curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
It usually takes more than a few days to set up a marketing campaign, they probably started before the shooting. Should they have delayed it to not look bad?
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Writing quality can mean a dozen different things. Sometimes it's just 'adherence to a certain style'. Sometimes it's about 'telling a good story'. Sometimes it's about efficiently communicating what's important and cutting what's not.
Yud's "good writing" isn't 1 or 3. But he tells good stories - HPMOR's enduring popularity speaks to that. And he presents novel/interesting ideas in engaging ways. I don't think the 70th percentile nyrb writer has written, or would write if they tried, something as persistently popular as HPMOR or the sequences (but could be wrong about that)
Evidence for Yud's intelligence is less his writing, though, than the ideas within the writing. His AI risk ideas were useful and prescient, and the correct parts being mixed with nonsense (the agent foundations stuff) is par for the course for novel ideas. And the sequences cover a lot of different complicated ideas pretty well. The ways he is (or was) wrong about e.g. quantum physics or the applicability of decision theory and mathematical logic to AI are the ways a smart person is wrong, not a dumb one.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
I can't tell if this is ironically comparing me to the left-wing position here or an earnest attack. If the former, good one! If the latter, consider the "i'm sympathetic to: the state should just kill the homeless black guy" part as evidence I'm not the leftist here. I'm considering the theory of law and ethics here, not the specific case, which I don't really care much about either way.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
It'd be very interesting. There are a lot of mini-ethnographies of online communities on /r/hobbydrama, and a few on rdrama
Does it make sense to take gwern's url archiving to its radical conclusion and start automatically saving-to-disk webvideo and random forums and every version of every executable I ever download? Would you get away with it for long before Google slammed you (I don't think youtube-dl is detectable?)? The tools for automatic categorization and identification exist (among others), but has anyone actually put them into a moderately user-friendly format to actually find stuff once you have archived it?
I could write this, I don't really do effortposts though.
Does it make sense? Yes, content disappears very rapidly. A lot of youtube videos I wanted to revisit have disappeared, a lot of random sites, a lot of tweets lost to suspensions or history-cleans, free PDFS that aren't free a year later, hosted images on discordapp.com or imgur, ...
If you mean "archiving every video you watch and website you visit", you'd get away with it easily. Youtube is botted, and videos have lots of bytes, so it has some bot protection - but iirc isn't that strong, and the yt-dlp maintainers have consistently gotten past it, so using that on every video you visit would work. So just [visit youtube.com/* url] -> [run yt-dlp to save video]. For every other website you visit, it's mostly just html, so (ignoring a ton of relatively boring things) you can just save the html, and the images and videos within, and view it later. For discord specifically, discord dump style tools work fine. I'm pretty sure google could kill yt-dlp if they wanted to (imagine they make a backlog of browser quirks, and every day they release a new youtube patch that modifies the JS challenge to depend on that quirk, requiring yt-dlp's JS emulator to be updated daily or run a full browser emulator), but they don't for some reason, even though they have stronger anti-bot protection in other areas.
If you're imagining something larger-scale, archiving everything on a forum or tens of thousands of youtube videos - also doable! Archive team, archive.org, has done that kind of thing for a long time. In the case of youtube videos specifically, it's so easy (and videos are so large, and most of youtube content is so useless) that archive.org actively asks people to not upload random scraped videos.
While big tech puts a lot of effort into defeating bots, it does cost money for dev time and is a maintenance burden, so they only do in areas it's worth preventing bots, e.g. account creation and posting of content. Most top 100 websites can be trivially scraped at within-10x-of-human-activity intensities, because they already have tens of millions of users doing that, so preventing read-only bots at that scale doesn't meaningfully affect load.
but has anyone actually put them into a moderately user-friendly format to actually find stuff once you have archived it
I imagine fast full-text search or embedding-based search would work fine here. I'm pretty sure there are open-source tools for both 'save every text you look at and search it' that are janky, as well as startups working on making a good UI for it.
what's wrong with web app deployment
This has improved a ton recently, with tons of commercial products and open source projects. Also, eevee was doing "See, I actually have a 64-bit kernel, but a 32-bit userspace", which ... it'd take a ton of effort to seamlessly support every quirky configuration people can come up with, so most devs don't, which is correctly prioritized imo. Again, with the database, they didn't use the supported configuration of 'give it root' and did some permission thing.
A little on the logistics side -- how and why is Etsy pulling 6% of sales fees and eBay 13% compared to PayPal's (already high) 3%
I know less here but ... 3% extra for etsy seems reasonable? Maybe not reasonable in the sense of 'how the economy should be', but reasonable in the sense that they have to address regulatory complexity, develop their software, deal with payments issues, prevent fraud... patio11's writing might be related
How much do and should we trust a lot of User Design stuff as reflecting what is measured, rather than what it studied?
Design is tightly coupled to revenue, which means companies and the people in them will be properly incentivized to care about it. If we imagine a psych lab doing experiments on college students, where ... any result is fine if you can publish it, and the pricing page of your SaaS, where your main source of revenue is people clicking and you really want them to click - if, in the former, you spew out a bunch of 2% uplift nudges that, when all implemented, add up to 0%, you can still publish, nobody's checking. If in the latter, you spew out a bunch of 2% uplift nudges that, when all implemented, add up to 0% ... you're not getting that bonus.
so much residential internet or screen size is (and during the study time especially was) high-variance enough it seems like these should have been swamped by noise
If it's actually per-user noise, sample sizes of 50M users x 100 interactions per day (adding together that many normals reduces your standard deviation by 70,000x!) are more than enough to wash it out for 'latency of every page load'. Even for 'converting to paid user', that's still a few million interactions total, which is more than enough. If there are ten groups of users with entirely separate behavior, that's still only 3x higher 'noise', which isn't that much.
In the particular case of latency - I definitely do notice latency and use sites less that take longer to load. Consumers being price-conscious in consumer goods, especially commonly purchased ones, is pretty well established, although idk the specifics of what you're referring to.
Suck thread was great.
Is there a (non-violent) solution to the problem of scam spamming, especially of the elderly, even if only a partial mitigation
I thought of "social media companies take it as seriously as they do racism", but they don't deal with that effectively either. Maybe as seriously as they do CP or ISIS (but even for CP they're not great).
Are there any One Tricks for documentation? Not just in a code context; I hate javaDocs, but they do seem a genuine tool, and weird that they're such single examples.
Not sure what you mean exactly. I also hate javadocs, /** @param1 int A Number @param2 int Another number @returns Two numbers added @desc Adds two numbers */ public int add(int param1, int param2)
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
I'd be interested in any or all of these, and would pay for some of them if not for my desire to be anonymous. No strong preferences on topic though, which might be surprising, but the content of a post matters more than the topic - I've enjoyed review articles about something as trivial as the chemistry of paint drying before, while the average post on any topic is dull due to lack of inspiration and competence.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
please post it <3
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Or just a lower-effort CW thread/BLR lol
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
This doesn't answer your question because it's a normal culture war topic, but I think we should've had a post on the harlan crow/thomas situation, and I don't remember one
More in line with your question, an effortpost outlining the various factions of the diffuse, yet much realer than even a few years ago, cloud of individuals in and adjacent to "dissident right" and their likely futures
It's not really a time question for me, I could just comment less and effortpost more, but don't
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Supply chain issues from covid lockdowns are (vague guess informed by a few papers) mostly gone by now. Inflation from stimulus or pandemic checks ... isn't going to go away, the money's still there.
That said ... assuming production stays constant, all the pandemic money has to go somewhere, all the extra revenue corporations get from increased prices has to go somewhere. Because "the capitalists are using inflation as an excuse to jack up profits!!" isn't true, that money will eventually translate to increased wages. But institutions are slow and transaction costs aren't zero, so wage increases will be slow and occur at uneven times. And that's already been happening. Inflation at a single time devalues your past dollars, but it can't simultaneously devalue everyone's future income -if we imagine future production is fixed and then distributed, all the 'value' is still there and will go somewhere. Intentional deflation probably isn't worth it for reasons others describe below.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
It's about very broadly poetic analogies. When you're moved by an aesthetic or piece of writing or find it appealing, that corresponds to learning, believing something new. If I read a particularly nice passage about everyone living in harmony in a socialist utopia, or about the glory of a noble battle, that's not just some aesthetic pleasure that's disconnected from anything, that's a specific claim about the kinds of things worth doing and their effects.* If I read 'being gaslighted is like botflies erupting from the liar's foaming mouth and corkscrew-drilling through your eardrums into your neural tissue' and am like 'wow ... so compelling ...', what am I convinced of? I'm worried it's a general sense that 'gaslighting is bad' that isn't informative. Maybe if you read a few paragraphs that characterizes particular aspects of progressive gaslighting, even via analogy - it might enable you to understand better how it's bad - but when you read 'gaslighting is like a roiling mass of hairworms' ... what? Okay, I believe that now, I believe there's something to the way hairworms are viscerally disgusting that also applies to progressive gaslighting. But I don't think it does? Hairworms are viscerally disgusting because once they burrow their way into your skin, they hurt you, and absent modern antibiotics there's not much you can do to stop them. Progressive ideas, by contrast, are virtually everywhere, and the only real way to beat them is to understand why they're bad.
not sure i explained that well.
*Modern fiction still invokes this, but the way it's so disconnected from day-to-day life both hides that and, imo, causes people to come to believe, and act on, various half-baked, incoherent ideas
This case might be different from the usual 'Is it really ethical to MURDER* someone just for being poor? (*murder: n. not provide $100k worth of state of the art medical treatment to prolong someone's life by a few months)'.
If you haven't put yourself in danger or created a situation where self-defense is justified or ..., nobody else has the right to intentionally or negligently cause your death. If a homeless guy is screaming at someone or throwing hamburger wrappers at someone, you can't take out a gun and shoot them. And you can't choke the homeless guy out and 'accidentally' kill them. (And if you could, that'd be a way to get away with intentionally killing them!).
If this guy was actively physically attacking someone or something similar, restraining the person could be justified, and then the killing would - maybe still be prosecutable (as minor fights happen a lot more than killings, and escalating them to killings can still be bad), but maybe not be. But if the guy was just being disruptive or screaming, the legal system shouldn't (according to today's ethics) allow that to escalate to a killing - it's disproportionate, it takes the 'monopoly over violence' away from the state and its adversarial legal system, etc.
One response is "the state isn't dealing with this guy and he was a danger, so it's good a vigilante dealt with him". Another response is "this guy doesn't contribute to society or his own life, and shouldn't be alive anyway". I'm sympathetic, but generally allowing random killings of people you judge in the moment to be bad has spillover effects outside cleaning out undesirables.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Definitely, but that's not what I'm arguing - it's specifically about the way the insect metaphor is used. If you already know gaslighting is bad, and have some sense of why it's bad, thinking there's some disgustingness to it beyond the actual harms it has, in a way that's related to insects, doesn't seem important. 'assertive writhing mass'?
I think there's something to my objection. It's not specifically to ilforte's comment or themotte, it's a very broad and common thing, present in most fiction, poetry, etc
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Convincing, sure. But what were you convinced ... of? Being 'gaslighted', over who did the laundry last or over black crime, sucks, but do invertebrates help anyone realize that? Is the abusive boyfriend or SJW trying to "violate your soft tissues"? How does that tell us anything beyond "being tricked"? If there's any sense of 'aha, this is true!' you get from the insect paragraph that you wouldn't from a description of gaslighting itself ... what did you just start believing that you didn't before?
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
He mentions the hairdryer in quite a few posts. I just re-read them all (they're good posts) and didn't see that bit
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
I don't understand where you get these claims. It's not like white people are just marketing while pakis are just doing research. Immigrants are getting all sorts of jobs (see all the indians in trumpland / on the right), not just technical ones. See table 8 here (you need to ctrlf table 8 then click the link) - "Asians" do all sorts of jobs. They're overrepresented in stem stuff, sure, eg (baseline: 6.4) "category - Computer and mathematical occupations" (23), "Medical scientists" (37). But they're still overrepresented in finance and marketing, if a bit less - "Market research analysts and marketing specialists" (8), "Financial and investment analysts" (21), "Gambling services workers" (25), "Business operations specialists" (11.3). And for every occupation they're specialized in, whites are still a majority - even in the most stark one, medical scientists, whites are 58.7.
So
The plan to have Americans do marketing strategies, finance, write legal documents and do sales while the foreigners do the boring technical stuff was doomed to fail
Doesn't make sense. Whites/Americans never stopped doing 'boring technical stuff', they're still doing more than half of it. (I think OP's "It is no exaggeration to say that most of STEM innovation in US academia is now being carried out by foreign-born people" is exaggerated - probably not too much than half is done by non-whites, some of whom were native-born).
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Direct factual issues aside, a single tweet with a single chart mentioning "The narrative" is almost never correct or informative. Not for individual consumption, but certainly not for a toplevel post. "Those of us who were paying attention ... were screaming to high heaven that vaccinating humans to replicate the spike protein was a Bad Fucking Idea." Bad Fucking Idea isn't a mechanism or an argument, make it if you have one!
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
OP claimed that "revolution and social upheaval are often worse for women than for men", which isn't really true, because 90% of the men are lost while the women aren't, for the reason you describe. Losing 90% of your men is worse for the men, and requires explanation. But the explanation is that men can reproduce more, and thus benefit from either socially outcompeting or killing other men more than women do.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
I don't think OP's last paragraph is any more combative or 'missionary zeal' than many other political posts here, eg about race or trans stuff. And both are fine - conflict over facts values and strong moral claims are useful information.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
I remember probably the same post, with an explicit example of a person who was having a relationship problem that, when described, had a solution so trivial and obvious to scott that he found it shocking (on the order of 'we fight about the dishes constantly', 'maybe alternate doing dishes'), but he gave the person the solution, they implemented it, and it worked and he thanked scott.
But I looked and can't find it.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
I'm also not sure a reasonable account of historical monarchies proves them less "truth-distorting" in a literal sense than existing societies. Stuff like a de-facto requirement to praise the king or monarchy is a requirement is too easy of a dunk - a world of perfect truth, except for a minor "The King Is Great" tax, is still almost entirely perfect. But both explicit mass hysterias, including ones that took the royal court, and more general confusion seems to be as or more prevalent during whatever historical periods as it is today.
His claim (there's probably a lot of interpretive drift here) is that a monarch's career is more secure than random careerist bueraucrats, so they can use their intelligence to make decisions like "climate change is retarded, you're all fired", while existing climate bueraucrats both have an explicit incentive to not do so (lack of a job) and, further, their entire lives they've been sucking up, playing social games, and doing things not directly in pursuit of truth, so they won't even know/want to discredit climate science even if they could.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Isn't the evosych bit backwards? Evolution mostly occurred for humans in small-scale societies (some did in larger societies recently, but less, and I don't think there's are any significant differences in noncultural sexual dimorphism between populations with more or less agriculture historically). In a small society, conflict might mean (exaggerated) half the men die, while their wives are just taken by the winning men and continue to reproduce (maybe their kids die, maybe they don't). Part of my guess - Men (also a very questionable justso story) would rather have a more spread out distribution - have a chance at being 'the best' or 'the worst' - rather than conforming and having a higher chance at being mid-distribution, because the best men might be able to reproduce a lot, while both middling and bottom men reproduce close to zero. Female reproduction is capped, so they're more influenced by the natural risk-aversion of it being easier to imitate the current cultural set of good ideas than try to come up with your own, most of which will be bad.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Cut to 6 months later and some guy is getting arrested for passing out flyers calling George Soros an asshole
A whole third of the US population despises Soros, every other day there's a new Fox article calling him out. Enough to matter is the point, are hate speech laws actually materially preventing any right-wing progress or activism? Not that I know of. Something can be bad, yet also not effective at being bad.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
I don't think that happens enough to matter, in the specific case of hate crime laws. The case for something like that is much stronger for 'hostile work environment' / 'hiring discrimination' - I still think those are an effect, rather than a cause, for the most part, but just in terms of 'number of people affected' or 'amount of right-wing behavior suppressed' they have to be 10,000 times as impactful.
(also, even w/o hate crime enhancements, prosecutorial discretion still exists)
I'd be very interested in this!
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