anon_
11hr ago
I'm not really talking about national politics, I'm talking about the petty intradepartmental stuff. Or maybe it's just "all politics is local" again.
Moreover, they can't care about it because the people that do care have infinite time to devote to political games.
anon_
11hr ago
Yeah, the kind of person whose opinion matters is only the kind of person with political stature.
anon_
11hr ago
Writing some boilerplate doesn't require politics. It's indicative of someone whose political stance is to recite whatever those who care about politics care about in order to do esoteric math.
anon_
12hr ago
Wholeheartedly agree, but I think this is a lot harder than you imagine.
Without being interested or engaged in politics, he needs to select an avatar that understands it keenly. That's both a principle/agent problem and a
The reason DEI was able to spiral is because the spiral did not affect the academics’ social status, but actually increased it.
Which is downstream of the fact that DEI advocates were the kinds of people that were interested in things like department/university politics.
anon_
1d ago
as it motivates normal academics to police their extremist colleagues, rather than acquiescing again
Ah, but in doing so you changes the very nature of the person in question. Serious academics like TT aren't interested in the prior step of acquire enough institutional power to be able to police their extremist colleagues as they have better things to do like discover new math. The person interested in university politics just isn't the same person.
Of course, you do see serious academics that have taken up the task of working university politics. Whether out of duty or necessity or simply inertia. And every single time I've seen it (and to be fair, I wasn't in academics that long, I bailed on it for private industry), it fundamentally changed how they related to the world.
anon_
2d ago
How much of this is attributable to the extremely low startup cost of an AI project? Having someone spin up a few Claude instances and seeing if that works can be surprisingly cheap.
Previous technologies have required far more initial investment, so this might just be “everyone can have $10K tokens to try whatever you want if you can write a half cogent proposal”.
anon_
3d ago
This kind of nitpicking desire for pedantic precision is at odds with speaking plainly. Otherwise every possible statement has to be qualified with a bunch of extra drivel.
- No responsible adult would violate a custody order outside of vanishingly rare situations that are inconsequential to the claim that it is impossible to infer anything about kidnappings from crime statistics.
This seems far less plain nor does it add much information to my ear that wouldn't be covered by a plain reading.
anon_
3d ago
Sure, there is some outlier case that is possible. That exceptional case is both extremely rare and inconsequential to the point.
anon_
4d ago
If you want people to write plainly, you ought to read plainly too.
Moreover, it's not false (let alone obviously false), any more than any statement that has an exception, no matter how non central & inconsequential, is false. Applying this level of pedantic precision requires also rejecting as false the statement that "smoking causes cancer" because it not every smoker gets cancer or "summers are hotter than winters" because one July was January. Or if you want an SSC example, to object to "criminals harm society" by pointing out that MLK was a criminal.
If you want to consider this a "retraction" rather than "a clarification that in most polite conversation it would be considered peevish of a listener to insist upon" that's fine. But it's probably among the least enjoyable aspects of discussion on the internet when readers do that.
anon_
4d ago
Do you think those cases are even remotely representative?
Granted they exist, they are the exception that proves the rule applies to the rest of cases.
anon_
4d ago
Sure. Some people get away with getting into a shootout with the police. But very few do, and the kind of people that think they will win in a shootout with the cops are the last people that you should encourage to do so.
The stories of people that successfully jump the border with their kids are like man bites dog.
anon_
4d ago
Even responsible adults can panic! That doesn't mean they aren't generally sufficiently responsible to care for a child.
It doesn't mean that in the sense of being sufficient, but surely it's at least a few bits of information in that direction.
Again: only if it doesn't work out for you. Which it often won't! But there are literally times when your choice is "break the law now, and it will be bad, or don't break the law now, and it will be worse."
Well, if it often won't work out then, on the balance we ought to advise people against it.
The police are not invincible
Sure, but I still wouldn't advise anyone about to be caught with a few grams of drugs to escalate it into a shootout with the police. Sure, some fraction of people that do so get away with it (that is, agreeing the police are not invincible) but on the median
- The odds are extremely bad
- The kind of person at the time is going to severely misapply the odds
- Unless you're already about to charged with murder, you're gonna make it much worse than just eating the drug charge
the courts are not infallible, the law is not incontestable
Of course not. But the fallible courts have fairly-reliable armed men that, if you decide to contest their possible-mistakes via physical force, will enforce them against you.
This isn't a normative statement.
anon_
4d ago
It could. But I predict it is extremely unlikely in any given chance.
So much so that I think any parent gambling on "I'm gonna defy the court and get a media shitstorm that causes it to reevaluate in my favor" is making an extremely irresponsible bet.
anon_
4d ago
I have an extremely strong prior that courts very reverse custody agreements in favor of a parent that violated their previous order. In fact, there is standing caselaw that violating of a family court order is unfit.
I'm also kind of shocked. The statement "if you violate a custody order you are more likely to be judged unfit" is so much the default presumption that I think the burden really ought to be on the contrary of "the court will not construe violating an existing custody order against the violating party".
In any event, there is sufficient citation to it in existing caselaw.
anon_
4d ago
The health and welfare of the child is not served by having the only responsible parent thrown in jail and discredited in the eyes of the court.
So I agree with the standard that it's the health and welfare of the child. But unless you have a strong predictive reason to think you can beat the law, it's extremely unlikely that disregarding the court order meets your first rule rule.
anon_
4d ago
I disagree. If the court got it wrong somehow, no responsible parent would let their kid stay in an unsafe situation just because the law said they had to.
A responsible parent with a reasonable predictor of the external world would realize that violating the order will lead to their child shortly being returned to that unsafe situation with less chance of ultimately getting a better solution.
anon_
4d ago
Now of course this is a non central example, but if you think it's impossible for judges to be morally wrong in a way that's terrible enough as to require risking everything by running afoul of the law, you clearly have unreasonable faith in the institution.
Of course they can be morally wrong! Or factually wrong! Or legally wrong! Or any combination of the 3.
The issue isn't that they are right, it's that violating a custody order will just get your ass thrown in jail and the custody order enforced and discredit further attempts to challenge it. Which, if it's a bad order, just makes it a lot worse.
anon_
4d ago
It seems reasonable that in the mind of the accused, he would merely be acknowledging that the recipient is judged sexually desirable, which is not an insult.
While not an insult, this is a different kind of social faux-pas. Walking down most streets in the daytime (obviously the street in front of a club at 1AM is different, and I'm sure some influencer is wearing a skimpy outfit on TikTok) is not a place most people intend to be judged sexually desirable. It's a (very minor) social injury in the sense of bringing something more private into a more public area.
Compare it with having a woman in a class/meeting and someone saying out loud "let's all give an applause for how great so-and-so's tits look today". The injury from this isn't the insult, it's the public airing.
No responsible adult would violate a custody order.
EDIT to flush out:
Willfully violating a custody order will just get your ass thrown in jail and the custody order enforced and discredit further attempts to challenge it. Which, if it's a bad order, just makes it a lot worse.
This makes about as much sense as "if a police officer is violating your 4A rights, try to steal his pepper spray". I absolutely am not denying the predicate here: officers do sometimes step over the 4A, just that reacting in that way is straightforwardly counterproductive.
anon_
14d ago
Bob Jones is gonna come in extremely handy in the current administration v university dustup.
anon_
15d ago
Irrespective of whether that's true, there is no explicit intent by Congress here.
There is not some kind of magic escape hatch from constitutional law that is invoked by putatively combating racism. If anything, I would have expected the Biden DOJ to put forward that kind of wonky theory (e.g. in SFFA) not the Trump one.
Have you read DARPA grant applications? I remember (in 2005) PIs filing all kinds of "we will use micro-scale flux capacitors to create a mobile platform capable of detecting chemical and biological weapons so as to ensure American victory in the GWOT".
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