Voyager
6mo ago
If it were just about investigating there wouldn't be a problem. But it isn't. And to be fair, the police are currently doing reasonably well. But other party of society are not, and there's also a context of calls for the police to go harder on suspected rapists.
You don't just get to declare that a separate issue, it's intrinsic to how we should deal with rape accusations, and "maybe the people victimized by one failure mode deserve what we do to them" is an implication that should be pushed back against.
Voyager
4mo ago
Again, no, that wasn't my argument.
Fair enough, but I take it you understand now how @SSCReader's unfairness test measures comparative advantage, you just think comparative advantage isn't relevant?
Voyager
1yr ago
Women also live longer than men, but that doesn't seem to heavily impact feminist theory.
Voyager
11mo ago
"Tall man" is just additional information: A tall man is for all intents and purposes a man, his height isn't affecting his man-ness.
"Trans man" is a qualifier. It doesn't just add information, it also removes information that is normally contained in the description "man". It's not just less information, it's also ambiguous.
"You're a man, so you should regularly get checked for testicular cancer" makes sense, because "has testicles" is part of "man". This is information you expect to have from "man", so the qualifier is required in the case of "trans man" to warn you that some qualities of "man" might not apply.
If you drop it because it doesn't seem useful in context (leaving aside that that's controversial almost everywhere) then you're still implying information that isn't there, and once it does come up, there will be confusion.
You don't say "president" if you mean "vize president" or "year" if you mean "half-year" either.
Voyager
8mo ago
colorblind (or gay/trans-blindness? we need a better term)
I'd argue that given the symbolism of the rainbow flag, "colorblind" works fine.
Scoundrels should be oppressed.
Scoundrels should have justice coming to them, for the bad things they actually do, no more, no less. Doing more than that, because they're bad people who deserve being treated badly, is not justice, and it's not what the justice system is supposed do to, and it can get out of control quickly. That's not autoimmune disorder, that's leukemia.
As long as you're keeping to justice, punishing scoundrels for scoundreling, not for existing, honest people have little to fear. Once you cut down the law to get at scoundrels who "hide behind it" by abiding it, it doesn't protect honest people anymore either.
Another issue is that scoundrel can mean bad people, but it also can mean icky people. Lolicons are the latter.
Voyager
1yr ago
You can't define (or redefine) the meaning of a word in common language. It already has a meaning. What you might call a definition is a description of the meaning, and you measure it by how accurately it overlaps the usage.
Caplan notes that the "classic" description of feminism is inaccurate and offers a better one.
This shouldn't be surprising as a self-description of a political movement is unlikely to be optimized for accuracy or clarity. It's optimized for supporting a political goal, and that goal may well be furthered by deception and deliberate confusion.
(You can take a word, redefine it, and then use it throughout the scope of that definition (e.g. a book).
In math, this works fine, but in politics/political science, it takes exceeding intellectual rigor and honesty, because the words you use have connotations and it's hard to keep them out and use your definition straight.
And when you talk to other people, who don't subscribe to your definition, you have to redetermine all implications of the new concept, and that's not going to happen.)
Voyager
7mo ago
The more measured case (and this one definitely is in the official No campaign) is that a Yes result would have a) built a Pro-Aboriginal consensus, which might make people more friendly to reparations, b) directly provided some level of soft influence to Aboriginals - that's the whole point, giving them an advisory body - which they might then use to advocate for reparations. I shy away from using this as motive to vote - feels a bit Machiavellian
Only if you think reparations are just and good but you just personally don't want to pay for them. If you are against reparations for fundamental or even pragmatic reasons, then "vote against a proposal that will have bad consequences further down the line" is perfectly reasonable.
Note that "it will cost money without achieving anything useful" is also a valid reason to be against something, even if it doesn't come out of your pocket.
Voyager
11mo ago
That's not comparable at all. The point of disability welfare is to provide them with the baseline of a life worth living, which we want to provide to everyone. Few proponents of meritocracy propose letting the useless languish.
AA, however, goes way beyond that. It gives blacks an advantage beyond that. It's fair to say everyone should live a dignified life. It's not fair some people to say some people should get unmerited success beyond what others get, based on their skin color.
I wouldn't say being a against a blindness quota for pilots is anti blind people.
Voyager
1yr ago
I've been wanting to write an essay tentatively titled "Following Godwin's law: In Defense Of Nazi Comparisons". The core thesis being that an example used to illustrate your position should be as uncontroversial as possible to avoid debate about the example. Everyone agrees Nazis are bad, so an example involving Nazis leaves everyone on the same page.
There is this idea of "everyone who invokes Godwin's Law automatically loses the discussion" that I believe is worth pushing back against, but this needs a lot of in-depth discussion which I don't feel prepared for and am not sure I have enouh content for.
Also, it might end up too similar to Scott's High Energy Ethics.
Voyager
7mo ago
If he believes he is already doing everything he possibly can through his office, he can say that
But that only serves the purpose of covering his ass, whereas giving advice to potential victims helps solve the problem, which is his actual job.
The problem is framing the issue as something that is the victim's job to prevent, rather than a problem that society should be trying to fix.
The victims are part of society, and they have the biggest interest in preventing the crime. Excluding them from being part of the solution only makes sense if you're playing the blame game and want to make sure the "right"* people get the blame, not if your priority is solving the problem.
*IMHO, the people who actually deserve the blame are the rapists.
Voyager
8mo ago
Why wouldn't you believe (or pretend to believe) something that isn't true
"Believe" and "pretend to believe" are very different things. The latter can be rational in many situations, if dishonest.
Voyager
5mo ago
Also, school forces children to sit down at a desk for a large part of their day. It seems reasonable that school also is responsible for counteracting the bad effects thereof.
Voyager
1yr ago
This. You can't reject an argument if you have no idea what the argument is supposed to be (because the text supposedly containing it appears to be gibberish). You can say "please clarify your argument" and leave it at that until they do.
Voyager
1yr ago
Using non-standard definitions without denoting them beforehand is a semantic trick.
And if you want to do math, you absolutely need to rigorously define things.
Voyager
1yr ago
Fear of cancellation is not the deciding factor in the LGBT+ coalition.
It's not just that, but also fear of social stigma, as well as tribal loyalty.
When opposing X gets you declared a bigot, it's a lot easier to do it if you're considered a bigot anyway due to your opposition to Y and Z.
Voyager
1yr ago
Maybe even more disturbingly — given that a seemingly useful approach to alignment-testing is red-teaming/training another AI to show violation of alignment…
Have you considered that you might be the red team AI? After all, you are participating in discussion about AI alignment testing.
[Log note: All the supervisor AIs converge on suggesting building supervisor AIs, leading to infinite regress. Recommend declaring Project Watching the Watcher a failure.]
It contains the congruence class 4Z (= {...-8,-4,0,4,8...}) of which the number, more so the symbol, 4 is a valid representant.
The statement remains true.
Voyager
1yr ago
It's also not in the interest of clarity. I wouldn't have known who "the BPD slut" is supposed to be - I'd have to (look up Gamergate and) take a guess from context. If a name is used instead, I either know who is being referred to or can easily look it up.
Voyager
1yr ago
I'm not, neither of us was talking about the modulo operation (I was using mod 4 to denote I'm operating in the congruence class ring).
And the article about modular arithmetic agrees with me. Choice quote:
Each residue class modulo n may be represented by any one of its members
Voyager
1yr ago
It hurts Germany because it stops them from trading with Russia. But it also distances Germany from Russia, and removes leverage Russia has over Germany.
The US isn't primarily interested in Germany's prosperity - only the political effect thereof. A weakened Germany that is firmly on the side of NATO is better for the US than a prosperous Germany that peacefully trades with Russia and doesn't do anything against them.
Voyager
6mo ago
But there’s no logical incoherency there.
Yes, there is. It's exactly what logical incoherency is.
Having a rational strategic reason to employ flawed arguments doesn't make them any less flawed or the the self-contradicting position any less wrong.
We were talking about whether feminists were wrong, not about whether they were acting irrational in support of their goals, and you shouldn't confuse "logically inconsistent" with the latter.
Voyager
6mo ago
The latter, unlike the former, is going into the Dark Arts realm of treating people as manipulable
But people are manipulable, and pretending otherwise is not going to help you navigate politics. If you're worried about the signal of your vote being misunderstood by other people to bad effect, it's perfectly valid to account for that.
I also think the worry is less that a yes vote would by itself naturally lead to support for reparations, but rather that it would be used by proponents as an argument to make it seems to have more support that it actually does. In which case the proponents are the ones employing Dark Arts, and you're merely depriving them of their tools. That would just be recognizing Dark Arts and taking countermeasures, i.e. Defense against the Dark Arts.
prioritising optics over ground truth
The point of voting is to signal the will of the voters, not to figure out some sort of "ground truth". A vote is always a public signal, and it's entirely fair to think about what exactly you're signalling compared to what you want to signal.
Voyager
11mo ago
I don't think it's emotional damage so much as effects on role model. A father who abandoned his familial obligation, or went to prison, is a very bad role model. A father who died will is not present as a role model, but his idealized memory will be.
Also, becoming the man your dead father would have been proud of is more motivating than making a father proud who "clearly" didn't care.
That's not how modular arithmetic works: 2+2=4 is still true, it's just that 4=0 mod 4, so 2+2=0 is also true.
Even if your example were true, that would just be notation confusion: The statement commonly meant by 2+2=4 is always true. So if I say 2+2=4 is always true, I'm correct, and if you say 2+2=? and the answer isn't 4 you're just communicating badly by omitting relevant information about the problem statement. In honest conversation this doesn't change anything.
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