Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
I mean, the twist is obvious isn’t it?
Trump wins a majority of pledged delegates in the primaries. He then gets handily convicted of multiple felonies, and is sentenced to what amounts to life in prison right before the Republican National Convention. Hilarity ensues.
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
At this point arguing Catholic theology feels like arguing Star Wars lore. It's fake. It doesn't have to make sense. It doesn't make sense. It was always fake, but now it's super doubleplus ultra fake. If you try to apply logic to it you will end up running in circles.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
You're forgetting the most important aspect for an entertainment company. Disney under Iger produced good content. Disney under Chapek didn't.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Also, what’s going on with the tattoos and piercings? Does anyone think that stuff looks attractive? It’s not just women either. Am I getting old? Why are people intentionally discoloring their skin and putting holes in their face?
Quantumfreakonomics
3mo ago
I don't see where the offramps are other than Abbot backing down.
At some point federal agents could arrest state national guardsmen. If they're afraid of forceful resistance, just send the arrest warrants to the guardsmen's home addresses. They can be physically handcuffed after the "crisis" is over. I doubt many people are willing to risk their freedom to defend Abbot's showmanship.
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
It is quite unpleasant to argue against the core assumptions of veganism in a way that is epistemically rigorous. One has to tear down the entire concept of ethics as it is typically understood, then rebuild some sort of timeless decision theory-based normative system that reproduces the common-sense undisputed norms of "ethical" human behavior, but hopefully without the gaping security hole of giving in to utility monsters and bottomless pits of suffering.
> But QuantumFreakonomics you wise sage, I inherently care about the suffering of all sentient beings. It is part of my utility function, and I don't want to change my utility function.
You are wrong about your own utility function. You do not inherently care about the subjective experience of shrimp in the Atlantic Ocean. I don't believe you. You are confusing type I goods (goods which have intrinsic value, i.e. are valued for their own sake) with type II goods (goods which have only extrinsic value, i.e. are valued for their ability to produce/acquire type I goods). Your own pleasure and your own lack of suffering are type I goods. The pleasure and lack of suffering of anonymous random sentient creatures is not a type I good, but it is often (but not always) a type II good. Assuming that the pleasure and lack of suffering of anonymous random sentient creatures is a type I good is an error, as is assuming that it is always a type II good. No one wants to say this in polite company because it makes you sound like a massive asshole, but when no one has the guts to point this out you end up with people advocating to redirect the malaria net funding (which saved 100,000+ lives) to saving chickens instead.
I don’t think people are fully grasping what is happening here.
The Australian government is flirting with making it illegal to ask someone on a date.
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“Pressuring the respondent to give them information about their location or their schedule.”
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“Pressuring the respondent to meet them in person when they did not want to.”
This is what asking someone on a date is. You don’t know if they want to until you ask.
Some have speculated in these very comments that destroying dating apps is good actually, because then people will start meeting each other and going on dates somewhere else (where exactly this “somewhere else” would be is left unspecified). This is a folly. The kind of government that bans dating apps for allowing and facilitating people to ask each other out is the kind of government which will ban in-person dating scenes too. Think that’s too extreme? This is Australia we’re talking about. I’m totally on Kulak’s side if the Australian government goes through with this. These inhuman totalitarians need to be taken out by any means necessary.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Limit dispensing of oral contraceptives to married couples with verified children. Ban abortion.
Yes, it will be tough. Lots of terrible situations will pop up. The question to be asked is, “is this worse than literally running out of people?”
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Women's College Basketball Update
The gap between the Super Bowl in mid-February and the start of the NBA playoffs in mid-April is a dead zone on the American Sports calendar. The only respite of any relevance is the three-weekend single-elimination tournament extravaganza that is March Madness. Interestingly, most of the hype this year has been from the women's bracket. The quarterfinal between LSU and Iowa was the most-watched women's basketball game of all time with 12.3 million viewers, which is more than last year's (men's) NBA Finals. It was a good game too.
What is going on? The WNBA is still completely irrelevant. Last year was a good year for them. They got about 700,000 viewers for the finals. The only active WNBA player I can name is Brittney Griner, and that's because she was the subject of an international incident.
As with most questions regarding women's social status, "is she hot bro?", is probably the best place to start. Here is the roster of current NCAA darlings Iowa. Here is the roster of the 2023 WNBA champion Los Vegas Aces. You'll notice I had to use a promotional Twitter post for that one. The Aces don't have photos of the players on their website. They aren't even trying.
How did this happen? What are the incentives that led to this?
The WNBA loses money. Not a massive amount of money (about 10 million dollars a year), but it isn't particularly close to being profitable. The NBA keeps the WNBA around for positive PR, and because getting little girls interested in basketball is good for the cultural relevance of the NBA. The NCAA Women's tournament exists because of Title IX. Any university that spends money on men's sports must also spend money on women's sports, lest they be sued for discrimination. Universities can't pay players directly, but recent court cases and rule changes mean that players are allowed to profit off of their "name image and likeness" ("NIL") through endorsements, sponsorships, and the like.
In men's sports, NIL has created a massive clusterfuck that is worthy of it's own post. In women's sports, results were much more banal and predictable. The hotties get all the money. There is an economic incentive to be and present oneself as attractive in order to get paid. You think Hailey Van Lith wears her hair like this because it helps her get buckets?
On the earned media side, Caitlin Clark is getting a lot of airtime on the sports networks. She is in fact putting up some impressive numbers, but I doubt she would be getting this much attention if she wasn't a cuteish white girl who isn't attractive enough to feel threatening to the middle-aged PMC women who complain about stuff.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
While the poll itself may be interesting, what I find most interesting of all are the responses from the normies
I didn't dig too deeply into this one, but I looked at the replies (and even *gasp* the quote tweets) on the Hanania poll. I grew up on 4chan, but I've spent enough time in sanitized spaces like Reddit that I forgot what viscerally angry uncensored people sound like; disgusting, but beautiful in a way, like a cheetah devouring a gazelle. Hanania tried to connect this reaction to the old "but I did eat breakfast this morning" failure to parse hypotheticals, and that doesn't seem quite right, but it does serve as a reminder that many (most?) people aren't like us. They are either unable or unwilling to peal back their assumptions about morality or world-models.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
I don't think I've seen this discussed here yet? I have to admit, the song has grown on me. It really feels authentic in a way that say, Try That in a Small Town doesn't.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
It seems pretty clear to me what happened. The Florida Department of Education of thinks it’s perfectly fine to teach AP Psychology without the gender identity and sexual orientation stuff, and the college board thinks those topics are integral to the course and cannot be omitted.
Of course, a media worth a shit would actually get into the weeds of the curriculum to find out what the gender and sexuality topics really are and how inseparable they are from the rest of the course. Unfortunately you’re going to have to do your own research.
To be fair to the College Board here, I have no clue what counts as “age appropriate” content for 11th and 12th graders either.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
So like, where is the money going? If healthcare costs so much in the US, who is getting paid more? Who is getting paid to do irrelevant work? Who is getting massive returns on investment?
There is one question I still need answered: It’s pretty clear at this point that SBF does not care about other people in the sense of having normal “empathy”. He lies, cheats, and screws people over all the time. And yet, he doesn’t seem particularly selfish? The guy was working 18 hours a day, ate vegan food, and had an ugly girlfriend (okay, he was def banging hot chicks on the side, but still). What was the money for? His actions don’t make sense if he was trying to maximize his own wellbeing. Why would he go on Twitter spaces and admit to fraud while under house arrest? Why take the stand at trial and almost certainly get years added to his sentence? He wasn’t trying to get out of jail. He was trying to restart the grift. If he got the chance to do it all over again, the only thing he’d change would be not paying CZ in FTT tokens.
So yes, he does believe in effective altruism. Not the caring about people part, the maximizing multiversal utility part. Here’s the real question, the non-rhetorical question: Why care about multiversal expected utility if you don’t have empathy? I can understand being an uncaring sociopath. I can understand being driven by empathetic reason. I cannot understand what base human impulses drive SBF. He is an enigma, the Joker, a man I don’t fully understand.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
I can’t believe this shit. The front running candidate is probably going to be in jail on election night, and the challengers are scrambling to find an angle of attack. It’s right in front of you ya imbeciles.
Quantumfreakonomics
5mo ago
Luckily, a brand new article just dropped with details about that:
Some executives said they were getting questions from regulators and law-enforcement entities such as the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan over the charge of Altman’s alleged lack of candor, the people said. The truth was going to come out one way or another, they told the board.
People familiar with the board’s thinking said there wasn’t one incident that led to their decision to eject Altman, but a consistent, slow erosion of trust over time that made them increasingly uneasy. Also complicating matters were Altman’s mounting list of outside AI-related ventures, which raised questions for the board about how OpenAI’s technology or intellectual property could be used.
The board agreed to discuss the matter with their counsel. After a few hours, they returned, still unwilling to provide specifics. They said that Altman wasn’t candid, and often got his way. The board said that Altman had been so deft they couldn’t even give a specific example, according to the people familiar with the executives.
Not entirely related, but here's a particularly eye-popping quote:
OpenAI leadership and employees were growing increasingly concerned about being painted in the press as “a bunch of effective altruists,” as one of them put it.
Yes, the demoralization is the point. The new update just dropped. The "appeal to religious tolerance" bug has been patched. That particular tactic will no longer work. You lose.
Curtis Yarvin is right that this level of power cannot be challenged head-on. You really thought press-releases from Republican senators would work? This is the equivalent of a Japanese Banzai charge straight into dug-in machine gun emplacements and sighted artillery. They will not only defeat you handily, they will enjoy it the whole time.
I suppose if you really are Catholic (whatever that even means these day), you can have faith in "divine providence" or whatever to eventually fix things. For everyone else, we will have to simply live with the pain.
EDIT: Speaking of Republican Senators and sports leagues, if you want to know how mid-level white-collar employees in NY and LA feel about Republican Senators sending them open letters, here’s ESPN NBA reporter Adrian Wojnarowski sending a “Fuck you” email directly to Senator Josh Hawley.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
This is a miscarriage of justice in my opinion. If Ethan Crumbley had run over 4 people with the family car, would the parents have been prosecuted for leaving the keys on the counter? The parents didn't shoot anybody. A school shooting is not a reasonably foreseeable outcome of storing unsecured weapons in the house. Its hard to say that the Crumbley parents didn't do anything wrong, but its a stretch to say that they caused the death of those 4 people, in a way that they should be feloniously liable for.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
What's the deal with Kate Middleton? I can't make heads or tails of it, I think because of the culture gap. Feels like there is a subtle difference between the Bounded Distrust rules in America and the rules in Britain. Give it to me in freedom-speak.
Quantumfreakonomics
10mo ago
Idk if it's Jiro's objection, but what leaped to mind for me is, how are admissions officers supposed to evaluate the quality of essays about niche topics they don't know about? High-variance sampling to identify outliers doesn't work unless you can actually identify the outliers from the sampled data.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
Thoughts? Yeah, the birth of one's first child is a big moment, but this is also the biggest moment of the last 20 years for his team (who gave up quite a lot to get him I might add). Apparently, he was expected to just make it back in time for tip-off, but weather delays pushed his flight back. I'd be pretty pissed if I was a Timberwolves fan tbh.
Quantumfreakonomics
20d ago
People seem to be operating under the assumption that there is a set of deterministic “statuses”, and then there is a different set of non-deterministic free-will “choices”, but actually it’s all deterministic (modulo some weird quantum mechanical stuff).
Free will is essentially a legal fiction. It is incredibly useful, but it isn’t actually true. Yudkowsky’s decision theory paper uses the phrase “surgery on a world model” when describing how one considers counterfactuals. I think that is a good way to put it. In some sense it is impossible for someone who is homeless at any given time to have not been homeless, because in the physical universe that exists they are in fact homeless, but this isn’t very useful when designing a legal system that creates actual justice.
Quantumfreakonomics
7mo ago
I’m sorry bro. We’ve all been there.
They say “the worst thing she can say is no” but I asked a woman who I’m sorta friends with on a date via text and she read the message but hasn’t responded for 11 days and that’s so much worse than “no.”
You now understand how completely unhinged conventional-wisdom dating advice is. You’re not supposed to tell bright-eyed youngsters, “actually the worst thing that can happen is that she becomes viscerally disgusted by the thought of being with you,” but that’s the truth. That’s not necessarily what happened here, but it is a realistic option that one needs to be aware of.
If not, it's not a big deal, we can pretend this didn't happen and keep being friends lol
I get what you were going for here. You heard somewhere that the biggest thing women fear about dating is feeling unsafe, so you wanted to be as non-threatening as possible. Women hate this for some reason. I don’t know why, but they do. You will drive yourself insane if you try to figure out the deeper operating principles at play which cause this bizarre-seeming behavior. Just accept it.
Unfortunately I don’t have any practical advice for what to do going forward. If you wanted a sanity check, you are making the typical mistakes that a young man reasoning from male-brained priors would be expected to make, so no, you are not going insane.
Quantumfreakonomics
20d ago
Or that the conduct is different if different people are doing it?
I challenge any gay man to have sex with his husband by inserting his penis into his husband's vagina.
More seriously, I've never read Lawrence, and don't particularly feel like subjecting my eyes or brain to tortured legal reasoning at the moment. Is it written in a way that would allow a state to criminalize anal sex in general without regard to the sex of the persons?
SBF was right about books. Sorry bookworms, but they’re obsolete. Every good book should have been either a blogpost or a video lecture.
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