PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
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User ID: 890
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
29d ago
My read is: avoid a two-flavor pair if either flavor on its own would be good enough. This means the answer can't contain vanilla, since vanilla by itself is the tried and true.
The best answer would be something silly, like peanutbutter-pistaccio, but thats not an option.
If it doesn't contain vanilla, then between e and d the last problem is decide if mint or coffee will work best with the caramel.
The prompt only gives info about mint in the presence of chocolate chips (no info on whipped cream) and about coffee in the the presence of whipped cream (no info on chocolate chips)
At this point, I reread the prompt which says "what of" not "which of" so multi answers are allowed: e and d are tied.
If I had to tiebreak, I choose e because the word "sometimes" feels less frequent to me than "less commonly." But really the wording is ambiguous.
I must be missing something.
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Recovering Quokka
1mo ago
To be honest, I am a little put-off by your phrasing that science is what we are better off "believing."
When I think, "things we are better off believing," I think of a case where believing and not-believing make a difference. For example, maybe there is a self-fulfilling prophecy involving the prescription "You should be confident." In that case, I might say we are better of believing "I am confident." Science is not a self-fulfilling prophecy, because results of experiment do not depend on beliefs.
Science is stories about the world that we are better off acting on. This phrasing seems better to me. In this way, can't I argue against theism (whatever you mean by that) by saying "acting on theism doesn't make us better off"?
Actually, similarly to the old adage that theism is Not Even Wrong, in this new formulation of "true," theism is Not Even Actionable. I don't think this parallel is a coincidence.
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Recovering Quokka
1mo ago
I understand why no finite amount of evidence can give you a statistical confidence of 1, but you go on to say that
there is no statistical law that would justify belief in the law of universal gravitation with even one tenth of one percent of one percent confidence, based on any finite number of observations.
Is this just because gravitation is claimed to be "universal" e.g. for all we know, gravity could suddenly change to work differently tomorrow, or work differently as soon as we leave the solar system?
it is a miracle that the scientific method works
Is it? Maybe since I live in this world, I am corrupted by it and I can't imagine it any differently. But: I cannot imagine a world where the scientific method doesn't work.
I think the Sun rises every morning because so far it has, but even if it didn't rise every morning, there would be hidden order to it. Maybe it rises every other day. Maybe on some mornings it rises, and on other mornings it doesnt - maybe I never learn to predict whether the Sun rises on a particular morning, just like how we can't really predict the weather, or which way a leaf blows in the wind. But if I spend decades failing to predict the Sun's rise, then tomorrow I expect it to be difficult to predict. If the Sun did alternate between periods of "rising every day for 10 days in a row" and then "a period of complete unpredictability," I've still summarized it with some compression, so I'm not totally ignorant.
I suppose a world that doesn't have this hidden order would essentially have to be free of cause-and-effect. In that world, I'm not sure how I could exist as a lawful being within it. Maybe there's an anthropic argument here?
Overall, your post seems to be a weaker form of what a lot of philosophical skeptics claim. Skeptics say things like "you can't know things with 100% confidence" and your post seems to just zero in on "the laws of physics, the source code of the universe." I'll reply to you the same way I reply to philosophical skeptics, which is: while it would be nice to know what is True, I'd rather send rockets to the moon anyways.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
3mo ago
I googled "positive claim" and one of the first relevant things that came up was Burden of Proof, which speaks as if positive claim means existential qualifier, For example, "there exists a teapot orbiting the Sun somewhere in the solar system." It contrasts that with a negative claim, which asserts the non-existence of something. Certainly, it is easier to prove a positive claim than a negative one.
The issue you're talking about seems to be more like "null hypothesis," which is definitely just cultural consensus and is essentially a rhetorical trick, and not very rigorous. When I took statistics class in school, I never liked null hypothesis as a concept, as I noticed that it didn't seem mathematical to me (although it was intuitive).
Science is not immune to this at least according to Yudkowsky. I've read attempts to formalize what burden of proof ought to be, and the ones that seem aesthetic to me are just having proof "in proportion to how complex the hypothesis is," which is in line with Occam (buzzword dump). This has the added benefit of ignoring the order that evidence is encountered.
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Recovering Quokka
25d ago
I agree with the first half of your post mostly. For quite some time I've taken to saying "Law of Natural Selection" and "Theory of Evolution." You correctly explain that Natural Selection is tautological. But then you go on to use the phrase "Theory of Natural Selection" and criticize its consequences and adherents. Should I read this as "Law of Natural Selection" or "Theory of Evolution?"
It's true that as a tautology, Natural Selection is completely separate from evidence. Similarly, Peano Arithmetic (the mathematically smug way to say counting numbers) is a tautology, completely separate from evidence. It is only an empirical observation that apples and rocks and such obey the laws of arithmetic. That 2 applies placed next to 2 apples makes 4 apples. We could find out tomorrow that apples and rocks don't follow counting rules, but that should not shake our faith in counting rules: it just means reality works differently than intuition suggests. This is what happened when we discovered the cosmic speed limit and found that velocities do not combine using addition as we thought! Likewise, whether or not life on Earth was shaped by Natural Selection is simply an empirical matter, albeit not reproducible because we're talking about the past, so it's just guesswork.
As for what Natural Selection as a tautology explains, this gets into what I think the value of Darwin is. The second half of your post is completely incomprehensible to me - right about when you start to talk about "divine creation." Now i am not familiar with what people thought in 1800. I learned in school that Origin of Species was some kind of groundbreaking thing, and you seem to imply that when you say society worships Darwin. So, I am kind of guessing at the value of Natural Selection.
The value of Natural Selection is exactly that it is a tautology, that it so obviously dissolves the mystery of how you can bootstrap so much complexity in an organism without an intelligent designer. Without understanding Natural Selection, someone who knows the complexity of biology could quite reasonably hypothesize a kind of intelligent creator. If we tell him, "No that's silly, there's no God, it's simply tautological that complex creatures come from nothing" he would laugh at us! Imagine these exchanges:
"Why do the fundamental constants seem so fine-tuned?"
"Well, it's tautological of course."
"Why is entropy always increasing with the arrow of time?" "Well, it's tautological of course."
They are silly! If evidence is how you show your work in empirical matters, then tautologies (math theorems) are how you show your work in logical matters. We can immediately see how obvious Natural Selection is, but it's not immediately obvious to me that we should say there is an intelligent designer, or why the fundamental constants are the way they are.
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Recovering Quokka
1mo ago
Well, yes. Thinking our generalizations are universal would be equivalent to saying, "Science knows everything; we will not be amending our theories" which is not really how it works as far as I know? It seems anti-inductive to me, in fact, as so far science has only ever been wrong! So in the future I expect it to stay wrong! Obligatory link to a classic by Asimov.
I do wonder why people would be so obsessed with "Laws of nature," as you seem to be calling it the "Source code" of the universe. It seems (to me) more apt to describe scientific theories as working with some of the universe's internal APIs than working directly with source code. Still, there's a lot we can do with APIs.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
1mo ago
a loose burger(literally just ground beef scooped out of a hot pan and spooned onto a hamburger bun)
Is this a questionable Dish? Just sounds like an incomplete sloppy joe. You were supposed to put condiments on it!
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
23d ago
You're right that there's no single "Theory of Evolution" - rather there is a "Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection" and also "Theory of Evolution by ..." and also... I call "Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection" just "Theory of Evolution" because I rarely hear anyone talk about the other theories.
And again, I'm afraid I don't understand the second half of your post about tautologies. How can you start from (only) a tautology and reach a non-tautological explanation? Your example with the math notation confused me too. Did you mean to give an example of an unsound implication? It seems to me that you're writing a lot of sentences, but I don't see any main idea in your post.
I feel like you didn't address my point about apples and velocity. Take a math equation that describes motion: speed = distance / time Isn't that tautological? Take the following claim: If I put 1 apple on a table and my friend puts 1 apple on the table, now there are 2 apples on the table because 1 + 1 = 2. Is there no value to these?
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
2mo ago
What, specifically is "having my cake" and "eating it" referring to here?
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
8mo ago
You're missing a key piece of the puzzle, which is that people who complain about and criticize women online are called incels. This includes well-adjusted, married conservative men on twitter. "Incel" does not really mean something about being alone, it really does mean immoral anti-feminist.
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Recovering Quokka
8mo ago
For the longest time in Early Access (see this video) the "Identity" slider was simply called "Appearance." It apparently didn't use the term man, or male. People on the forums gave feedback during early access that it should be more woke, although I don't remember what the exact verbiage in the requests were: It could have been to use the words man or woman, or it could have been to add a pronoun slider, or it could have been to add a gender option.
When I booted the game up for the first time at launch, I did chuckle a little at the appearance slider being renamed "identity." It seemed like the least-development cost to satisfy an argument over words, that has no substance. Upon further reflection, BG's implementation of identity is probably the most woke-respecting it could be. Your, and my, initial response most likely reflects an inability to empathize with our opponents.
If I was given the task of changing the Early Access iteration to satisfy the feedback, I probably would have added a separate slider for identity or pronouns, because it fits (1) my model of reality and what I think is true, and (2) my model of gender ideology and what it thinks is true.
- I think biology is real, and pervasive. I would have kept a slider that determines physical aspects of the character, because in real life, things like bone structure, voice, muscles, and height tend to cluster.
- I think wokeness talks about a gendered soul. I would have added a pronoun slider or something. It would be an additional fact about a person to appease the feedback.
In my character creator, it would be feasible to create the woman from a post I made awhile back (A post I don't think many people understood?).
On the other hand, BG's character creator is pretty woke-respecting. All features of a person are uncorrelated with their identity: you can mix and match voices, looks, and genitals. If anything, the genital slider, being at the bottom of the appearance section, serves as a biological sex slider, an "additional fact" about a person that is basically inconsequential save for the intimate cutscenes.
To be honest though, one of the most woke things I hate in modern videogame character design is what I'll call the "boring and conformist way of creating exciting and nonconformist characters." This could probably warrant its own top-level post. Like Admiral Holdo from Star Wars, almost the entire cast of hero-shooters like Overwatch, Apex Legends, and Valorant feature quirky appearances that look straight out of well, the 2020s. There is an overuse of dyed hair and modern body jewelry. I suspect this is because the person who used to dress that way in high school - or whose theatre-kid friends did - became a journalist that complains about representation.
If 5e was actually transhuman escapism like some posters here claim, shouldn't there be some options like charmed limb prosthetics held together by magic?
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
2mo ago
I think I understand. Someone having their cake and eating it too is someone who hypothetically would commit, or can commit, because they don't see sex as a toy. But they might try to abuse someone's infatuation to get sex without putting in commitment.
On the other hand, swingers view sex as a toy and keep that decoupled from their emotional attachment to their spouses or whatever.
What exactly is unethical about the first case though? It sounds like taken to it's logical conclusion, hookups and casual sex are unethical for normal monogamous non-swingers. Or is it only unethical when there's a "power imbalance" (which is really just an infatuation imbalance)? Clearly this cake-having cake-eater is capable of decoupling sex from commitment, because that's what hooking up is?
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Recovering Quokka
7mo ago
While people are answering the poll question, I've seen little commentary on the history. As I remember, NPC first became a term from a tweet that went viral in certain dissident right spaces (at least that's how I heard it).
It was a study about self-reported internal monologues, and how a surprising (to some) fraction of people report "not having an internal monologue." I think this tweet went viral among people with a certain personality trait, I would guess: unusually introspective, high verbal IQ people who have some sort of emotional baggage that make them feel scorn for their more ape-like peers.
The term NPC as opposed to sheeple or anything else probably resonated with this audience because it is a videogame term and lets the group bond. If a more general term was used then the meme would not have been as viral to this audience.
You still see viral tweets really similar to these ones, for example, one involving a survey and glass of water rotated, and something else i can't remember. These tweets usually have un-PC results, like clear differences between how men and women answer the questions.
This audience is anti-woke so naturally NPC would become applied to more partisan politics, especially with how the modern information landscape quickly changes mainstream narratives about COVID, protests, etc.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
8mo ago
I immediately thought it was fake because it's structured way too closely to a female experience, which is to become hot and suddenly get a lot more matches - too many to manage. This is probably bait to get people thinking about double standards. Of course, there is no believable male analog to that experience.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
7mo ago
The problem I see with group pointwise badness is it lets you tar saints. The problem I see with uniform badness is it lets you tar normal people. It seems to me that ever talking about groups is less fair than just dealing with pointwise bad people. This is made worse because often when people complain about groups, they gerrymander and redefine things to play games.
You used examples of criminals and human rights crimes, so when it comes to legal justice I would say generalizing is unfair - just punish pointwise bad people.
What's a more appropriate context for when we should generalize groups as being "bad" and ignoring individual differences?
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Recovering Quokka
1yr ago
It's thus not a shock that random people slip up and say "we don't use pronouns" instead of "we don't use preferred pronouns"
Is it really a slip-up? If that is a slip up then so is "please use our pronouns" or "what are your pronouns?". The reason that is never corrected to "preferred pronoun" is because everybody knows that "pronoun" can refer to the progressive idea.
Qualifying "pronoun" with "preferred" would be a tactical error by gender-believers. The way they say it now is a rhetorical technique to obscure the fact that the mainstream idea and progressive idea are different. Rather than framing the discussion as "should we change how pronouns work?" it is "please use my pronouns." It's not much different than the "basic human decency" rhetorical technique.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
1yr ago
This goes the other way, too: I've seen LGBTQ friends complain about conservative signs that say, "we support all sexes, races, religions" for not "mentioning anything LGBTQ" and "even said sex instead of gender."
That is to say, it is simply tribal signaling. The reason I am annoyed by white-bashing isn't because I identify with my racial coalition. As you mention, much of my outgroup is literally caucasian.
The white people that support her simply see a neon sign that says "ingroup." You see a neon sign that says "outgroup" but is it really because they call out straight white men (ironically by not calling them out), or because calling out straight white men is the kind of things your outgroup does?
There is a certain beauty to some definitions of Rectangle. The one I am singling out is
a parallelogram containing a right angle
Why? this was the definition listed in my high school Geometry textbook. I remember it because the wording was a little peculiar. But, later I came to enjoy it. This is the kind of subtlety only a math nerd could appreciate.
I began to appreciate it once I learned how feminist theory defined patriarchy. The wording (doubtless there are many) I recall is, "a system of gender roles which is harmful to men and women" or some such. Some might say that this definition smuggles in a claim: that gender roles are harmful. That's not quite correct. You see, a non-harmful system of gender roles would simply not be Patriarchy as a matter of definition.
The reason I wrote this post was because of the earlier discussion that "Rape is about power, not sex." I was reminded of many past times I've heard rape defined this way. You might say that this definition smuggles in a claim: that men are motivated by power (or some such). But that is not quite correct. You see, a man who is motivated by sex is simply not committing rape as a matter of definition.
My textbook used the phrase, "at least one right angle," like Wikipedia uses a right angle. This is critical to leave the reader mentally itching, to leave him thinking that maybe a rectangle contains a mix of angles -- some right, and some not.
If a parallelogram has one right angle then it has four right angles
Behold! The full force of a theorem (not a definition)! So there is no doubt in the mind that there could ever be a parallelogram with mixed angles. This relation between the angles cannot be expressed with mere definitions.
Much later, I learned a name for this: The virtue of precision. Definitions should be as small as necessary.
What other imprecise definitions smuggle unproven claims?
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
1yr ago
As others have said, vaping is a gateway drug. Which is to say, it has drug vibes, or is a drug-thing to do. So naturally most parents want to keep their children and teens away from that as much as possible. Arguments from cost, smell, or health issues seem like rationalizations to me.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
1yr ago
What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify?
Anything about incels, low-status men, or nerds. Especially in regards to life development, dating, or gender relations. (In exactly the direction as expected from a Motteposter/SSC reader)
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
1yr ago
There's a lot of talk in online dissident right about how terrible public schools are, and how they are all gonna home school their children. (Usually tradcath types, too). They talk all the time about how daycare is awful and the wives all talk about how she and her friends love being stay at home moms and how they have way higher happiness levels than single in-debt professional women.
A common theme they point out seems to be the opposite of what you are pointing out, in a way. Whereas you mention that there are few role models for children nowadays, the trad-right-winger always bangs the drum saying that the centralized public schooling pipeline is a faux-family, the government trying to raise your children. That is, he is saying that children are being taught to follow the wrong role models.
This is not a new idea; I've seen people say all sorts of things like, "family is the most important bond, so any authoritarian institution needs to break it, something something communism." The idea of school, for example, brainwashing "educating children to be tolerant in order to function in an inclusive democratic society" is something I've read actual educators write and I cringed a little reading it.
Who benefits from children being deprived of traditional role models, as you mention, as illegible knowledge is being removed from the pool? If children today are primarily learning from school, maybe they do? It's very tinfoil hat, but if "the long march through the institutions" is real, I wouldn't discard the theory that the role model crisis is an intentional plan.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
1yr ago
Some tests are meant to distinguish object-level ability. Take for instance, becoming a fireman or infantryman. It would be sexist to deny a qualified woman these positions because she's a woman. Furthermore, mumbling something about oppression or double standards is stupid, because you want your positions staffed by qualified applicants.
Whether or not something should be test or a competition can be contentious. For example, those college orientations where they say, "look to your left and to your right. One/two of you won't pass." Those always angered me because I figured a certification should be a test and not a competition.
Competitions are a little different than tests because it's not really about object-level ability. If it was, you would never have weight classes in boxing. After all, being heavy is simply part of the ability in boxing. And I think this is the primary argument for sex-segregating sports. But it's unclear what to do about a female (XX) who happens to somehow be naturally stronger. Why reward her, because she was born stronger than her peers? (I'm trying to sidestep any trans issues, that's a different issue).
As far as I can tell, the entire idea of rewarding winners in a competition has to do with spiritual merit, like determination, or how hard someone practiced.
Or something else I had issue with is how a lot of online games use "time played" as a kind of bonus, and let players grind up more powerful equipment to offset differences in mechanical ability.
Do people construct competitions that they'd be good at in a bid to win status for being good at them? Does TheMotte try to push "effortposting" as a spirtual virtue so that society rewards us?
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
1yr ago
Expanding on how incels are progressive near-group, with anecdotes: Most progressive women I know have been bitching about incels (while not calling them incels) since before the term incel became mainstream. I think another poster probably hit the nail on the head, that incels are a certain kind of failure-mode of trying to internalize the numale role. The exact details I'm unsure about. It's possible incels have some combination of bad looks, poor social skills or risk-aversion that sets them up for failure. Or they're just not getting the joke.
I challenge that incels are unique in applying woke ideas to romantic relationships. I think the trans movement is already leaning that way. For more anecdotes, some of my friends who are most seeped in trans-apologetics unironically say things like, "not dating a trans person is transphobic," and "trans people are some of the most transphobic groups out there." See also: canceling of Super Straight.
I think the simplest explanation is that incel beliefs come out to reducing the status of women and increasing the status of men. Textbook anti-feminism.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
1yr ago
long and pernicious history as a signal of impending violence
While tiki torches don't have a long history at all of being associated with the altright, I am pretty sure Charlottesville started that association. I've met people in real life mention tiki torches as if they automatically imply someone is altright, and have heard someone say, "now I can't use tiki torches anymore."
If tiki torches are a shibboleth for the outgroup, and the law is just a tool to beat them, then who's to say the tiki torch doesn't have a long pernicious history of a signal for violence? Was there any principle behind the "cross burning has a long history" here? Wasn't it just, "cross-burning is a low-status racist thing, so sure let's punish them."
Could you speak more plainly? Are you saying in the future incels won't be allowed to own possessions (because of incarceration, for example)? Or that in general people will own nothing and be happy?
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