Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
10mo ago
No? I guess you could say they were “faked” in the sense that all social science experiments are “faked”.
What I have seen are allegations that the experiments were unethical, usually framed in a way that suggests the results cannot be trusted (the suggestion is transparently bullshit. Anyone with the slightest understanding of the scientific method knows that informed consent forms make experiments less reliable). You may have been misled by one of them.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Yud should stop trying to convince the everyman. I’m not saying that no one should do that, just that Yud specifically should not bother with it. It’s not good for his mental health or morale to be dealing with people this dumb. It clearly disturbs him on an emotional level.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
New Coke was legitimately a worse product. No one would have known or cared about Dylan Mulvaney's Bud Light deal if it wasn't for social media outrage. It wouldn't have affected the product at all.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
2rafa also isn't American, so she already can't vote in the elections that matter.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Any specific age of consent policy is going to entail some degree of legal absurdity, but you have to draw a line somewhere or else you’ll get defendants arguing in front of a jury that that 8-year-old girl was totally into it.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I don't see much input from the EA/rat circles into the scam.
You would be wrong. Here is Caroline explaining her trading philosophy literally replying to Scott Alexander.
The money quote: "Those people are lame and not EAs; this blog endorses double or nothing coin flips and high leverage". That's the smoking gun
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Situations like the state of Texas trying to expand I-35 through downtown Austin that the city generally opposes.
Mind-boggling. It’s as if they want Austin to suck as much as possible. Like the suck is part of the charm.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
"Super-smallpox" is a metaphor. There's no reason an engineered pathogen needs to bear an apparent similarity to any known pathogen.
An AI that's solved protein-folding can make its own custom restriction enzymes and ligases with different nucleotide substrates than are currently known (good luck predicting the substrate from the amino acid sequence without the AI's help). The final DNA sequence need not be obvious from the fragments sent to the lab for first synthesis.
Maybe the virus looks like it isn't replication-competent? Maybe they even run tests on an immortal cell-line in a petri dish. Perfectly safe right? Uh-oh, turns out it was specifically designed to not replicate in the exact cell-line used for testing. Whoops.
This is what Eliezer means by "security mindset". The above safeguards are the equivalent of computer security via increasingly large passwords. It is predictable that they will fail, even if you can't see the exact failure scenario.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
More concerned. The schizo who tries to murder politicians could potentially be used as a weapon by malicious interests in a way the subway bum can't
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
Is it instability if Israel just wins? Do any Iranian officials really want to spearhead a new anti-Israel campaign? Sounds like a death wish.
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
That specific scenario may or may not be plausible. I don’t know how the federal government’s payroll software works, but that is the level that these things need to be analyzed on if you want a clear or definitive answer.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I love this subthread because it shows how absurd it is to read the New Testament as a consistent (much less inerrant) theological tome. Romans isn't "the gospel according to Paul", it's a pledge drive. He is asking for money, both for himself, and the Jewish Christians in Judea.
I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain, and to be helped on my journey there by you, once I have enjoyed your company for a while. At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem bringing aid to the saints. For Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to make some contribution for the poor among the saints at Jerusalem. For they were pleased to do it, and indeed they owe it to them. For if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material blessings. When therefore I have completed this and have delivered to them what has been collected, I will leave for Spain by way of you. I know that when I come to you I will come in the fullness of the blessing of Christ.
I appeal to you, brothers, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to strive together with me in your prayers to God on my behalf, that I may be delivered from the unbelievers in Judea, and that my service for Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints, so that by God's will I may come to you with joy and be refreshed in your company. May the God of peace be with you all. Amen.
Once you view Romans in this light, all the little oddities about Israel start to make sense. Paul wasn't particularly popular with Jewish Christians at the time. He was trying to regain his street cred.
Quantumfreakonomics
5mo ago
Speaking of blurry boundaries, Nonlinear almost certainly violated either federal tax law or minimum wage laws, and potentially immigration law too.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Hearsay is the wrong term, but there are hard-coded exceptions to evidence rules which only apply to sexual assault and not to other crimes.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
like a woman I know who talked about the need to ban gas stoves for the environment while a handyman was installing her new 50kBTU outdoor propane patio heater which feeds from the same tank as her removed gas stove.
Some people are so lacking in understanding that they don't even know when they're using the wrong units.
Quantumfreakonomics
10mo ago
Wikipedia claims that; the opinion of the court claims Lemon had already been effectively set aside.
Yeah, by previous Roberts court opinions like American Legion v. American Humanist Association
SFFA overturned neither Bakke (which was a mess of a set of opinions, and in fact the ruling was in favor of Bakke) nor even the later Grutter which endorsed Powell's opinion in Bakke. The ruling was that Harvard and UNCs programs were impermissible under Grutter.
If your take is, "actually affirmative action has been illegal the whole time," I guess you might be right, but that's kind of missing the point.
I only wish it overturned US v. Miller.
It did. The two opinions are fundamentally irreconcilable. Nobody knows how much of the NFA is constitutional at the moment.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Do they literally do nothing? Why do they get welfare? Surely they would be okay working in ultra-orthodox kosher food factories or something?
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Do you mean this in the sense of, “there is no possible DNA sequence A, protein B, and protein C which, when mixed together in a beaker, produces a virus or proto-virus which would destroy human civilization”? Because I’m pretty sure that’s wrong. Finding that three-element set is very much a “humans just haven’t figured out the optimization code yet” problem.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Possibly, but possibly not. I can easily imagine a world where everyone agrees that there need to be more children being born, but nobody wants to have children themselves. In such a scenario, the pro birth-control coalition is women 15-35 and the dudes that are fucking them, and the anti birth-control coalition is everyone else. You should be able to tell who wins politically in that situation.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
This assumes that low-income bank accounts are stable on the timescale in which rebates would be distributed.
It doesn't matter if they'll get the 30% back at the end of the month. Groceries cost 30% more.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
There's no reason even why a preference ordering has to exist. Almost any preference pair you can think about (e.g. choclate vs. strawberry icecream) is radically contextual.
The utility function over states of the world takes into account context. If you have 2 ice cream flavors (C and S) and 2 contexts (context A and context B) it is possible to have
V(C, context A) > V(S, context A)
and
V(C, context B) < V(S, context B)
both be true at the same time without breaking coherence.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
My guess? Better air defense. I suspect that Chinese missile installations are still susceptible to a first strike by air-launched standoff-munitions. Also the risk of nuclear escalation.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
It might be difficult to find an individual lab to synthesize the whole virus from scratch. You could do it by coming up with a 2-component capsid which spontaneously assembles in aqueous solution at a particular pH, getting two individual shipments of the two capsid proteins, getting a third shipment containing the viral genome, then mixing them together and adjusting the pH.* You could bribe, brainwash, or trick an undergrad to do this part.
Why do you assume the lab would synthesize any arbitrary protein? Surely they would want some confidence they're not building a dangerous supervirus?
Sequences are blacklisted, not whitelisted. The whole point of research is that you don't know exactly what the proteins are going to do yet. It would not be hard for the AI to come up with sequences that look benign at first glance. If need-be, yes, a convincing doc could be submitted. GPT-4 could probably do that part today.
I assume you'll have a clever solution for 4.
I admit I'm a bit confused here. Do you need an explanation for how we get from "supervirus in a tube" to "everyone dies"? Imagine Covid but with a 3-month incubation period and a 100% fatality rate. Convince an undergrad to pour it over his face or something. Tell him its the Fountain of Youth.
Ordinarily I wouldn't post personal Reddit drama here, but the thread is slow and I'm mad.
Here is a post that I saw on /r/baseball:
Anthony Bass promoting anti-LGBTQ propaganda on his Instagram
You probably noticed that the thread is locked with a moderator message: "The trolls are flooding in, and the conversation has run its course at this point. Friendly reminder to love your neighbor, and that it's not intolerant to oppose bigotry. Everyone have a nice holiday Monday!"
This message was posted only a few minutes after I was permanantly banned from /r/baseball for comments in that very thread! In fact, I believe they are referring to me as one of the "trolls flooding in". Lets take a look under the hood to see what counts as perma-ban and threadlock-worthy comments.
First, the actual article in question. Anthony Bass is a pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays. He posted an Instagram story saying Christians should boycott Target and Bud Light. That's it. That's the "anti-LGBTQ propaganda". I posted a top-level comment in the thread sarcastically making this point.
Is this a high-effort comment? No, but if you are familiar with the sports subs at all then you know that this type of low-effort sarcasm is all over the place. That's the posting culture there. I also got involved in another comment thread.
JaysRaineman73 -18 points 2 hours ago: "Who the fuck cares. So tired of this shit. I only care about how he plays on the field. If he’s not abusing or hurting anyone, it’s irrelevant."
realparkingbrake 11 points 2 hours ago: "On what planet does denying people the same rights as everyone else not qualify as abusing or hurting them?"
QuantumFreakonomics -4 points 2 hours ago: "What rights do they not have? Name them? How is he hurting anyone? How does asking people to not purchase products from a specific mega-corp hurt anyone? Am I hurting people every time I go to Walmart and not Target? Please, I’m begging you. Actually think about the things you are saying. Don’t just parrot the same irrelevant lines you’ve seen other people use."
PuppyPunter21 4 points an hour ago: "Well, if any players live in Florida, they have recently passed quite a few laws targeted against them. The continued promotion of these types of boycotts encites more hate. Covid caused more hate towards Asians, Kayne West promoted more antisemitism. Ignoring it isn't a solution."
QuantumFreakonomics 3 points an hour ago: " 'Well, if any players live in Florida, they have recently passed quite a few laws targeted against them.' What rights did these laws take away? The right to have teachers come out in front of their students? I had never heard of that "right" before a few years ago. 'The continued promotion of these types of boycotts encites more hate. Covid caused more hate towards Asians' Is your position that someone shouldn't be allowed to talk about an issue if it could possibly cause someone else to hate another group? I don't see how that is a workable position at all. Should we not have instituted Covid restrictions or even complained about covid in order to prevent Asian hate? 'Ignoring it isn't a solution.' Why not? People speaking their mind on public issues is the bedrock of Democracy. Some of those people are going to say things you don't like. A democracy where certain issues are not free to be discussed is not much of a democracy at all.
This was the extent of my participation in the thread. I did not expect my comments to be particularly well-received by the Reddit population, but I felt that I pointed out enough legitimate issues that I would be safe from accusations of trolling. I was wrong.
Here is the modmail message I received informing me of my permanent ban, along with the brief conversation we had before they muted me with their absolute power.1 For reference, here are the /r/baseball rules. Would an honest reading of these rules give you any reason at all to think that anything I posted would not be allowed, much less permaban worthy? You would have to be steeped in internet leftist culture to understand that, "Trolling, threatening, harassing, or inciting violence towards individuals or groups will not be tolerated. Racist, sexist, or otherwise intolerant language in both comments and submissions will be removed." means that pointed questions against the progressive consensus will get you tossed out.
I understand why so many subreddits are complete circlejerks now. It's not about echo-chambers and voting dynamics. They literally just banned everyone who disagreed.
1. Here is the source they cited for their "62%" figure. I'll let you decide for yourself whether this poll is applicable
I do think there's a pretty big gap in sexual maturity between 14 and 15-16. I feel no guilt for going "nice" whenever I see a hot teacher get fired for having sex with a male student 15 or older, but when he's 13 or 14 that seems fucked up.
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