Voyager
2mo ago
No, it doesn't, because my decision doesn't retroactively change what kind of person I am. The causality goes in the other direction.
Basically, depending on what kind of person I am, Omega offers me a different game.
No it doesn't. The answer is the same regardless.
I gave two examples where my strategy of analyzing the causation yields better results than yours. Only in one restricted example they come out the same.
Then you are an irrational person. It's that simple.
It's definitely not as simple as just claiming your interlocutor is irrational without doing any work to establish that.
a⇒b,¬a∴¬b a) find causation, b) choose X.
If you find causation, then you choose X; you didn't find causation, you don't choose X.
That doesn't sound like what I've been saying. I haven't actually made a claim on what you should choose, only that you should reason from causation if available. What you actually do depends on the details.
And generally, "A implies B, Not A implies Not B" isn't an inverse error fallacy. Only concluding the latter from the former is.
It's precisely the other way around. In the real world causation is merely a hypothesis, it's a tentative story you tell yourself.
- It's not the real world, it's a thought experiment, and we do know the causation from the construction.
- Even in the real world it's still possible to understand something about causation. We do in fact understand the causal relation between weather, ice cream and skin cancer.
There is a high correlation between the choice and the prediction. Ignoring that correlation is irrational.
You haven't done any work to establish that. You just claimed they're analogous and have the same conclusion. But I pointed out they're not actually analogous, so just repeating your claim isn't gonna cut it.
Voyager
2mo ago
But then when you realize pre-commitment is an option you should be back at 1-box.
But is pre-commitment an option? The problem as usually stated stipulates that by the time Omega has finished explaining the rules to you, the content of the box is already determined. It's too late for pre-committing.
P.S.: Should I be worried for myself because I know what your name refers to?
Voyager
2mo ago
Once you have entered the room, the game is already over. The prediction has already been made, and if you're a two-boxer, you've already lost.
Honestly, I agree with this framing, and I think it's a strong argument for two-boxing.
If I already lost (or won) the "get Omega to make a beneficial prediction" game, then all that remains to do is two-box and collect consolation prize (perhaps on top of the jackpot). My decision doesn't impact what's in the second box, only my personality at the time of Omega's prediction does, but that's factor I can't influence because the game from my perspective starts after that.
The question isn't "Omega will choose you for Newcomb's problem in one year, do you try to pre-commit to one-boxing just this once?" It's "you're sitting in a room, Omega has explained the rules to you, the box is already filled." If I one-box now, it won't improve my outcome (in fact it will reduce my payout by $1000 either way). Only already being, per Omega's judgment, the kind of person who would one-box to begin with will, which I can't change retroactively.
Voyager
2mo ago
You know that because I gave you the background of how I constructed my synthetic problem, but in the real world all you have is the correlation.
No, I know it because it's not hard to figure out the actual causation. But where I know it from doesn't matter, it still means I can do better in practice.
But to assume otherwise would be an inverse error fallacy. My question was in the form of a⇒b, I didn't ask anything if ¬a.
That you asked about a doesn't mean analyzing ¬a can't give useful further insight. This has nothing to do with inverse error fallacy.
Anyway, the point stands: Understanding the causality allows for a more successful strategy than just knowing a correlation.
Consider another study that finds a correlation between a) "the number of nesting storks in European countries" and b) "human birth rates". Are you just going to discount that correlation just because the causal network is not immediately available?
For what purpose? For most purposes I could think of, I am indeed going to discount the correlation, because it's unlikely there's a direct causal effect between a and b. If I'm concerned about birth rates, I'm not going to conclude helping storks nest will matter just from that correlation.
That is literally what the original formulation of Newcomb's problem tells you is going to happen.
The description of the problem tells me the causal rules that govern the problem. Statistical outcomes might be derived from that, but there's no further benefit to that if you already understand the causality.
You are once again committing an inverse error fallacy.
What? How so?
The fact that you do not immediately see a direct causal link between the choice and the prediction doesn't mean that there isn't a causal network between the two. But more importantly: it doesn't negate the very real and undeniable correlation.
In Newcomb's problem, the causal links are stated, and we know what direction they do not go in, and we can reason with that. Correlation, meanwhile, tells us little if we already know the causation.
I'm not even sure how Newcomb is supposed to be analogous to the ice cream example. In your post you claim it is, but you never lay it out.
You know A (ice cream) is correlated with B (sun screen is effective against skin cancer), and B implies action X. You observe A, therefore you should do X. Assuming you have indeed no other information, this is correct, and it works because A is a proxy for C (summer) that causes B. But what's A in Newcomb's problem, or the correlation version thereof? It can't be the same as your decision X, because if you touch A, it loses its value as a proxy for C. If you're worried about skin cancer, eating more ice cream won't help, because it doesn't actually affect sun screen efficacy. It's just correlated with it.
Voyager
2mo ago
Could there be a common cause between eating ice cream and sunscreen efficacy? How about summer? When it’s summer more people eat ice cream and the rate at which people get skin cancer increases. If that’s the case, then it behooves you to use more sunscreen, not because ice cream makes it more effective, but because its effectiveness is correlated with summer.
It behooves you to use more sunscreen because it's summer, not because you're eating ice cream. If you spend your summer holiday at the beach then you should use sunscreen, even if you eat little ice cream because the ice cream stand at the beach has been closed. Meanwhile, if it's january and you eat ice cream for comfort while huddling indoors after a bad breakup, there's no point in using sunscreen.
If you don't understand the causalities, or if you have no other information, ice cream is a proxy that lets you do better than random. But if you do understand it's actually about summer, ice cream is just a distraction.
If you present a variant of Newcomb as "Omega is giving you a choice between two options, "two-boxing" and "one-boxing". People who picked "two-boxing" on average gain $1000, "one-boxing" pickers gain on average $1,000,000", then, sure, obviously B is the optimal choice. But if you add information about what the choices are, and the causal mechanisms behind the payout, then it becomes reasonable to analyze that, and the disagreement about actual Newcomb is pretty much about causality.
Voyager
3mo ago
"But someone you lent your car to (you didn't report it stolen) did, so pay up"
That justification doesn't transfer over from the analogy. If you lend your car to someone, that's a deliberate action you take, with your responsibilities being clear beforehand. A man who got cheated on by his wife took no such action, he's the victim in this situation. If your car was stolen, making you pay for what the thief did with it I would indeed call kafkaesque.
Second, you have ownership of your car, with all that implies, but you do not have ownership of your wife. I do in fact get to lend my car to someone, or decline to, and the car gets no say, so it makes sense that the responsibility is on me. But husbands to not get to rent out their wife's body. It's also understood that I'm responsible for its safe operation. If I neglect to put on the parking brake, that's on me. Is it also negligent to not put a chastity belt on my wife?
Third, the car is a tool, not a person with agency. It doesn't do anything on its own (or if it does, I might be able to hold the manufacturer liable instead.) A woman, of course, is a person, who can take her own actions that aren't my responsibility.
Voyager
3mo ago
the justification is essentially that integrity of the nuclear family, or at least material safety for the child, is valued higher than justice for the man.
That's obviously special pleading though, because divorce laws would look much different if that principle were applied consistently.
And given that material safety for the child can be achieved in other ways, it just tells us how little justice for men is valued.
Voyager
3mo ago
I think the far more important part of imprisoning political opponents would be removing them from the political battlefield rather than get rid of their 1 vote among millions. In order to get an appreciable effect on the vote counts, you'd have to imprison so many opposition members there's no one left to vote for anyway.
Voyager
3mo ago
Would it still be wrong to give them the cold shoulder if they were blasting loud rap music at all hours, street racing, and selling drugs? If they actually live up to the stereotypes, is it wrong to treat them differently?
Differently from whom? Neighbors who don't do any of those things? That's it's not really about race. Unless they are/would be nice to white neighbors who "act black", there isn't necessarily a racism issue here (although someone might suspect that there is.)
Voyager
4mo ago
Whether the positive effects are outweighed by the negative effects is a value judgment, not something you're right or wrong about.
But specific predictions about positive or negative consequences can be wrong. Not in terms of "outweighing", but in terms of materializing or not.
Voyager
4mo ago
I think the survivors weren't necessarily people who survived the sinking of their boats, but rather mostly whose boats came home in one piece. Many of them would then get taken POW after the u-boat bases on the french atlantic coast surrendered, but those who were dismissed from service beforehand would just go home as civilians.
Voyager
5mo ago
Once you establish that Spartan troops have a mediocre win-lose record against peer competitors (and were not worth shit against Macedonians, despite the equal tech level) the only remaining interesting questions are
- Why did a society which proudly traded off everything else for military strength and then turn in a mediocre win-lose record survive so long?
- Why did Sparta have such a strong unearned reputation for military excellence?
No, the win-lose record actually doesn't imply what you think it implies, and this is the central flaw in Devereaux' argument.
A "batting average" in a sports league works because two conditions are met:
- There are rules in place that work very hard to ensure the duel is "fair", that is, skill is the major deciding factor and other influences are eliminated as much as possible.
- There is a league system that ensures everyone meets everyone, and so then wins and losses are comparable. In sports where this isn't the case, like various combat sports where a fight requires negotiations between both camps, this already breaks down: You see comparisons between fighters with similar records revolve around comparing how good the people they beat actually were.
In battle, neither of those are true. Various methods of gaining an advantage like bringing more numbers, occupying a good position, attacking enemy logistics, launching a surprise attack and various other stratagems are commonplace. The "quality" of the soldiers is only one factor in many deciding the outcome of the battle.
Secondly, a general can choose to decline battle. As Devereaux himself detailed in his series on gneralship, battle normally only happens when both generals think they have a reasonable chance of winning (although there are ways for a good general to try forcing a battle anyway).
What does this mean? It means unless there's a consistent skew in the judgment of the generals, the expected outcome in a battle, and therefore the expected win-loss-ratio of a faction, will be 50:50, no matter the relative quality of the soldiers!
If one side is reputed have the better soldiers, then the other general will decline a "fair fight" and instead only offer battle if he believes he has a way to make up for it. Maybe he waits for reinforcements to gain a numbers advantage or occupies a advantageous position like a hill. Meanwhile the spartan general might see those odds but believe the valor of his men may carry the day anyway. So battle will be given once the odds are, on average, equal, after accounting for the soldiers' skill. A stronger faction will not win through winning more battles, but through having more ability to give battle, for example by simply marching up and giving siege, without the enemy ever seeing an opportunity to stop you. And if the mismatch is too great, the weaker side will consider sueing for peace rather instead of going to war at all.
So, with that in mind, what does the mediocre win-loss ratio of spartans tell us? It tells us that the reputation of spartan hoplites was more or less accurate! If they were consistently overestimated, then we'd see a streak of losses for Sparta, as overly cautious enemy generals would stack advantages before they dared to give battle, and overly confident spartan generals would happily accept those bad odds because they believed their troops could handle it, and then the reality of the stacked deck would assert itself. Of course, such a losing streak would rapidly tank the spartan reputation, allowing the perception to realign itself with reality, at which point the win ratio levels again.
So, the conclusion from the data would be the opposite of what you and Devereaux think. The elite reputation was deserved, and Sparta gained influence by winning wars because they could offer battle where others could not, or simply by bullying their neighbors into concession with the threat of their army. And if they overdo it, their neighbors start allying against them, thus gaining a numbers advantage to cancel out individual prowess.
(The alternate explanation would be that spartan generals were consistently superior, and everyone falsely attributed their success to their troops, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone claim that.)
And to be clear, this doesn't mean Spartiates were supersoldiers. But it does appear as if they were at least noticably better than their peers.
It also doesn't mean the "300" memes are accurate, because it doesn't tell us where their advantages lay. Maybe it's simply the better maneuverability and tactical flexibility Devereaux mentions, or any other martial virtue.
One last thing to consider, an elite reputation, even if (mostly) undeserved, is itself a material asset. If everyone believes Spartans are invincible supersoldiers, this will boost their morale and drop their enemies' just from the prospect of fighting them, and morale decides battles. This could even become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But that doesn't change the conclusion. An average win ratio means at least the generals know how good they are.
Voyager
5mo ago
I think the kernel of truth behind "Decadence" is simply selective pressure or lack thereof.
Hard times make strong men less because hardship is good for the spirit, but because hard times mean weak men perish. Effective strategies will outcompete ineffective ones. Weak men will either figure out how to stop being weak or be replace by those who do. Men who already are strong will rise to the top because they can deliver success - if you're not meritocratic, you will be outcompeted.
But once you grow to enough success, this changes, because your prosperity introduces slack that cushions inefficiency. You will no longer be immediately punished for operating inefficiently, because the system runs well enough and has enough inertia it can handle some inefficiency. The best way to power is longer to create it, but to politick society into giving it to you. You no longer need to invest wealth in that which promises progress, you can afford to spend it on practically useless, but beautiful art. When previously ensuring success for your son requires raising him into a strong man, because a weak man would quickly fail, you can now pass on the existing wealth and power to him and let him coast on it. If the army has better equipment and more numbers than any enemies, and a solid structure of professional staff officers and NCOs, even a nepo baby general can win.
So the structures ossify into something that serves a different purpose, and over time, such issues accumulate, the staff officers also become nepo babies, the NCOs and civil servants grow corrupt, the tactics grow obsolete, and the wealthy show off by employing armies of artisans instead of doing anything of practical value, all while your inertia prevents them from failing visibly. Meanwhile, your enemies still face incentives to become strong, and will eventually be able challenge you, and then the nepo babies, the corrupt viziers, and the artisans won't be able to effectively fight back. Your empire falls, your wealth gets looted, and your art either destroyed or left for later generations look at and wonder what happened to the civilization that created something as impressive as this.
The core mechanic isn't hardship as such, but lack of competition. It's the Great Empire with mostly barbarians on its borders that falls to this, because they have no actual peers who can outcompete them. Meanwhile, the european powers of early modernity always were surrounded by multiple equally strong rivals. So as soon as decadence started creeping in, one of those rivals would quickly pounce and deliver a humiliating but not fatal defeat, exposing everything that went wrong and leaving you to scramble to fix it, before your problems could ossify.
Voyager
6mo ago
It's not really possible to make a definition based on biology, since one of the core tenets of modern transgenderism is inclusivity of anyone with dysphoria.
That's my point: If it's not possible to build a meaningful steelman that satisfies the tenets of transgenderism, transgenderism is indefensible.
It depends what you mean by "valid"? I think this philosophy clearly captures a desire, and way to manifest this desire into reality (whilst still constrained by reality)
That's not a philosophy, that's a tactic. A meaningful philosophy would contain some object level claims with a truth value, not just a manipulation of rhetoric to achieve a goal.
At the very least, this will make it impossible to refer to someone's sex (which is helpful if someone dislikes their sex)
So it's about stopping people from talking about inconvenient reality
and in cases of low information, people might just be forced to assume a man is actually a male
advancing falsehoods by hiding relevant information
And also some people might just have trouble adjusting to the new defintiions, and start confusing map for territory and thinking of "men" as males. Or at least retain associations of the word "man" to the old concept of "man".
and deliberately confusing people through rhetorical tricks. I suspected from the beginning it was a rhetorical shell game, but it's starting to look more like an Orwellian propaganda framework.
The concept of sex would have to be a cognitohazard threating to wipe out humanity for me to even consider this. And even then it couldn't be meaningfully said to be "true". Some people will be less sad" (but others more sad) is not a sufficient justification.
Voyager
6mo ago
Precisely - I'm trying to give a formulation that doesn't require lies or logical inconsistency.
At the cost of not having any substance beyond semantics. Your difficulties offering a steelman that is both consistent and meaningful might be indicative of the validity of the philosophy.
It makes people with gender dysphoria less sad.
But does it really? If your redefinition succeeds - as the transparent redefinition it's advertised at - all that happens is that "father" now means "parent who wishes to be a man", and the birth certificate will change its terminology in response to the redefinition, using a new term with quite possibly the same implications, which won't satisfy the person from the OP. Because it's not about the word, it's about the meaning behind it.
Meanwhile, forcibly changing the language will make other people unhappy.
Now let's make binary transgender ideology (just 2 genders for now):
- I define a new sort of identity marker (next to stuff like race, sex, age, etc) called "gender identity" (or "gender" for short)
- This is a redefinition of the old concept of gender. We will still keep the word "sex" to refer to the old-fashioned thing above.
- I also redefine "man", "woman", "boy" and "girl" to now refer to gender identity, instead of sex
- Same for any other gendered (pro)nouns (fireman, mother, lesbian, etc) - we can only refer to sex by male/female (and references to sex should be avoided where possible)
- Being a man/woman means sincerely wanting to be male/female (this, but unironically)
Taken at face value, this seems bad on its merits, because why? There aren't any substantial actual claims in there, just a demand for changing language, so what benefit does this redefinition offer? This isn't even a steelman, because it involves no object level position. It's just a proposal for changing words without a justification.
Redefining terms is bad, because it leads to confusion. So where is the justification for paying that price, over creating new terms?
Aside from allowing for rhetorical shell games, of course?
Correct, she is not a father. She is a woman, and fathers are men.
The document isn't using the new definition under which this is true. If you honestly just want to change definitions, you can argue "the term 'father' should be replaced with 'male parent' (or similar) to reflect that 'father' now means something different". You can't argue the meaning/content of the document should change alongside a definition change of the word it was using.
Your "steelman" framework doesn't give an argument here. It only appears to give one because it equivocates between the two meanings of "father".
There may different schools of thought and laws, but there aren't different schools of biology.
But the disagreements are about tactis and laws, not biology.
Almost no violence is truly "safe". The judgment of different options on the risk-of-death/efficacy ratio is a matter of tradeoffs and cutoffs. "The risk of death in a shot to the leg is x" is biology. "The risk is so high compared to the likelihood of stopping a threat that there is no situation where it is justified over a center-of-mass shot" is not biology, and that's where the schools of though differ.
If someone competent tells you that they are shooting at the legs to warn rather than kill
No one said that. (Edit to clarify: warning shots, shots at the legs and shots at tires are three different things. When I wrote "police are taught to shoot for warning, at the leg or at tires", the comma could be replaced with another "or".
Voyager
7mo ago
This isn't as universal as you make it sound. In Germany, and to my knowledge other european countries as well, police are taught to shoot for warning, at the leg or at tires, so there exist competing schools at thought and differing laws.
As a matter of American tactical and legal doctrine though, which is relevant to the case in question, you are correct.
Voyager
7mo ago
Speed, brutality, decisiveness - action for the sake of action - are conflated with effectiveness by certain kinds of people, while caution, planning, and introspection are viewed with contempt.
Not all of these are mutually exclusive. I'm pretty sure some careful planning went into the Maduro extraction at least from the professionals in the Armed Forces. That's why it was so quick and successful.
Quick and decisive execution doesn't have anything to do with rash decisionmaking. A well-prepared operation is more likely to go smoothly and achieve your goals with the minimum amount of action.
Voyager
9mo ago
Is declining rates of violent death adjusted for 1) rising average ages
I don't think that adjustion should be done. 1. Rising average ages means people live longer, and that longer life means more opportunities to encounter violence. An old man might be less likely do get into violence, but before he was old, he was a young man for as long as his ancestors were, so all else being equal, he should get into more violence over his longer lifespan.
If there's a positive effect, it's probably from the effects on society from having more older people around too cool down and dilute young hotheads - but why would you control away social structure?
Also, people who didn't die violently live longer, so there's causality in the other direction (declining rates of violence cause rising average ages) and you're controlling away what you're testing for.
I.e. my choice doesn't change anything, it just "reveals" information already known to the relevant player Omega.
What I know or don't know ahead of time doesn't matter, because I'm not making a decision ahead of time.
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