VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
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User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
dumbest possible species capable of building an industrial civilisation.
Is there any good theory basis for this claim? It seems to me just as likely that "intelligence" is more like large-scale Bayesian inference, and that for a given quantity of sensory input the possible predictive performance is quite bounded, and potentially even grows logarithmically such that billions of times more input data may only marginally improve the output.
But I will admit I'm somewhat spit balling here and not familiar with the existing literature.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
I think most would agree with this choice put in front of them, but the faith in the public health system generally is low enough that it might poll surprisingly poorly, especially if stories of (pro-choice) doctors handing out "totes serious health complications" notes for late-term abortions like prescriptions for emotional support animals. Witness the slippery slope that euthanasia in Canada has wrought.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
As far as I can tell, she inherited the debate agreement from the Biden campaign, and would look weak backing out of the already-reduced debate schedule (and rules!) he had committed to. I believe the last few cycles have had three debates, all after the conventions.
I think there are rumors they tried to get the rules modified (unmuting mics), but I don't think they changed them. IMO if Harris were a strong candidate, they'd be trying to schedule another one or two, but I haven't heard any such rumors.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
I seem to recall reading that US and South Korean border guards are selected to be particularly tall specifically for, er, diplomatic reasons. But I don't have a citation on-hand.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
If you never have anything concrete and immediate to stress about (eg, periods of food scarcity), then your “stressful event” hedonistat doesn’t have a clear signal, and ends up calibrating in a more stochastic way to regard commonplace stimuli (eg someone being rude to you at the coffeeshop) as threatening.
I will observe that a number of successful youth development/leadership programs focus on (mostly-)safe, controlled "stressful events". Thinking of things like NOLS, JROTC, and various sporting and scouting-like organizations. It's usually pitched as building confidence, but dropping kids into the wilderness and showing them how to survive (and even thrive) in unpleasant or even hazardous conditions seems, from this angle, to be deliberately aimed to calibrate this hedonistat. I've been through things like this, and while it's not a controlled experiment, it didn't seem like it was Earth-changing at the time, I've come to appreciate those experiences more as I've gotten older.
If I were looking at data to reduce confounding with heredity, that might be a place to start.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
I think it's an interesting, if somewhat abstract question. As a counterpoint, Maslow's hierarchy doesn't include "being superior to others", and plenty of religions try to challenge a relative notion of status: "the last shall be first", or the notion of kharma.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
The Roman emporer is poor in terms of what stuff he can access, but he is famous and powerful and has many slaves and hangers-on.
It sometimes crosses my mind that these are very different measures of wealth that people probably use interchangeably. The wealth of "other people's time" is actually zero-sum: the guy at the bottom of the totem pole will never get anyone's time. You might think robotics and computers could fix this, but my dishwasher saves countless person-hours and hasn't given me any (well, at least much) social status.
To some extent, it might make sense to consciously get people to adopt non-zero-sum measures for status. Not sure how practical that is, though.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Yes, actually? The First Amendment is often seen to cut both ways: it prevents the establishment of religion, but also prohibits enforcing secularism on the public.
It was broadly seen to include religious exemptions to generally applicable laws until Employment Division v. Smith in 1990, at which point Congress passed the RFRA near-unanimously, saying "actually, we meant to apply strict scrutiny to laws burdening the practice of religion". At its core, allowing Native Americans to use peyote for their religion, or the Amish to opt out of Social Security (some groups even object to the assignment of SSNs to people!), or Sikh soldiers to grow beards.
In practice, some of the Internet atheism crowd chafe at Christians taking advantage of the RFRA, but I'd say it's general use cases are fairly popular. But it also swings close to self-contradiction in legal arguments, like Trinity Lutheran: the state can't prevent churches from applying to generally available playground improvement funding.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Have life expectancies really improved much, if at all, since 2000? I see headlines suggesting that they've actually regressed in the US fairly often, largely due to obesity more than countering anti-smoking efforts and such.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
This gives me a hilarious mental image of center-right college students ironically donning Che-style shirts featuring Churchill, FDR, or Eisenhower. Maybe even Patton as an edgy choice.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Not discounting the first two, but I think there has been an interesting swing in voter opinion. I follow a number of local subreddits, and one recently had a controversial picture of a shiny new bus stop that had no shade and only a bench that could only be leaned on. There were upvoted comments about how this homeless-hostile architecture, but also upvoted comments about how functionally encouraging encampments at public transit stops is, practically, hostile to working-class transit users and the environmental cause of public transit more generally by encouraging those with means to just drive. Definitely a vibe shift since 2020.
There are probably some interesting parallels to consider in adjacent issues: "it's compassionate, and basically free to you so why do you care?" seems to slowly be losing ground to "it's obviously not free, and I'm not even sure it's actually compassionate" more broadly on several fronts, but it's not clear to me where that will stabilize in the short and long term.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Arabist / orientalist sympathies were common in the subset of the British upper class that managed a lot of the foreign/imperial office
I would be curious to know more. It's hardly a True History, but what I know of T. E. Lawrence is, albeit a decade or two earlier, a story of seeming indifference to Arab priorities and nationalism. Maybe sympathies changed in the interbellum period, but Sykes-Picot wasn't done for the benefit of their Arab WWI allies that fought the Ottomans.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
At the rate things are going, in 5 to 10 years tops.
Which is conveniently around when the last living memories of the war will be completely gone. At that point I've observed that historians are wont to jump in with revisionist takes. Not that they're always wrong: sometimes the living histories are corrupted by a sense of honor and flawed memories. But it often leads to "maybe the baddies weren't completely bad" takes.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
the model of the residential university would either go away or change a LOT.
Not the most familiar with it, but I seem to recall someone describing to me that BYU is particularly supportive of students having families. I don't remember the details there, though.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
At least where I live, sidewalks are designed to move people at a walking pace. Even running is sometimes a bit hard! They have sharp corners, frequent low hanging branches, sometimes steps, and nobody bothers to fix discontinuities of a few inches. It works on a bike if you're going real slowly, but part of the general complaint here is that "bike speed" is pretty varied between kids with training wheels and spandex-clad roadies that are closer to car speeds.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
I chose The Queen as the example because I wasn't really sure if Charles has acquired the same "beloved, apolitical voice of patriotic respect" that she had yet. But I'd be curious to hear from any of his subjects that have an opinion on that.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
I don't always find myself agreeing with the most radical egalitarian types, but I can at least accept their viewpoints. We've largely broadened the definition of "woman" to include anything a man can do (specific corner cases, maybe not). But they weren't really successful, as far as I can tell, at broadening the definition of "men". We haven't really increased the acceptance of men in caregiving roles, or even wearing traditionally women's attire -- the reverse pant suit, as it were.
I'm not planning to do it myself, but "I'm not a trans woman, I'm a man wearing a perfectly egalitarian dress. Don't assume my gender. " would at least be an interesting wrench to throw into the debate.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
On one hand, I appreciate the decorum of not politicizing national cemeteries. On the other, I appreciate your Constitutional argument, and it seems like we live in a time in which everything ("the personal," as the kids say) is political. Most wouldn't object to the President attending a ceremony at Arlington and giving a speech (indeed, this seems like a pretty regular occurrence), and the Right seems to have dug up campaign ads he's used in the past featuring national cemeteries. If we're not careful, the rule will quickly spiral in practice into "the President's political opponents are not allowed to attend ceremonies on public grounds," which feels very autocratic.
In practice, I don't really come off liking either side here: Trump seems to be pulling a political stunt on hallowed ground. On the other, Biden seems unbothered to attend to the families of soldiers sent to their deaths on his orders three years ago. I haven't read Trump's remarks, so it's possible the only direct politicizing was implicitly by Biden's absence, although from what I know of the man that seems unlikely.
Honestly, I am, for once, appreciating that other countries like the UK have a (mostly) non-political head of state (The Queen) that can attend to such things.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Like the social roles associated with women that aren’t on some level arbitrary are the ones a male-sexed person can’t perform anyways.
It's worth noting that there isn't broad agreement about what these differences in gender roles are. As far as I can tell, the entire war between trans activists and radical feminists happened because a specific sect of feminism denies that there is (or ought to be, at least) a difference between those gender roles. If women can be, say, firemenfighters, there isn't a distinct "men" gender role to mismatch with your mechanical parts, and so from their perspective the entire idea is nonsensical.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Somewhat related: I know a few couples for whom legal divorce and living together filing separate taxes would be a decent federal income tax break (this can be the case for dual-moderate-income families). But I know nobody who has actually done this, even if it has come up in conversation, and even if only on paper and remaining "married" in a common-law and spiritual sense.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
It's pretty apparent even in English: the retcon split the adjectives male and female as "sex" from the nouns man and woman as "gender". There isn't really a way to describe a "gendered" person with a specific job -- "woman doctor" doesn't roll off the tongue.
I suppose this is excluding grammatically gendered nouns like actress or aviatrix that are becoming increasingly archaic at this point, although that may be the result of the proto-wokeness of last century.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
I saw one of those set out with bulk trash pickup a few months ago. Wasn't sure if it was someone moving or a legitimate vibe shift, but it was memorable.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
The taxes, are different, although the people that make up corporations are still responsible for their own taxes and serving in the military. The Defense Production Act allows the President to require businesses to accept and prioritize contracts for "critical and strategic" goods, which is at least related.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2yr ago
Organizations often have privileges beyond those granted to individual members.
Could you elaborate on what these privileges are? Because the obvious ones that come to mind are limited liability, which has some limitations and regulation regarding group formation, and tax advantages for nonprofits, which come with restrictions on governance, actions, and even speech -- 501(c)(3) organizations are largely prohibited from political action in favor of candidates.
Because "the combined group has more resources" is true, but seems pro-egalitarian: pooling resources allows larger expenditures (TV ads! Blimps!) that would only otherwise be accessible to the Musks and Bezoses of the world.
I will admit that the emergence of AI may finally give some interesting answers and maybe closure to philosophical questions about how introspective and abstract philosophy and mathematics are. As much as (some) math claims to be proof pulled from the ontological ether, can the concept of, say, prime numbers be explained to an intelligence with no real-world sensory inputs? Does the notion of counting make sense in an absence of things to count?
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