MathWizard
formerly hh26
No bio...
User ID: 164
MathWizard
formerly hh26
6d ago
I don't think we should be selectively picking and choosing lawmakers and pedantically going through their actions to decide whether their actions do or do not technically count as "insider trading" or not and then prosecuting the ones that the prosecutor chooses to prosecute at their own discretion.
Instead I think we should make a new law that unambiguously singles out lawmakers, prevents them from buying/selling/owning anything other than specially licensed (and public) index funds, limit their transactions to certain times of year, and also prevent external sources of income. Then ruthlessly enforce that law on all of them, which should be tailor-made to be less ambiguous than existing insider trading laws which are not designed with politicians in mind.
Obviously this will never happen because the politicians are the ones who make laws and don't want to cripple their own sources of income. But if it magically happened then I would feel comfortable prosecuting it.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
6d ago
I think he means that Trump winning is a rebuke of the Democrat's lawfare against him, because then they didn't accomplish their goal.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
9d ago
1x. If it's a video I'm actually watching, I want to watch it as intended. If it's a "video" where the point is that people are talking, I have it on in the background while doing something else. With my attention split between the words and the something else, I'll lose track of what's going on if it goes too fast, and I won't get bored at 1x because my attention is already split.
If it's a video that needs to be actually watched and it's too boring at 1x, I'll just stop watching and find something better.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
10d ago
Right, but barring some sort of bungling by the defense, or dishonesty, or extreme bias, or something going horribly wrong, it should be impossible for the same collection of evidence to meet the burden of proof to actually convict both defendants "beyond a reasonable doubt". It seems to me like the same set of evidence that convicted the first one, simply knowing that a jury convicted the first one, is itself a reasonable doubt on the second one. It's possible that the first was incorrectly convicted of being the mastermind and the second is actually the one, but it's reasonable to doubt it.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
12d ago
"But battles are ugly when women fight."
What does he mean here? This could either mean that women fight dirty and thus make the battle ugly, or it could mean that women having to fight means women getting wounded and killed and being forced to wound and kill others which is itself ugly. Or it could mean that only in a most desperate and ugly battle for one's very survival do we forgo our principles and make women to fight because we need every last body at any cost.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
16d ago
Technically they could and should do it on their own, but clearly they don't, so some sort of handholding might help. Like, if the court could formally submit the law to the legislators with the specific part highlighted as being ambiguous or exploitable, and the case motivating this as an example, and then the legislature must handle it in a timely manner to clarify their intent. Given them an option to say "we endorse this exactly as written, even in light of the example you've submitted with it, the law needs no changes", but if they have to explicitly vote for that publicly then it removes a bunch of the status quo bias that lets these loopholes exist for so long. And also have a system where if the legislature ignores the bill entirely or can't come to a consensus on it then the court publicly admonishes them for being incompetent or something symbolic that doesn't give the courts any actual power beyond what they already have, but makes the legislators look bad publicly when they make stupid laws.
And limit the court's ability to do this to a certain number of times per year or per law or something to prevent activist judges from just harassing legislators with laws they disagree with. But I mostly just want a fastforward button on the existing "law runs into trouble in court -> legislators notice and care -> legislators fix law -> courts can do sane things without having to abuse language" process. And then maybe use this as an excuse to crack down on courts abusing language and bending laws towards what they think was intended instead of what it literally says. Just always do what it literally says and if you think the intent was different ask the legislature to make them match.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
17d ago
This is precisely why I think courts should have a "return to legislator" option, at least for future cases if not for the current one. Rather than have a war between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law and being forced to either ignore the spirit, or mangle the language of the letter until it fits what you think the law should be, this should be a case where the judge goes "Hey, lawmakers, we found a bug in your code, fix it!"
Now, it would be unfair for the people involved here for the law to suddenly change on them mid-court battle, and their own case should be decided based on the law as written, but the law could update for future cases.
In this particular case, the obvious solution is to adjust the "single-family" zoning law to prohibit renting to more than a single family at a time. You can build your 24 room "single family house", good luck finding single families that will pay you enough to recoup your costs when renting in series instead of in parallel.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
19d ago
You can do that, but it's rare. Therefore, as in Scott's Be nice at least until you can coordinate meanness (which I only partly agree with), it doesn't really do much unless it's a norm. The curve of behavior as a function of consequence is highly nonlinear, and a rule which is enforced in 0.1% of cases might as well not exist, since people will just ignore it. A world in which each instance of hooking up under false pretenses carries a 0.1% chance of getting beat up or having to go to court leads to basically no change in behavior and just increases violence to no benefit. It's only if men seeking to take advantage of women expect to actually face consequences, and have either had it happen to themselves in the past or to people they know, that they will factor those consequences and rethink their behavior.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
20d ago
Back in the day, fathers and brothers would take it upon themselves to defend the woman's honor. If a man slept with a woman under false pretenses of a long-term relationship and then just abandoned her, they would beat the crap out of him, ostracize him, and possibly even kill him.
We can't do that in modern society and, while the rule of law is useful and helps protect people from threats of violence for less significant offenses, I think something was lost here.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
28d ago
All of these are plausible depending on surrounding factors absent from the example. As written and inferring from base rates, and assuming some degree of mental illness on John's part, I'd think 1 is most likely, but 2 is fairly plausible, if we assume the mental illness is something along the lines of "pathological liar" that keeps him exaggerating even as it starts to fail to gain sympathy.
It could also be a more steelmanned version of 1, what if people do keep trying to kill him? Like, not these specific people at his work, he's still exaggerating about them, but what if it's other people? Maybe John lives in a really bad neighborhood and gets mugged once a week, barely escaping by throwing his wallet and running the other way. Maybe he has to fight tooth and nail and ends up in the hospital regularly badly wounded. Maybe it's not about John at all, it's just a really bad neighborhood and everyone who lives there gets mugged regularly, or maybe John looks like an easy target. But the repeated trauma makes him think it's a conspiracy and he's not smart enough to pick out the pattern: person in dark alley = mugger, person in office = friendly, and he just thinks all people have a 50-50 chance to attack him.
If we reduce his pattern-matching abilities even further, maybe he never actually gets mugged, but he keeps doing something stupid like climbing rusty fences and scratching himself, or drunk driving and getting in accidents that almost kill him, and generalizes that to people trying to kill him.
Or maybe he just watches too much TV and movies and people are trying to kill each other all the time (especially trying to kill the protagonist) and he thinks of himself as the protagonist, therefore people must be trying to kill him.
If instead, we increase his pattern-matching abilities, maybe he does regularly get mugged, or his friends and family members do, and he notices that most of the muggers in his bad neighborhood have a certain ethnicity, and so he becomes a racist. Or maybe he goes to the police to fix the issue but they don't take him seriously because he sounds like a paranoid nutjob (when he accuses the actual mugger and Alice from work in the middle of the same rant the police can't tell which one is real and which is exaggerated), then he becomes anti-cop, or anti-government, or anti-whoever is in charge of making the cops be so lax on crime and oh hey have you read this article about how such and such group is secretly controlling the government to be soft on crime or whatever?
Stepping out of the metaphor, which I think is somewhat of a weakman for this phenomenon, I think this simultaneously explains a large chunk of racists (in all directions), anti-religion, anti-capitalists, etc etc etc. Bad thing happens to person or to people that person knows, or hears from (sometimes signal boosted and exaggerated by the media, sometimes by word of mouth). There is a real pattern causing it to happen repeatedly, though sometimes it's a pattern as complicated as "The Entire Economy", it gets oversimplified, exaggerated, and then attributed to a particular group, and the people who believe this explanation become radical anti-that-group. It's a combination of paranoia and actual pattern recognition, because there usually is an actual legitimate instigating factor that is genuine Bayesian evidence against that group, it's just much weaker than would be needed to draw the exaggerated conclusions they come to. There ARE evil racist white men trying to keep minorities poor. There ARE worthless degenerate minorities who live on crime and welfare and contribute nothing to society. There ARE corrupt police officers abusing their authority. There ARE pedophiles in government jobs. There ARE Zionist supremacist Jews who want to control all of America and manipulate it into being pro-Israel. All you need is for someone to encounter some of these in real life, or evidence of them existing, and then the pattern matching can begin until it spirals out of control.
And some of these people will have genuinely convincing evidence on their side, by sheer random chance. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been mugged. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been unfairly harassed by police. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been stared at suspiciously by shopkeepers despite doing nothing wrong. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been laid off by a Jewish boss. They're going to look at the evidence they've seen with their own eyes and be unconvinced that it might be a coincidence. It doesn't seem like a coincidence, it seems super unlikely. If their life were admissible as a scientific paper it would reject the null hypothesis. p < 0.05. They're Jellybean people!
I think that's what a lot of this is. People who perceive patterns where there are none, people who pick out genuine patterns and misattribute them, and people who have coincidences happen to them that are rational evidence when viewed from their individual perspective but don't stand out when you adjust for multiple comparison tests.
What if we create diversity quotas for Quality Contributions? Almost all of the political ones that end up actually making the list are right-leaing, or at least anti-woke. If we (slightly) lower the standards for left-leaning or rare opinions so that they get signal boosted, and in particular the highest quality of them get seen by more eyes, that might incentivize people who hold those opinions to put effort into it and feel more appreciated.
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