PokerPirate
2mo ago
This survey caught my eye. It’s probably not perfect but it showed 20% of mail-in-voters admitted to some kind of voting fraud.
This writeup doesn't inspire much confidence in me. The only details they have on their methodology are the following sentence:
The poll of 1,085 likely voters was conducted from November 30 to December 6, 2023. Among those surveyed in the poll, 33% were Republicans, 36% were Democrats, and 31% were “other”; 32% were 18-39 years old, 46% were 40-64 years old, and 22% were 65 or older.
But how were these "likely voters" determined? Random phone calls? Knocking on doors? Are they all from Portland or spread out over the US? Are they rich or poor? Were they paid for the survey?
They don't even answer how many of these "likely voters" they survey actually voted or voted by mail!
Based on this incredible lack of detail, it's hard for me to take these results seriously. If there's a more detailed writeup somewhere that I missed, I'd love to see it. I didn't see any link to one though.
PokerPirate
1yr ago
I not only don't care about them, I fundamentally don't understand why people do.
There's a pretty simple explanation that already aligns with your stated values: Caring about the homeless guy on the street can convert him into a productive member of society (maybe one of the people working at USPS's sorting center).
There's certainly a fine line between "caring" and "enabling" that needs to be debated, but my impression of most of the YIMBY crowd is that their "care" for the homeless guy stems from the same rational self-interest that you're describing.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
I'm trying to challenge your statement:
And unlike the traditional Christmas displays which genuinely are now fully secularized, these Menorah displays are deeply religious in nature.
I don't see how you can argue that a "traditional Christmas display" (such as the angels/trumpets linked in the OP, or the still common nativity scenes) is "fully secularized" while a Menorah is not. My point is that the Menorah has no more significance in Judaism than these symbols have in Christianity, and I'd even argue it is much more minor than something like the nativity.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
The Menorah is a minor religious symbol and does not hold the same status in Judaism as the cross does in Christianity. The Torah is probably about as important to Jews as the cross is to Christians, and the Torah is not regularly displayed in public spaces.
It's true that Menorahs on public grounds have always been culture war, but I think everything else in your post is gross exaggeration.
PokerPirate
4mo ago
I appreciate your technical clarifications. I think these corrections only reinforce my main point though that getting long term domestic support for nuclear cooperation is very hard in the US, and that's why we don't see more of it even if it could be an effective foreign policy tool.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
Ehh... I think you have a bit too much of a "soldier climbing over the top at the Somme" notion of physical courage. The other examples [1] of physical courage in the prompt don't have nearly the chance of resulting in a "cheap" death, but are still associated with physical courage. I think a more poignant military-adjacent take is that all these examples of physical courage can be explained away by "training" your body to react a certain way in the face of danger so that you don't need courage in the moment. For example:
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Fire fighters practice running into burning buildings everyday. This may seem scary to an outsider, but after you've learned to do it safely, it's a perfectly normal thing to do. You rarely see firefighters meaningfully risk their lives for strangers, and the captain would certainly scold them for breaking protocol afterward if they do.
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Steelworkers don't start on their first day 10 stories up. They've been slowly building the building floor by floor, so that by the time they're 10 stories up, they're confident in their balance. And any violations of safety protocol are going to get them quickly fired.
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The underdog boxer and the mugged man standing up for themselves are certainly putting themselves in real danger. But it's not the sort of danger that results in a "cheap death" so much as potentially very painful and longterm injuries. I'm sure that most people who do this also have trained for it in someway, but I can't know for sure.
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The mother has trained her mind/body for years through countless small acts of service to her children in order to value their lives above her own. "Mundane" sacrifices like waking up for years at midnight, then 2am, then 4am to feed a baby and change it's diaper make throwing your body infront of fallen debris a no brainer. These mundane sacrifices don't seem at the surface to be too related to physical courage, but I definitely think they end up resulting in actions that seem physically courageous.
[1]: for reference, I'm referring to
The courage exercised by a soldier climbing over the top at the Somme, by a firefighter running into a burning building, by a rock climber attempting a difficult route with shaky fall protection, by an underdog boxer stepping into the ring in a fight against the odds, by a steelworker calmly welding ten stories in the air, by a man refusing to give his wallet to a mugger wielding a knife, by a mother using her own body to shield her children from falling debris.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
Ehh... I think you're being inconsistent/missing the point.
You previously said:
Fire fighters running into burning building, or a mother using her body to shield her children from falling debris, might look impressive from the outside but it is ultimately mundane.
and then called these things "something of a cheap thing", to which I wanted to know what you think is "expensive".
The "fire fighters running into burning building, or a mother using her body to shield her children from falling debris" absolutely have to "live with the long-term injuries and the PTSD" just as much as any infantryman.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
An email exchange doesn't strike me as a great source for a claim like this. It would be fantastic if Stuart Slade was an army colonel who participated in this exchange, but I don't know who he is or why he should be an authority on this topic. The email is also written as a retelling of someone else's story rather than like a primary source.
PokerPirate
1yr ago
Simply put, the moral valance of violence has absolutely positively fuck all to do with the "consent of the ruling authority" and I have no idea where you might have gotten that impression from unless you were falsely projecting own secular progressive background and moral intuitions on to others.
Christianity has a pretty strong tradition of requiring the "consent of the ruling authority" in just war theory. For example, Thomas Aquinas describes three criteria for a "just war", the first of which is that it must be waged by a proper authority. (The second is that the war must have a just cause and the third is that the soldiers must have a just intent.)
PokerPirate
2mo ago
Many philosophers/theologians already self describe as Christian atheists, and they usually have much more complicated theologies than you're suggesting. They're complicated enough that I've spend the last 30 minutes trying to think of a decent summary that responds to your post, and I can't do it. So instead I'll just link to the wikipedia page and let you learn more if you'd like.
Personally, I struggled for a long time with the "humiliation of professing that thunder comes first" part of Christianity. I find the Christian atheist solution to this problem to this problem quite satisfying, and probably closer to what the "original" Christianity of Jesus looked like than what most modern American Christians believe.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
I'd love to hear what you think is "expensive" if you call daily devotion to those mundane tasks of firefighting/caring for an infant/etc "cheap".
PokerPirate
5mo ago
That's more-or-less my point. It's all ultimately mundane to the people who do it regularly.
PokerPirate
1yr ago
FWIW, I am a Christian, and this line of reasoning was a major factor in my becoming a pacifist and leaving the navy as a conscientious objector. Killing abortion doctors seemed obviously un-Christlike, and I couldn't find a moral difference between killing abortion doctors and killing enemy soldiers. So I decided I should stop killing enemy soldiers.
I tend to agree that I used to worship the flag more than I worshiped Jesus, and that I see a lot of other Christians doing the same.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
Thanks for posting this. I've often had difficulties articulating why my understanding of "faith" is different than "not needing proof to ascent intellectually to something". But the synonym of allegiance is excellent.
PokerPirate
5mo ago
I'd be shocked if there was only 1 sample from the Oslo mine. This is a super trivial thing to verify, and I would have assumed both the US and IAEA at a minimum would have done so.
I did a brief read through the references in the wikipedia article and found a handful of non-French scientists who've published about Oslo, but I don't see any references to actual samples taken from the mine except the French one.
PokerPirate
7mo ago
I think the editors don't allow links in news stories because it harms the website's pagerank to have outbound links to other (often competing) webpages. This is one of the many subtle unforeseen harms caused by google's monopoly on search that I haven't seen people properly discuss.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
The market already has solutions to this problem, they're just normally used for highly skilled staff like programmers. One very common structure is to issue stock options that only vesting after a certain period (like 4 years), which strongly incentives workers to stay with the current firm until vesting. Another common structure in the academic market is that university's will purchase a house for a professor with a 0 interest rate loan that gets forgiven over the period of 10-20 years. But if the employee leaves early, then the loan reverts to a standard (or even much higher than standard) interest rate.
PokerPirate
11d ago
Lurk https://old.reddit.com/r/linguisticshumor/ and try to understand all the jokes.
That was my main strategy for shifting gears from being a professional machine learning theory researcher to doing computational linguistics work.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
But the next time some genuinely asks me "I don't get it. why didn't we just nuke Afghanistan?" I wish I could use an argument from authority using quotes from Clausewitz.
Now that I think about it, this was probably the real reason for including Clausewitz in the Naval Academy curriculum. I definitely saw random O6+s namedropping Clausewitz to get us junior officers on board with their harebrained schemes.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
You might enjoy reading about the Shackleton Expedition to the South Pole. The ship wrecked, and Shackleton managed to somehow bring everyone home by clever use of life boats and navigating. The story is much less grim than other shipwrecks (no drawing straws about who will get shot and eaten), but has lots of endurance-style adversary to overcome.
There's lots of good books to choose from, and I don't have a particular recommendation.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
My audience at the time (maybe a 200 or so friends/family) consisted of plenty of skeptical people, and so the small nods were directed towards them. This is a pretty common format for people doing overseas NGO work in non-US friendly countries.
PokerPirate
1yr ago
Are these 3d printed guns remotely useful in combat? I can't imagine any plastic parts---let alone printed plastic---standing up to the pressures/temperatures created when firing a bullet. And AK47s are already dirt cheap.
I could see a 3d printed gun being useful for an easily concealable, single-shot assassination weapon, but that's not what a jungle guerrilla needs.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
As we get closer to the point where LLMs can spontaneously generate 5000-10000 word pieces that make plodding but cogent arguments and engage meticulously with the existing literature, huge swathes of the academic journal industry will simply be unable to survive
I think you're wrong about this being a good thing. Currently, all the best journals in most allow anyone to submit. Sometimes you get people outside "the cathedral" getting really novel ideas published and changing fields. Once it becomes too easy for hoi palloi to submit, journal editors will start relying more and more on the author's credentials. Not from Harvard/Yale/Oxbridge? Then you're totally out of luck.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
I remember watching the Harry Potter movies before reading the books, and was totally confused by parts of movies 3, 4, and 5. (These are some of the longest books, but don't have correspondingly larger movies than the first two.) Lots of other people I know IRL feel similarly.
GOT is different because they got a whole season to explain a book instead of just a movie.
I don't see how you can reasonably construe this speech as a problem.
Plenty of Americans describe themselves as "Irish" or "German" or whatever without trying to imply they are less American. American's do this so much that there are thousands of memes making fun of us for it. So I see getting bent that a Somali-American calls herself Somali as just a thinly veiled boo outgroup.
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