Quantumfreakonomics
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Quantumfreakonomics
13hr ago
This is the same stuff people were saying about Covid well into March 2020
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
I feel like I've read similar things 5 times in the past few weeks.
Most of the fake scoops have been from Barak Ravid of Axios. He is Israeli so one would expect his "scoops" to be for the purpose of advancing Israel's interests, but from my POV it looks like he's the Trump administration's mouthpiece for market manipulation leaks.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
The first policy position you see on his website is "Medicare for All". I'm not sure if that plus Palestine makes him part of the Squad
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
Lets talk about the Senate Democratic Primaries.
Maine
Graham Platener, aka nazi tattoo guy, aka "disabled" veteran oyster man, is the presumptive Democratic nominee in Maine after 78-year-old former governer Janet Mills dropped out. Platner will be running against the incumbant moderate Republican Susan Collins in the general.
Susan Collins has won five straight terms in Maine, but she is the underdog in the upcoming election due to the expected blue wave.
The Maine election is interesting because the conventional wisdom is that Democrats need to run an unusually moderate candidate to win, and Platner shows that we don't have a good conception of what "moderate" even means. On policy positions Platner is leftist, but culturally he has the effect of a rural white tough-guy (as one might have expected from the Nazi tattoo). Expect the results of this one to be poured-over for years in candidate selection debates.
Michigan
The Michigan Democratic primary is complicated by having three candidates instead of two. Haley Stevens, Mallory McMorrow, and Abdul El-Sayed all have viable campaigns. Looking in from the outside, the big issue in the race is Israel.
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Haley Stevens is "establishment" in the machine sense. She is openly pro-Israel. Not much grassroots support. I expect her to lose barring shenanigans.
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Mallory McMorrow is the traditional liberal PMC candidate. Very white woman coded. Backed by literal Anthropic employees. Her public position is skeptical of certain aspects of the US-Israel relationship, but it is clear that she doesn't have deep convictions on the issue.
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Abdul El-Sayed is the leftist anti-Israel candidate. As his name suggests, he is an Arab Muslim. He is best known at this point for campaigning with leftist streamer Hasan Piker.
The attempts to cancel El-Sayed for his Israel position and Hasan connections seem to have backfired, as he has catapulted into the lead on Polymarket. What I think is happening here is that Israel is by default a low-salience issue, but if Israel is made into an issue by e.g. a US-involved war in the Middle East or constant media coverage of campaign tactics, then the anti-Israel faction of the Democratic party will simply win because they have an overwhelming numerical advantage among the Democrat base.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
Having heard nothing about this controversy before this thread other than that it had something to do with a video game, I simply could not believe the cover art was real. I still kinda don’t.
You buried the lede. They made the little girl look like an age 9 version of the hottest chick in the college sorority, complete with makeup, bedroom eyes, and long flowing hair.
Spec Ops: The Line was controversial for intentionally making the player feel like a war criminal. Is part of the artistic vision of Pragmata to make the player feel like a pedophile?
I appreciate the resistance to ideological uglification in games, but that doesn’t mean we need to make preteen girls look like Kate Upton.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
(This is for Variant 1:) The number that Alice should put into the computer is not her credence that in her side of the experiment, right now, the coin came up tails. Alice should put p, the weight of the coin, into the computer. All of the weird anthropic probability shifting only occurs because Alice doesn't know what day it is. Because of the way the computer works, it will only transmit the message to Bob if it is Monday. This is why the probability that Alice should put into the computer is the naive weight of the coin, and not the anthropically shifted probability that she should bet herself.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
I guess if you want to get metaphysical about the idea of probability and statistics at all then you can dismiss the problem as underspecified, but you'd have to apply the same radical skepticism to coin flip odds, dice rolls, and all other stochastic phenomena. I mean, can you really say that a coin has a 50% chance of coming up heads? Any given coin flip is a completely determanistic process, only capable of coming up heads, or only capable of coming up tails. Probability is just a shorthand we use to make sense of pseudorandomness beyond our control or comprehension.
When one uses the same tools of probability and statistics that we use to analyze every other stochastic phenomenon to analyze the Sleeping Beauty problem, one finds that there are three equally likely states that are indestinguishable from Beauty's point of view. Two of them correspond to tails, and the other one corresponds to heads. The math is simple.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
There were localized spikes to that level, but that’s different from a a global continuous price that high.
There are military options available to force the strait open if it comes to that. They won’t be easy or politically friendly to Trump, but they are possible.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
That’s not really what I was getting at. Public display of religious attitudes isn’t forbidden in Western culture, but different neighborhoods having completely different rules kind of is.
It’s becoming more common as our culture becomes less Western, but that’s the point
No, it is also needed for naval reactors. They have to use highly enriched uranium in order to be small enough to fit on a boat.
Sort of absurd to think about, but it sure would be a pain in the ass if the US navy had to worry about fast attack submarines sneaking up on their carrier groups.
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