Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
I guess short-term it's the right strategy, but it makes pro-gun people sound like lunatics when they deny that getting rid of the guns would reduce murder. It's not quite as bad as the people who insist that those racial crime statistics don't mean what you think they mean, but it's the same kind of politically-convenient reality denial. If you don't have an affirmative case for why gun rights are more valuable than X dead kids per year, I hate to tell you, but you're going to lose.
Quantumfreakonomics
9mo ago
No wait, that's a Key and Peele sketch. Here's the real song that's making headlines:
Jason Aldean - Try That In A Small Town (Official Music Video)
The song is about shooting rioters. One can argue about to what extent shooting rioters is actually a good thing, one can argue about to what extent said rioters are "racialized" as African American, but the song is transparently about shooting rioters. Just what exactly is, "Around here, we take care of our own. You cross that line, it won't take long," supposed to mean? Surely it's a metaphor, not a literal line (like say, some train tracks) right?
Needless to say, the video has been pulled from Country Music Television (whatever that means). Seems more like fake backlash than real resistance to me, but I don't know much about country music. Are these guys a big deal?
Also, my God country music is terrible. It's better than rap, but rap hardly counts as music. I'm glad Red America finally has the balls to stick up for itself, but this is not exactly art that's going to mog the cathedral.
Quantumfreakonomics
3mo ago
I realize that many people are in fact loyal to Trump. My point is that this is stupid and counterproductive. If you have a good reason that this is actually smart and productive, I would love to hear it.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
The culture in public schools seems to have changed a lot in the 1-2 decades since I've been there, but surely they still tell kids, "drugs are bad, mkay"? I have a similar reaction to this as I do when people talk about the "suicide epidemic". There is a very simple solution, don't kill yourself.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
To steelman the government and KBJ’s point a bit:
Imagine that shoplifting became memeified. I know that there are niche shoplifting communities in existence right now, but what if they got BIG? What if all the 17-year-old zoomers in your neighborhood were getting pro-shoplifting content shoveled into their feeds? What if the shoplifting epidemic spread beyond isolated city centers and became an existential threat to the whole economy? Nobody can sell anything. Delivery services pick up the slack, but then “porch pirating is shoplifting too,” becomes the meme and everything falls apart.
“Shoplifting is cool,” is protected speech, so is “those big corporations deserve it.” Imagine it’s clear as day that this is a social contagion mediated by online social media, but the tech companies refuse to take moderator action against shoplifting content. Does the government have to send in the troops and declare martial law before it can send a series of strongly worded emails to social media companies asking them to stop the madness?
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
Goddamn, they really mailed fake elector certificates to the Vice President.
Googling this right now. They all have the same format. This is obviously a coordinated conspiracy.
Trump is toast. He should be on his knees begging DeSantis for a pardon in exchange for his endorsement right now. He will be in jail on election day.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
You literally can't get much stricter than Chicago in restricting firearms
Thought experiment: Set aside the 2nd and 4th amendments for a second. Suppose the United Stated banned civilian firearms, all of them. No manufacture, no sales, no ownership. All citizens must surrender their guns to the authorities. Anyone who has ever posted a gun on social media gets their house searched for contraband. Children are taught in school about the importance of turning in their parents if there are guns in the home. What does the murder rate look like in Chicago a year later? How about 10 years later? Surely you concede that there would be less mass shootings in the USA, how would random 20-year-olds be getting access to weapons after a generation of total control?
Quantumfreakonomics
5d 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
3mo ago
he doesn't have the option to defect.
I don't believe this. He is going to have to pardon himself of felony charges anyways. Why not plunder whatever he can for personal gain? What's a few more pardons or a third (or fourth) impeachment to his eternal legacy? He might single-mindedly appoint judges based only on how likely they are to back him up in his legal battles, above all other considerations. Isn't that defecting?
Quantumfreakonomics
7mo ago
Thank you for proving my point. You can take potshots at which specific events happened at which specific locations. You can point out places where the initial investigators were wrong. What I have never seen is an explanation for what happened to all the Jews? Were the pre-war censuses wrong? Were the post-war censuses wrong? Where did they go? Pretty much every Jew can tell you about family members who died in the Holocaust. Are they all wrong?
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo ago
If Trump believed everything he said on that call then he’s legitimately retarded. At one point he says he probably won Georgia by half a million votes. There were less than 5 million votes total. This wasn’t in the fog of war right after the election. The call happened on January 2nd. He was just making shit up.
Quantumfreakonomics
2mo ago
I think Obama's re-election campaign was the turning point.
No, it was pretty clearly the Trump campaign. That was the empirical proof (in their minds) that free speech cannot suffice to ensure the triumph of good over evil. They kept expecting that the negative coverage, universal condemnations, and yes, polite conversations with Trump supporters would work. They didn't.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
@self_made_human made the point downthread that “Yudkowsky's arguments are robust to disruption in the details.” I think this is a good example of that. Caring about simulated copies of yourself is not a load-bearing assumption. The Basilisk could just as easily torture you, yes, you personally, the flesh and blood meatbag.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
A polemic against the hubris of man? A defense of single-family greenspaces? A questioning of the practical expertise and experience of EA staffers? A concrete example of Kaszynskian oversocialization run amok?
Quantumfreakonomics
4mo ago
Have you read the letter? If you take Islam as a given, it is a pretty reasonable argument.
Quantumfreakonomics
7mo ago
…Yes? Perhaps I’d feel different if I actually had a daughter and had watched her grow up, but this doesn’t feel like that big of a dilemma. If you don’t want Elon Musk solving the fertility crisis with your daughter, then you don’t want to win. Your reproductive fitness incentives are aligned with hers.
Now, with my wife/gf? Absolutely not. He can get fucked
Quantumfreakonomics
10mo ago
"It has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticize the decisions with which they disagree as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary. Today, we have concluded that an instrumentality created by Missouri, governed by Missouri, and answerable to Missouri is indeed part of Missouri; that the words “waive or modify” do not mean “completely rewrite”; and that our precedent— old and new—requires that Congress speak clearly before a Department Secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy. We have employed the traditional tools of judicial decisionmaking in doing so. Reasonable minds may disagree with our analysis—in fact, at least three do. See post, p. ___ (KAGAN, J., dissenting). We do not mistake this plainly heartfelt disagreement for disparagement. It is important that the public not be misled either. Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country."
This is some "please clap" shit. Roberts, what the fuck are you doing?
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Does this model explain why his rube-whispering was ineffective prior to 2016, leaving him a joke candidate in the two previous elections where he tried to run?
My pet theory is that Jon Stewart retiring from the Daily Show in 2015 opened the door for Trump to ascend. Without effective, hard-hitting, thoughtful ridicule, Trump was able to surf the wave of sneering contempt all the way to the White House
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
You’re kind of dodging the hypothetical. Petty criminals influenced by social media are destroying society. It’s protected speech so no court orders against the platform are available. How many, “in the department’s opinion, these memes are existentially damaging to the fabric of the national economy,” e-mails is the government allowed to send before it becomes illegal?
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
7mo ago
The difference now is that Musk owns a piece of the media. (((New York and California executives))) can't implement a complete blackout on negative stories anymore. News will leak out through Twitter. People on Twitter will keep pointing out that all the hitpieces are written by people with names like Steve Israel or Yonat Shimron. Americans can simply look around and see that Jews are rich and well-connected. The median American probably doesn't know a single Jew personally. If they do, that Jew is probably richer and higher-status than they are. The disproportionate representation of Jews in positions of power is so stark that denying it without full media/information control will nuke the ADL's credibility.
I think a lot of the latent antisemitism on the right was being masked for most of the last century by the popularity of dispensational theology. Now that dispensationalism is going out of style, and secularization has progressed to the point where even the right is being affected, you are seeing a lot of the antisemitism pop back up.
Quantumfreakonomics
8mo 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
8mo ago
For $30,000-$50,000, your friend can probably become attractive. (Examples 1, 2, 3).
Wow, they have surgery that can fix bad lighting now.
Remember the USS Liberty?
As much Israel discourse as there's been in the last 45 years, you never hear about the time the Israeli air force and navy attacked an American ship in broad daylight and killed 34 Americans, except from the most conspiratorially-minded places like /pol/ (and Brett Favre when he's being trolled by /pol/).
Why? This seems strange. One might think this is because it blends into the background of innumerable incidents that make up the Arab-Israeli conflict, and thus most people simply shrug and accept that, "yeah, shits really fucked over there," and leave it at that, but this involved Americans. You know, the people that matter. There's some dispute about what really happened and whether or not it was deliberate. It's not surprising that this would be controversial; it's surprising that this is not a real issue at all.
My tentative opinion is that it was a deliberate attack. The USS Liberty was a spy ship. It was not supposed to be as close to the coast as it was. Israel didn't want the State Department jeopardizing their OPSEC in the 6-day war, so they made sure the Americans had no eyes on the ground (or the water). It was probably the right decision tbh. US leadership decided that the incident wasn't worth making major foreign policy changes over, and so they went along with the Israeli cover-up.
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