curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
I'm pretty certain of the long-term harm from the air always being like that (like in some south asian cities). So I'd expect the long-term harm from breathing it in for a few days a year to be hard to detect - (made up numbers, there are definitely studies here but idk about the quality) .5% increased risk of lung cancer, .5% reduced lung capacity. It's worth wearing a mask for a few days a year to avoid that, but there won't be an epidemic of it
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Eh, sustained exposure to that level of air quality would cause harm. So e.g. wearing a N95 mask when outside if NY was always like that would be justified. And appealing to linearity - the effort/cost of wearing a mask for a week is something like 1/50th of wearing it for a year (you probably already have one), the harm of breathing it in for a week is probably 1/50th of wearing it for a year, so it's probably worth wearing a mask for the week.
Purchasing a HEPA filter is a good choice anyway IMO, but that or building your own fan-driven filter is a higher fixed cost and less obviously worth it for a single fire than like $10. Toughening up is good for things that don't actually cause long-term impairments - e.g. "I don't feel like exercising" - but isn't a reason to not avoid things that are harmful.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
If you had to put rough numbers on 'percent of trans people that pass' (among some specific groups of trans people, and for some specific groups of observers), what would they be?
The main takeaway is that there has not yet been a mass exodus away from stock photo companies and towards in-house AI image generation
I don't think you can draw conclusions either way here on the long-term or even medium-term future of stock photos. The new and better product still has to organically grow, be integrated into the workflows of professionals and slow-moving corporations, and exponential growth looks flat while it's small until it suddenly isn't. E.g. "dumb" phones didn't immediately crater when the iphone was released. And there are a (imo) lot of use cases for stock photos where AI art still isn't quite there - maybe you want to seem "professional" and don't want any weird AI artifacts, for instance.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Still, it’s tough for me to wrap my head around the idea that most adult women’s beliefs are malleable to that extent
Maybe you interact with a lot of smart women? E.g. a less extreme version of cloudheadedtranshumanist's post where he didn't see many psychological differences between men and women because he was 'socialized in rationalist group houses'.
There's a hierarchy of persuadability, anyway. 99% of people are uncritically receptive to opinions held by all of their peers and people of higher status since birth. Probably 80% would be swayed in the same way at around age 20-25. A still-significant minority are the kind of person who, over a period of months, just absorbs whatever their friends or partner believe. It's stronger in women, but present in both men and women. (There are probably differences in the process by which it happens in women vs men too)
Also, for every 'i am far-right and my wife slowly became a far-right' story', theres a 'my wife broke up with me because i was a nazi' story. Most of those are in practice 'putting the values of the overall group ahead of the values of the partner' rather than any form of personal strong convictions.
But if you put all of that together, it doesn't seem that surprising anymore.
I realize that this is a series of questions and that the subject matter might be too broad for the “Small-Scale Questions Thread”, but it doesn’t seem to be appropriate for the Culture War thread either.
I often want to post something for the motte audience, but it really doesn't fit into the CWR and isn't a 'wellness', a 'small-scale question', or a 'fun', so I just don't. Most recently is this (nonfiction, account of a murder among some homeless people).
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
"There may be 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe,[7][8] although that number was reduced in 2021 to only several hundred billion based on data from New Horizons.". Pop-science estimates of the number of planets in the observable universe were 10^20 - 10^24 from googling. this paper estimates 10^19 - 10^20 total planets, of which 1 in 10 - 1k are habitable. this paper seems less fancy but estimates 10^24 chances at emergence on habitable planets. That can compensate for a very small probability of emergence! Not that there aren't other issues
His urging is that the network of rules that surround us and govern us be made by people as physically and socially close to us as possible
(edit: I was+am aware these are greer's views, not yours)
But the rules I care about the most are about "the kinds of high-tech chips and electronic devices I can purchase", "copyright and intellectual property of text or image bitstrings", or "ability to reverse-engineer and adversarially interoperate with online platforms". The company I work for probably sells their product over the internet to people not only in every state, but in dozens of other international jurisdictions, how can local rulemaking work for that? Even the most physical ones would be something like "environmental regulations, e.g. on dumping and pesticide use, on farms and factories within a 12 hour drive from me". Plus, aren't two of the biggest examples of local control today pathological, development-strangling environmentalism (neither endorsing nor non-endorsing that judgement) and NIMBYism?
But what couldn't be explained away in such a fashion? Everything short of a gigantic Independence Day style battleship
When we detect a difference one part in one thousand between (something like) the mass of an electron and a theoretical prediction, we put thousands of (amortized) man hours, many from the smartest people in the world, into figuring out if it's experimental error or new physics. We probe the bottoms of the ocean for new species of life smaller than a single cell of your body. We accelerate protons to within a hundred millionth of the speed of light, or build experiments the size of football fields / tanks of a billion liters of water to detect microscopic events with a frequency of one in 10^34.
And yet the evidence for UFOs remains "fuzzy pictures and videos" or "rumors from experts". Where are the international collaborations between top scientists here? Why haven't the 30cm/pixel imaging satellites gotten good images? Why aren't we blowing the UFOs out of the sky with lasers or something and putting the debris in a mass spec? Imaging technologies have improved by, maybe, ten orders of magnitude over the past century, yet modern UFO evidence is recognizable to someone familiar with UFO sightings in the 1950s.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Can you elaborate on what 'take UFOs seriously' means? Presumably it's somewhere in between 'are confident aliens are real and actively use alien technology' and 'think that Unidentified Flying Objects exist and they're either natural debris or man-made objects'
The last time we discussed UFOs was here in response to Tucker positively mentioning UFO speculation, and my critical response was here and in subthreads.
What's happening here is, essentially - there are several million people employed in, or as contractors for, the US military and intelligence community. The number who hold positions like 'generational officer of the United States Intelligence Community with a Top-Secret Clearance who currently works for the National Air and Space Intelligence Center' are smaller, but (if we're allowed to lump together all kinds of quackery, instead of just aliens) at least 1 in 100. And any time you have ten thousand people, a few dozen of them are going to be, variously - gullible, insane, stupid, have committed to several important intellectual mistakes, intentionally lying for media attention, or are just of average intelligence when actually understanding whether a radar signature shows aliens or noise requires being above average + got sucked into 'exposing aliens' because they genuinely believe it's important. This is how you get things like "the CIA investigated astral projection" or "nobel prize-winning scientist believes in homeopathy" or the fake "bomb detector" that was just a dowsing rod used by 20 different countries' militaries (but, again, that doesn't mean their whole militaries endorsed/used them, just some people in them). It's not surprising that one in a thousand military people believes in aliens if one in a hundred 'normal' people believe in aliens. Yet 999 in 1000 don't believe in aliens. (edit: it's probably significantly above 1 in 1k even among those who are high iq / work in technical fields)
Additionally - there have been dozens of supposed firsthand accounts of interactions with aliens like this one, and all of their details are both incompatible with verifiable history and incompatible with each other. E.g. "arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally" - which technologies? All of the biggest scientific and engineering discoveries have very legible and sensible histories. The progress of science and engineering over the past hundred years hasn't been a secret thing, it occurs in public. Maybe everyone's been tricked, but that should require more evidence than one guy asserting it.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Pushshift was an amazing tool both for research and for seeing mod-removed posts on reddit (whether for entertainment or research), or just searching reddit, as reddit's search function is barely usable. StuckInTheMatrix built a similar tool for twitter, but it's private / for researcher use due to (old) twitter's restrictions. That twitter restriction has probably prevented tens of thousands of moments of mundane utility, and the pushshift ban will prevent similar. I suspect a pushshift clone that scraped reddit adversarially would be sued if it got big enough?
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
You just said 'girlboss feminism bad' in five different ways. "poor choices", "success rare", "poor fit for reality". Not that much was communicated.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
I have seen several other people make that claim because I looked for it
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Yeah, it's very normal OSINT procedure to write long investigations of Russian spook units based on Russian phone metadata, which is very open source information, really it is.
Iirc russian telecom providers are either corrupt or got hacked, and the metadata is available for sale on online 'black markets' the same way hacked US corporation data is.
Unlike intelligence agencies which often rely on anonymous sources for sensitive investigations, Bellingcat and their Russian partners The Insider base their work on cell-phone metadata and flight records which are readily available in Russia’s thriving black market of stolen data.
And unlike most major media organizations that are willing to accept leaked data but draw the line at buying information, Bellingcat and their partners have proven willing to go a step further and pay for information from data merchants which often originates from low-level employees in banks, telecoms companies, and government agencies looking to make a quick buck.
I don't think they're just getting the data from the CIA.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
The moral basis for protecting life is surely more related to the ... continuance of that life and the person's experiences and actions, than the person's lack of consent to dying? Children drowning wouldn't be good if you could convince the kids it was a good thing.
So, if killing prisoners is good, why get their consent? Just increase the scope of the death penalty. The much-mentioned expense of the death penalty is entirely procedural. And if it's bad, then why would their consent matter?
Anyway, the cost, in money, of lifetime imprisonment isn't that much on a societal scale, like, compared to welfare or healthcare. A competent government should probably address it, but it's not particularly pressing.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Yeah, very interested, more detail the better.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
I don't think that's particularly exceptional? Starting from the upper class and having a base level of imitation and willingness to do things that your local social group find distasteful when around other social groups should be enough to do that.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
I've talked to earnest flat earthers, they definitely exist
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
I mean, you're a visiting foreigner so you're probably going to go to places where there are more visiting foreigners than average.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
I think it's just authentic OSINT, and is mostly US-aligned. If you don't like popular US foreign policy ideas, you might dislike them! Musk's accusations are entirely baseless ('Psyop' is rarely in the same sentence as a meaningful claim in casual conversation / on social media), and he's probably repeating vague nonsense that morphed from the aforementioned disagreements.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
150/month for 'old pod in natural disaster zone' is still amazing tbh (provided you get a day or two's warning for the disasters, and just move to other pods).
that would probably violate building codes in the U.S. for being so small.
Are there any good reasons such building codes should exist? There'd be a bunch of new requirements for the specific constraints such small apartments ofc, building codes in general are useful, but as far as I can tell generally prohibiting them is pure deadweight loss
This isn't a piece of modern architecture that intentionally disrupts mainstream understandings of aesthetics or w/e. It's a functional building. The couches, tables, and shades aren't nice and wooden, but they're good for outdoor conversation. The solar panels are probably there for green reasons, but even purely on economics they're a reasonable choice. And the roof isn't an ugly metal slope or anything, just normal tiles.
I don't think anyone finds it beautiful, but it seems fine. Even if you want marble columns in your $5M mansion, that's still secondary to the material function of the house - spending your day there, having people over, etc.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Those kinds of white collar criminals should be treated similarly to, like, organized retail theft rings. If you rob a dozen stores without a gun, you still go to jail Both significantly disrupt the economic functioning of society for personal monetary gain, and that's the main thing prison is supposed to deter!
Any non-establishment politician that makes false statements to a court? Yeah?
I suspect an establishment politician who did that would be prosecuted too.
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