shouldn't get involved in. Slut shaming is a valuable tool that society used to use in order to disincentivize slutty behavior. This breaks down when it isn't being wielded against sluts, but against anyone for any reason. This is the same as the wife that gets mad at her husband because she had a dream that he cheated on her. It's a dream, it's not real. I don't think we should send people to prison for AI-faked videos of them stealing, I don't think we should scorn people for AI-faked videos of them saying horrible things, and I don't think we should shame people for AI-faked nudes of them. And because the human brain is wired in certain ways I think that sharing faked nudes of someone is inevitably going to lead to shame and humiliation of the same type as sharing real ones, even if not quite at the same level of magnitude. And that's wrong to inflict on someone who hasn't earned it.


On the contrary, when someone does do something wrong, punishments help correct their behavior so they don't do it again. Someone who incorrectly inflicts this humiliation on an innocent person, needs to be punished in order to correct their behavior. A healthy young man should enjoy his sexuality in a way that doesn't victimize people. Beating the crap out of these boys would help them learn that lesson and become better men.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Are they normally the same people? It seems to be in this case, but that's what's confusing me. Because normally I think it's the "hypocrisy" of different people who believe similar things for opposite reasons.


The liberal, sex positive, man says "no big deal, free sex is great, everyone likes sluts". The conservative, sex negative, man says "women shouldn't sleep around, nobody likes a slut". In most cases of a woman fucking around and finding out, both say "stop complaining, you did this to yourself." If you just read a bunch of comments by people criticizing slutty women you might think they're massive hypocrites, but if half the people believe on thing and half believe the other and they're literally different people then each one can have an entirely consistent worldview internally and just present a united front on this one particular issue. This happens all the time on different issues. I constantly see people who have superficially similar external opinions to me with stupid garbage reasoning underlying them.


But it seems to me like in the AI case that shouldn't happen, and the various sides should strongly disagree, because the woman didn't do this to herself so the conservative wouldn't assign any blame. Any assertions that this could be fixed by a man (father or husband) controlling her and her deferring to his authority make absolutely no sense because that wouldn't have stopped this either. If you think women sharing nudes is bad and want to disincentivize the behavior then it makes no sense to punish someone who didn't engage in this behavior with the same treatment as someone who did. That's not how incentives work.


It's exactly the sort of thoughtless pattern matching I would expect to see from a normie who just parrots party lines, not here on the Motte.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for January 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 28, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for December 19, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for December 19, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for December 19, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.