Quantumfreakonomics
No bio...
User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
3mo ago
Basically all non-torture execution methods are probably less painful than the median "natural" death. The idea that a few minutes of writhing is considered unacceptable is laughable. I've got some bad news for y'all. You, yes you, and your parents, and everyone you love, are going to writhe in pain for a lot more than a few minutes at some point before you die. Even if Canada-style MAID becomes the standard everywhere, imagine how much pain you would have to be in before you decided to end it once and for all.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
It's the 17th result right now on DuckDuckGo. I doubt that Google did anything Hanania-specific here, they just like to signal boost "authoritative" outlets. Try finding primary sources for anything vaguely controversial with Google. It's impossible. Just page after page of NBC News, CNN, CBS News, NPR, NBC News Boston, Fox News Milwaukee, NYT Opinion, HuffPost, etc.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
I kind of think the higher-ups are in the dark about what workplace culture on the ground is. A few months ago an NBA player was fined for saying “no homo” in an interview. I got into a discussion in the /r/nba thread with a corporate employment lawyer from Los Angeles who told me that you’d be in deep shit if you said that at any company. I tried to get through to him that no, those corporate HR policies he’s setting aren’t getting implemented in places like Texas and that middle management is simply lying because they don’t want to look bad. No one has the guts to tell these people to fuck off, so they think that they have the respect of their underlings.
Quantumfreakonomics
18d 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.
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.
-
“Pressuring the respondent to give them information about their location or their schedule.”
-
“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
1yr ago
No, my point is that if you see someone who is otherwise intelligent and clear-thinking make uncharacteristic fallacies and bad arguments on a specific topic, and that topic is something that they have a strong vested interest in, and they did not argue themselves into that vested interest, then you should have a strong prior that their vested interest is causing their bad arguments.
I will note that the best religious apologists tend to be converts. This is not a coincidence.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
The Bud Light debacle made it into the watercooler talk at my work, which is rare but not unheard of for culture war items. The general consensus seemed to be: it’s not just that he’s a man trying to be a woman, it’s that he’s trying to be an “adolescent girl”.
Oddly enough, I had the opposite reaction as you. If you want to be a woman, why would you want to be a business professional or something? why wouldn’t you want to be a teenage girl making melodramatic Instagram videos, dancing, screaming, waving your hands everywhere, and doing whatever gets you the most attention? His is perhaps the most sincere desire to “be a woman” as I’ve ever seen. Maybe the programmers with anime profile pics are the inauthentic fakers?
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
Is the guidance the same for all children? If so, it's unironic, literal white supremacy.
It's easy to forget how much closer to the equator the United States is than Europe. White people did not evolve to tolerate the Summer Texas sun.
The way a free market works is that consumers get to choose, for whatever bespoke reasons they so desire, which products they will purchase and consume. Producers would much prefer that they themselves got to choose which products consumers had to purchase. Corporate PR gets a lot of flak for being simple and predictable, but it is glaringly apparent when these simple predictable rules are violated. The fact that companies wish that their customers were pigs who they could shovel slop to every day and come home with an easy profit should be apparent from first economic principles, but consumers understandably take offense to that. Imagine if the CEO of InBev posted a tweet publicly asking Elon Musk to shut down all Dylan Mulvaney/Bud Light trending topics and ban Kid Rock. I’m sure that’s exactly what they wanted, but InBev has enough sense and tact to understand how condescending and contemptuous that would come off as.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
The mainstream media tends to avoid signal-boosting intelligent dissident voices. They want controlled opposition and/or clownish opposition. Much easier to write about Alex Jones or @420MAGAPepe1488 on X.
Quantumfreakonomics
3mo ago
This is the fruit of the Elon-Twitter tree. "Claudine Gay" has been trending on X every other day for the last month. It helped a lot that it was a slow news cycle, but this sort of cultural momentum would have been impossible a few years ago.
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
Alright, I'll say it. Advocating for genocide is political speech. It does not incite imminent lawless action. It should not be categorically banned. Genocide could conceivably be a good policy option in certain hypothetical situations. Also most things labeled "genocide" are actually ethnic cleansing or forced assimilation.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
MIRI Researcher Don’t be a Quokka Challenge (IMPOSSIBLE).
Katja Grace posts “date me” document. Asks everyone to share.
I originally posted a similar link in the small-scale-questions thread in response to Tyler Cowen linking to the doc on MarginalRevolution. What I didn’t know at the time is that Katja apparently wants this to be spread everywhere?!?!?
Object-level thoughts: I quite liked it. The document makes a compelling case that will appeal strongly to a certain demographic of men. It’s pretty much exactly what you would expect from “mid-30s Bay Area rationalist woman ready to settle down and have kids,” expanded out into a full dating profile. It certainly caught my attention.
Meta-level thoughts: OH NO WHAT ARE YOU DOING? You can send out something like this to your blog readers. They’ll know how to interpret it, and they’re the kind of people you’d be interested in anyways. You can’t toss it out into the black void that is Twitter and expect to come out unscathed. She even dropped her personal email address at the end. Guess who’s going to need a new Gmail account next week?
”If you don’t hear back in two weeks, feel free to try again, or try other means.”
Protip: If you are a woman, do not ever put something like this in your dating profile. This will be used as an excuse for some weirdo on the edge of sanity to stalk you.
I feel bad for her getting dragged in the quote tweets, but like, what did she expect? Why, in response to getting a negative reaction, is she intent on spreading it even further? That’s the opposite of what she should be doing. Everyone who would be compatible with her has already seen it.
Effective Altruism drama update:
You may remember a few weeks ago the article Effective Altruism Promises to Do Good Better. These Women Say It Has a Toxic Culture Of Sexual Harassment and Abuse was published in TIME (Motte discussion here).
It's been a hectic two weeks on the EA forum. Meta community posts have been consistently getting more engagement than object-level posts about actual charity. There is a palpable tension on the site between the hardcore rationalists and the mainstream liberals. Vote counts swing on an hourly basis depending on who has the upper hand, but overall the discussion has remained civil (mostly). A few days ago, the (in)famous Aella posted "People Will Sometimes Just Lie About You", a devastating screed against prudes, anonymous allegations, and haters of eccentric Bay Area parties. Eliezer himself even shows up, taking a break from doomscrolling to deliver a supporting bombardment against the mainstream press.
There's nothing EAs care about more than cute poly girls and AI. Once Aella and Eliezer weigh in, case closed right? WRONG.
EV UK board statement on Owen's resignation
In a recent TIME Magazine article, a claim of misconduct was made about an “influential figure in EA”:
"A third [woman] described an unsettling experience with an influential figure in EA whose role included picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs. After that leader arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview, she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel. When she arrived, she says, “he told me he needed to masturbate before seeing me.”"
Shortly after the article came out, Julia Wise (CEA’s community liaison) informed the EV UK board that this concerned behaviour of Owen Cotton-Barratt;[1] the incident occurred more than 5 years ago and was reported to her in 2021.[2] (Owen became a board member in 2020.)
One of the perpetrators from the article has been identified. So who wins?
Well, its too soon to say. This seems to be the first sexual misconduct allegation confirmed against an official EA leader, so you can't really call the TIME story which broke it to be a complete pile of journalistic garbage. It does seem like a pretty minor infraction though. After reading Owen's statement it seems like it could fall under the "weird nerds trying to date" umbrella, but maybe you can't use that excuse when you're a board member.
One aspect I haven't seen discussed is that this is the same guy who was behind the controversial decision to buy Wytham Abbey for 15 million pounds (see here). In light of current events, it sure looks to me like EA officials decided to blow millions on a luxury venue in Oxford in order to impress women.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
The Kulak "America should invade Australia" post came to mind first, but really any of his top-level essays fit the bill. What's wonderful about KulakRevolt posts is that they are almost always wrong, oftentimes obviously wrong, but you really have to think about why they are wrong in a way that leaves you with a greater understanding of freedom, the state, and the issues involved.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Caroline was seen in New York last week. Speculation was that she was there cutting a deal with prosecutors. This would seem to confirm that. Its one thing to give someone enough rope to hang themselves, its another to let him run around making a mockery of the legal system by admitting to felonies every day while nothing happens.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
At least now the space will be a bit more entertaining and potentially show normies that there can be drama and fun to be had even in doing good.
No, this is exactly why we’re in this mess in the first place. Mosquito nets and clean water are boring. High-leverage crypto trading is fun and exciting. Living in a penthouse with your buddies is cool and sexy. Drama appeals to the deepest impulses of the primate brain. A world without drama would be very boring indeed. But drama, living in penthouses, and high-leverage crypto trading are not altruism. In case you think that no smart or rational person would ever make such a category error, consider the following primary source:
five years ago it felt like a really serious conflict in my mind that what was maximally good often seemed weird, or sketchy, or tacky, or unpleasant, or just plain aesthetically distasteful
these days it feels like the good is shockingly aligned with the fun, the beautiful, the awesome, the exciting, the sexy and shiny and cool
… I … don’t know what to think or how to feel about that tbh
-Caroline Ellison, October 5, 2021.
Pull up a Bitcoin price chart and find early October 2021. She was making bank in a bull market and confused getting rich for doing good. She is a smart girl, and noticed that something seemed off. As we now know, she did not correctly resolve the problem. This should tell you something about the darkness and corruption inherent in the human soul. Altruism is not natural and must be either rigorously guarded or lost.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
I would expect having hundreds of extra murderous terrorists on the loose would be worse for morale. This isn't just theoretical. At least 6 Israelis were killed by prisoners released in the Shalit deal in 2014-2015 alone.
And that's just the first order effects. It's pretty likely that the moral hazard stemming from a policy of lopsided prisoner exchanges is what motivated the October 7th operation.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
the original video of her has yet to make an appearance in any of the numerous "j'accuse" incendiary articles
You didn’t post the video either.
Honestly, this looks more like prudish Anglo-American business culture triumphing over Southern European romance culture than it does feminism v patriarchy. I can totally imagine Fox News running a few “groomer” segments if this had happened to the USWNT instead. As a certified American, my immediate reaction upon seeing the clip was, “WTF you can’t do that.”
Still, Rubiales does seem to be getting a truly excessive amount of hate, such that it’s hard not to root for him. America has a sort of natural immunity built up over centuries of moral panics. Seeing a relatively minor incident like this completely paralyze international institutions overseas really drives home the power of American cultural hegemony.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
The thing you have to understand about the German reaction to the Holocaust as it happened was that WWII was going on. This seems like a petty thing, but think about it. In war you learn not to question the government. There would have been massive factories built and converted to military production all over the country. A brand new smokestack with odd smells in your backyard wouldn’t have triggered much alarm. The government is rounding up the Jews? It would be imprudent not to. They might be resentful towards Germany and eager to help the resistance. We did the same thing in America. Would you be able to tell the difference as a citizen from the outside?
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
BAU is not Mount Holyoke or Harvard; it is a massive university with lots of blue collar and international students
I think you've misread the social fabric of America. I would have expected "large research university near a nice urban center on the West Coast" to be more progressive than Harvard. Harvard has the constraint of having to project a veneer of respectability. BAU is likely to be filled with exactly the kind of person that sees 50 Stalins-style activism as their ticket into the big leagues. They're also unlikely to experience much student or government pushback, unlike say, Auburn or Arkansas.
This seems: absolutely pants-shittingly insane to me?
You should not be surprised. This is a very simple logical syllogism that follows from two premises believed by almost all democrat politicians.
-
Children who run away from home because their parents refuse them medically necessary health care should not be returned to their parents because it is unsafe.
-
Gender affirming care for transgender children is medically necessary.
-
Therefore, transgender children who run away from home because their parents refuse them gender affirming care should not be returned to their parents because it is unsafe.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
...are you really complaining that they didn't write out and evaluate the surface integral over the daylit hemisphere ∫∫S Isuncos θincidencedS? I assure you that it simplifies to Isunπr²
In the physical world no externally heated substance can raise the temperature of its heat-source.
I assume you are referring to the second law of thermodynamics? The greenhouse effect doesn't violate the second law. The net heat flow is still surface>atmosphere>space. The fact that infrared-absorbing gasses reflect some of this heat back to the surface would not cause the surface to "heat up" in the absence of external solar radiation. The net effect is to slow down the rate of energy emission from the surface out into space. Net heat flows from hot to cold in every step.
I can't help but chuckle to myself every time I see the phrase "medical ethics" or "bioethics". The millions of physician assisted homicides of unborn children are totally fine -- in fact, it would be unethical to withhold them -- but it is absolutely verboten to participate in the execution of convicted murderers.
I flat out do not trust them. The "medical ethics community" will complain that lethal injection procedures are potentially faulty, but they never come up with alternatives. There is absolutely no reason why it is possible to perform painless heart surgery but not painless execution. They are either lying, or they are perpetuating the unnecessary pain of inmates for political gain. I will not defer to the ethical judgements of these people.
More options
Context Copy link