ThenElection
No bio...
User ID: 622
ThenElection
11mo ago
Aks predates ask; it's the form preferred by Chaucer and the author of Beowulf. Ask is a modern degeneration enforced by London statists in their government building exercise. An unsavory task (or, more appropriately, tax).
ThenElection
1yr ago
Going with the spousal example, it's not equally optimal for both to choose red and both to choose blue. Both choosing blue is superior to both choosing red, because the very act of both choosing blue is indicative of stronger bonds and itself reenforces them.
ThenElection
2yr ago
Did I call him a pedophile? Just pointed out that he had an age-inappropriate relationship with a teenager, which is true.
The broader point is that sexual peccadilloes don't matter one way or another in terms of the value of someone's work, and (secondarily) cultural context matters. In the case of Foucault etc, they lived in a milieu where society hadn't yet decided that having sex with a teenager who was not yet of age was the Worst Thing Ever.
ThenElection
2yr ago
why the hell do we subsidize incompetent mothers one penny
Subsidize is doing a bit of work, here; as far as child support goes, it's a choice of how we split what's currently the man's contribution. Regardless of anyone's level of sympathy for irresponsible mothers, there's no reason that they should get less sympathy than irresponsible fathers. And even if we did want to subsidize irresponsible fathers compared to the status quo, allowing financial abortions would unleash a dynamic that results in substantially greater financial subsidization of children by taxpayers.
And hypothetically, at least, all this money is going to the upkeep of the child. If the money not actually ending up benefitting the child is the concern, you'd get a lot more buy in (from me, at least) with ideas on how to make sure a greater proportion of child support goes to benefit the intended beneficiary.
ThenElection
2yr ago
The reduced effectiveness against Omicron appears to be due to the virus being better at evading the immune system not due to a mismatch between the vaccine and the virus. Although that's difficult to tell because it's hard to find an entirely immune naive individual to expose to Omicron (either the actual virus or a vaccine).
One approach: why not engineer a new virus that the vaccine doesn't protect against and that mimics Omicron's ability to evade the immune system? It could give us deep insights into future pandemics.
ThenElection
11mo ago
She is also a candidate able to campaign without stepping on her own feet (too much). If she's asked about abortion, she knows and is able to segue into Trump wanting raped 12 year olds to die giving birth. And, furthermore, she knows not to divert the question to the scourge of illegal immigrants rapists, which is... Not a topic Democrats should be focusing on.
ThenElection
2yr ago
I agree that the US is uniquely well positioned, though I think that high quality immigrants are going to be harder to come by, particularly in the quantity needed to reverse the costs of an aging population. My hope is that we try to reverse the culture of anti-fertility starting now and that technology will catch up in the next decade or so to help with the dysgenic effects.
ThenElection
2yr ago
That includes people who are on Social Security. If you scope it to Millenials and younger, I think the average is around 10.
ThenElection
8mo ago
She's swallowed more bitter things on her path to power.
ThenElection
11mo ago
No. I'm saying that it's perfectly fine for the government to ban abortion or not and to require financial support from parents or not, and it should do whatever it can in that space of policies to limit the consequences of unintended pregnancy from affecting me.
In 10 years, suppose proper SAE (which descriptively is the prestige dialect used by the American college educated class) has managed to extirpate archaic forms like "mom" and "mother" in favor of the correct "birthing person." They remain in use among some holdouts insisting on speaking CAVE (conservative American vernacular English), but state, society, and institutions all vigorously police its use and shut out CAVE people from positions of power. What's a prescriptivist to do, once that has become the prestige dialect? Shrug their shoulders and get on with the times?
ThenElection
11mo ago
Is the old man next to her her father?
Those latter groups can easily be ignored and shuffled off to other physical areas for other people to deal with, on a day to day basis. Sexless men seem to sprout up everywhere and are encountered everywhere on the Internet, so they're harder to avoid and need a more forceful hand.
ETA: tongue in cheek
ThenElection
1yr ago
Bay Area housing is expensive because its workers tend to be far more economically productive than most areas in the US.
Reason not to be reactionary: it allows me to live in the Bay Area, with the alternative being stuck in the same shithole podunk town where I grew up and the only nightlife after 9PM is hanging out at the local Walmart.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Depending on your threat model, it's pointless anyway. Anything that stays up on the Motte for more than an hour is being stored somewhere, and if you've left a couple hundred comments, stylometry can identify you. Editing comments after the fact is only useful if your threat model is a weirdo who browses here regularly deciding to track you down for whatever reason.
Do you want children? I was in a similar position as you and found my wife in my 30s and it's working out pretty great, but parenthood was never a major goal of mine. The thought of raising a child in my forties is absolutely exhausting: you have time, and biologically your sperm will be fine for a long while, but I do strongly suggest having kids sooner rather than later if it's a goal. You won't have issues finding a partner who wants and is capable of having kids when you're 40, but your energy levels will have dropped precipitously.
Where do you live? If it's a tech-heavy West Coast city, I do think moving to NYC is a pretty good piece of advice, something that I wish I'd done. Plenty of jobs there, and the ratio is significantly better by all accounts. And there's more variation among the men there: in your niche, you're less likely to be drowned out by other men for women who are into that niche. I'd recommend against a developing country move: you'll have your pick of partners, but the cultural and gender expectation gaps are huge.
My Linguistics 101 take on it (I hate categorically dismissing a paper):
It's an okay study in itself; they give subjects a stick figure drawing, and say
“Please use the text boxes below to describe in 3 sentences what the person in the image is doing. Please be as specific as possible and provide as much detail as you can. In your description of this individual, it is important that you use the pronouns ‘[he/she/they]’ and ‘[his/her/their].’ This will help to standardize the accounts provided by all participants in this survey, which will make them easier to interpret.”
with each individual receiving a version with one of masculine/female/neutral pronouns (except in Swedish, with they/their being a new pronoun recently introduced by the government).
They then poll subjects on several political topics, and those primed with different pronouns show meaningfully different results. My main complaint here is around social desirability bias, as the prompt makes it pretty obvious the object of study here. They attempt to rule it out by measuring reaction times, but I don't find that particularly compelling. It's also weird that the results they find go beyond salience (e.g. increased recall of female politicians) to a wide range of issues ("profemale preferences"), as there's no suggested short-term mechanism that would do this. I don't think that compelled use of pronouns would make people immediately switch their votes from Trump to Clinton or move from opposition to support of gay marriage and abortion, and they only discuss salience because that's the only part they have a plausible mechanism for. The exceptionally broad result suggests they're not measuring what they think they're measuring, and social desirability fits better than increased adherence to progressive principles.
The broader issue is what you point out: who knows if the study will replicate. If a hundred grad students attempt to, we'll get five papers saying it does replicate, none saying it doesn't, and a thousand articles in the popular media saying it does. Other things (like the known issues with Sapir-Whorf-style linguistic determinism that should make us skeptical of the result) will never be mentioned as important context for the results.
That's the sleight of hand I mentioned: because qualia are so mysterious, it's a leap to assume that RL algorithms that maximize reward correspond to any particular qualia.
On the other hand, suffering is conditioned on some physical substrate, and something like "what human brains do" seems a more plausible candidate for how qualia arise than anything else I've seen. People with dopamine issues (e.g. severe Parkinson's, drug withdrawal) often report anhedonia.
That heavy philosophical machinery is the trillion dollar question that is beyond me (or anyone else that I'm aware of).
this leads you to the suspicious conclusion that the thousands of simple RL models people train for e.g. homework are also experiencing immense sufferring
Maybe they are? I don't believe this, but I don't see how we can simply dismiss it out of hand from an argument of sheer disbelief (which seems just as premature to me as saying it's a fact). Agnosticism seems to be the only approach here.
ThenElection
3mo ago
The fish tank was tucked away in a small room, which was hidden behind some furniture or something.
ThenElection
5mo ago
Code is a nearly solved problem, and I regularly see the leading models create correct output on the first try for things that haven't existed before, so long as you give them a reasonable spec.
That "reasonable spec" bit is a pretty big caveat, but the coding portion can be fully automated even today.
Welfare/jobs. I can certainly imagine a set of institutional and political incentives of politicians and military bureaucrats that would result in billions of dollars being spent on something pointless. And people making spending decisions might not even know about the program. (Not making the claim that that's what's happening here.)
There's also a keeping up appearances factor, though I suspect usually nations would want to publicize the existence of an overwhelmingly dominant weapon.
ThenElection
9mo ago
On balance, I think he likely did it. But Cole's specificity raises some skepticism of his testimony for me. Would a murderer actually mention those details?
Not impossible, and I don't have a strong mental model of jailhouse confessions and what motivates them. But I can equally see the police thinking "this guy obviously did it, so we should intentionally leak these details to Cole to make sure we get him."
ThenElection
9mo ago
For California in particular, I think more electable Republicans. Less crazy Democrats would be good and probably closer to my actual policy preferences, but having a single party system itself seems to lend itself to bad governance (at least in the context of American politics). Moderates and extremists will have different policies and spar with each other, but they close ranks when there is corruption or something that could affect the reputation of the party as a whole.
ThenElection
10mo ago
Looking through her Tweets, I'm thinking she's in on it (or at least just farming engagement). Says she isn't into politics, most political thing said being that she stands with Israel, references God a fair amount, seems to like Elon.
It seems she's some kind of digital content marketer/entrepreneur.
If the choice is between the father financing her unilateral choices with 18 years of child support and me and you financing her unilateral choices... I say the father.
Legal paternity surrender would increase the number of abortions (great!), but also increase the cost to the taxpayer (bad!) There's no principled reason either that someone should be able to get an abortion or that someone should be free from financial obligations: the government should just do whatever makes for a better society.
More options
Context Copy link