cuwurious_strag_CA
No bio...
User ID: 190
Russian performance in the war doesn't exactly scream competence, so it would be surprising, if they pulled something like this off, so deep in NATOs turf.
Why would russian competence at large-scale mobilization or logistics or strategy have anything, at all, to do with their competence at an individual sabotage mission? If russia was, say, Chad in africa, you'd expect them to be related - but russia is clearly capable of maintaining nuclear weapons, spy satellites etc, and the failures of the war don't necessarily suggest they'd fail at that. That doesn't have much to do with anything.
No idea if anyone did it, or who, at all, but that approach isn't useful.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
But like... how is "Drag Kids" even remotely plausibly not grooming
Because at least 95% of people who do "drag kid" shows do not, personally, want to molest the children involved. It may be 'grooming' in the sense that it's grooming to put a kid in violin classes or to 'groom a successor' for a company. It isn't grooming in the sense of manipulating a child into being sexually available. And the latter is a sense, and implication, that the term 'groomer' is primarily used for. Both may, in fact, be bad - just in crucially different ways.
This kind of rhetoric isn't useful, because it just distracts people from what causes kids to become trans, or gay, or whatever. "teachers / drag queens grooming them into being trans/gay/whatever" ... is not a common cause. Maybe /r/egg_irl is.
Same for calling it "child abuse". Child abuse usually means either beating or having sex, or sometimes 'severe psychological neglect'. Having a male kid get in a dress and dance - which can, still, be perverted, degenerate, and disgusting - isn't really child abuse in that sense at all, and calling it so is just distracting people with vaguely relevant but mostly meaningless assertions.
Next time, include a source for the claim? I dug it up -
I read the wikipedia article, an incredibly boring use of 5 minutes of time (and reading the sources was worse...), and it ends with
"On March 31, the court issued an order to count at most 400 rejected absentee ballots and denied any other relief.[88][89] On April 7, the court scrutinized those ballots and determined that 351 had been legally cast. Those votes were counted, with 111 going to Coleman, 198 to Franken, and 42 to others, giving Franken a final margin of 312 votes.[90]"
You seem to refer to "In July 2010, Minnesota Majority, a conservative watchdog group, conducted a study in which it flagged 2,803 voters in the Senate race for examination, including 1,359 it suspected to be ineligible convicted felons in the largely Democratic Minneapolis-St. Paul area.[110][111] Subsequent investigations of Minnesota Majority's claims by election officials found that many of its allegations were incorrect. Some of the cases that were submitted involved mistaking a legal voter for a felon with the same name, others involved felons who had had their voting rights reinstated after serving their sentences, and others were felons who illegally registered to vote but did not vote in 2008 election.[112][113][114] Ramsey County officials narrowed their investigation to 180 cases, while Hennepin County examined 216 cases.[115]"
From the first source (fox news):
The report said that in Hennepin County, which in includes Minneapolis, 899 suspected felons had been matched on the county's voting records, and the review showed 289 voters were conclusively matched to felon records. The report says only three people in the county have been charged with voter fraud so far.
The report says that in Ramsey, 460 names on voting records were matched with felon lists, and a further review found 52 were conclusive matches.
Added up, that's 342, which is slightly higher than 312. (although even if we believe that, if even 5% of the felons voted R, 342*.9 < 312). (although you could just as well argue plenty of the nonconclusive matches were 'real' too, whatever)
The star tribune confirms the 312 number, 'Ever since Franken won by a mere 312 votes', and
Of 1,359 suspected ineligible felons originally brought forward to Hennepin and Ramsey County officials, the vast majority have been withdrawn, found to be unsubstantiated, or erroneous. Ramsey County officials say they are still examining 180 cases; Hennepin County says it's still looking at 216.
Unless most of those were confirmed, that still puts us under 312.
And (from kare11):
"We've charged about 30 cases so far," he said, "About half of them were people who were felons who just registered but did not actually vote. Election workers flagged those names before they could vote, but it's still a felony for a felon to register."
Those who are being charged with two felonies are felons who registered at the polling place on election day and voted, leaving no time for a cross-check with lists of convicts still on probation "We're going to continue to investigate 180 other complaints but we're not talking about a huge number of actual cases. And of that 30 about half of them were registration only, they didn't actually vote."
If we assume that cuts half of the 180 + 216, that puts us well under 312.
On the other hand, of course, dropping an investigation may be because it's impossible to prove, not because it didn't happen.
But
He said just because someone's name appears both on a list of felons and a roster of voters doesn't prove they they voted illegally. In Minnesota many felons are granted an early end to their probation, and their rights are automatically restored. "The voter records as they appear on a computer screen say Joe has 5 years probation," Diamond explained, "But then when you talk to Joe's probation officer he says, 'No, we released Joe after 2 years, or after 3 years.' Well, then Joe can vote."
So - at a guess, these particular voters didn't tip it, but ... who knows.
However - these are right-wing claims. Did some R voters vote illegitimately, tipping the election rightwards? Idk, but from the wikipedia article, there were a number of recounts where both sides challenged vote counts, absentee ballot validity, et cetera - and in each of those, franken ended up with more extra votes than his opponent.
Obviously, both sides are very willing to play hard in the legal system, fighting tooth and nail, and care about the 'facts' only tangentially', and, more visibly so in more local races, sometimes commit outright fraud.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
I thought it psychology was specific to helping people solve problems by analyzing their individual thought processes and proposing and assisting them in implementing changes to their thought processes?
It sounds like you're referring to CBT here? Freudian psychoanalysis isn't really this. Notably, freud still "works". Also, EDMR works. At least freud, while absurd, is complicated, moderately-interesting in its absurdity, but EDMR seems like something out of scientology. And scientology's methods would, probably, succeed in a RCT just like cbt and edmr do.
Which begs the question - do CBT's claimed methods of changes of thought processes actually do anything, or are they just scientific sounding gloss to the same combination of social pressure and faux friendship as two hundred years ago? "the only reason why cristal therapy and angel therapy are not psychological therapies approved by the APA, is because they are lacking evidence of their efficacy. But this lack could easily be fixed if we really wanted to." - if crystal and angel therapy really do work as well as psychology, surely that's an indictment of psychology.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
it's a copy of the reddit feature to send someone a wholesome validation mental health support / suicide hotline phone number, to use as a joke. from the rdrama codebase. doesn't matter
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
It's very plausible, EA does a lot of policy stuff, and that can mean writing the text of bills / regulations
Who are they targeting that follows Vitalik and/or Coindesk but is so dumb that they'll follow up on the world's laziest cold call?
The million normal / below-average people who jumped on crypto not because of an interest in decentralization, experimental financial systems, or more practical applications for cryptography, but because the number went up and it put money in their bank account. Someone's buying and bagholding all the shitcoins after the bots and traders pump them.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
At the age of 12, in 2003, Le Conte and a group of friends played a contest to “find the weirdest porn on the internet.” Today, the results of such a search would be unpublishable
On the 12 + porn bit, controversial claim: it doesn't actually do that much, she wasn't really injured by it. men were much more violent with women (on average), not less, in pre-modern life, and choking-violent-sex-bad thing seems like a strange male-power-bad/early-feminist thing.
As for 'unpublishable' - no? there are plenty of places that'll "publish" that, including substack, or random subreddits. Reddit still hosts all sorts of weird porn. It's not going in the NYT, but why does that matter?
I’m never going to have TikTok on my phone because I tried, and I hate that it doesn’t let you search or watch what you want. It is fully algorithm-driven. It’s incredibly frustrating
tiktok actually does have a search function, and you can also browse by hashtags? No idea what that means. Tiktok is designed for the algorithm-driven mode, and it's more effective for most people's use cases, but it isn't even that different from 'searching or watching what you want' - it's still the same content, and most people click on the cat videos or half-naked women either way.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
why are the children of our elites so consistently idiots and drug addicts
They aren't any moreso than anyone else - there are a lot of poor drug addicts, being smart doesn't necessarily prevent you from being a drug addict, and the high levels of intelligence require a lot of randomness / non-additive genetic variation / other unknown (non-shared-environment) factors, so children of the smartest aren't as good on average, even though they're still smart. Coming apart at the tails etc, once you've milked all you can from currently-existing additive variation you can only get a lot better with something else.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
The process and values involved in that 'treatment' are awful though. If you take someone borderline suicidal and put them in temporary-jail with a bunch of differently insane people - maybe they even become friends, as in the OP - is that really going to help? Pair that with the frequent overuse of antipsychotics. And the life-denying nature of most of the 'therapy' treatments - convincing someone that, actually, self-care via burgers and 'live, laugh, love' is the true purpose in life to avert suicide isn't that much better when the person was, in part, depressed due to the initial (true) hollowness of that.
(Obviously, the person who euthanized themselves in the OP didn't have anything resembling a good reason to do so. But grandparent's suggestion that 'if you want to kill yourself, just do it' has some merit - one's instinctive desire not to is just evolutionary knowledge of how useful & powerful life is, and abandoning that should require understanding and confronting that personally, at least)
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
And the argument "The CIA/NSA are malicious and spying on everyone" are often expounded by sane people, but "The CIA/NSA put a camera in my bagel" isn't, and "death con 3" seems more the latter than kevin macdonald or ron unz
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Do you have any evidence for this? It's an accessible claim, whereas 'someone at amazon did a ... whatever it's called, business analysis or something ... and thought it'd benefit amazon's streaming platform to have a large cultural event' is less obvious.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
They already do lock some dox info until you register an account to make isp/cdn takedown based on the doxxes harder, that's about it
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Newton was 'addicted' to grand theories, too! "Of an estimated ten million words of writing in Newton's papers, about one million deal with alchemy". Also a religious heretic, believing all sorts of random christian things.
Grand theories are fine, if they're true. If they're not, the problem isn't that they're "grand theoriesl", just that they're untrue. Read some science, history (although the former - physics, chem, bio, etc - is more uniformly reliable than the second), speak to/read from all sorts of people, and come up with the useful ones!
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
I would not be overly surprised if they found themselves in a situation where Scott and 10 other high-decouplers uselessly decry this new trend of EAers embezzling for malaria nets
The entire EA forum is filled with people saying 'this is bad and evil and disgusting EA would never support this we made a severe mistake in blindly trusting SBF we deeply apologize we must be very careful to make sure this doesn't happen again'. And those posts are now the top posts of all time on the EA forum. They're also explicitly saying things like 'utilitarianism taken too far can look like this which is why we endorse pluralism and moderation', and they've said things like that beforehand. So I don't think the 'allergic to 2nd order effects' criticism applies!
I think the EA’s failure to have any effective impact on Bankman’s moral calculus is its complete absence of emotional salience
Wrong in both ways, imo? EAs are very emotionally moved by the dying african children, generally. Hard to argue for with a source, i guess. Closest I can try - EAs like Alexander Berger (open phil co-CEO), for instance, donated a kidney to someone he'd never met to help save their life. That doesn't feel like an action you take with 'absence of emotional salience'. Another one would be the strong moral sense EAs have about how important their work is, to the point that burning out of EA because it was totalizing / took over your life is a somewhat-common issue. (although I would not argue that's a criticism of EA itself.)
But - every large movement that's ever had strong 'emotional salience' combined with strong moral teachings has had many, many prominent figures who have broken those teachings or done other bad things. Christianity, progressivism, conservatism, etc. Christians, progressives, conservatives, people of any other group - commit crimes, scam all the time. Sam doesn't say much about utilitarianism/EA other than 'some of its followers often do very bad things', which is true for any set of morals. One can say utilitarianism/EA isn't necessarily better at preventing misconduct than other belief systems, but one can't say it's worse, absent ... any evidence of that - and it never claimed to be better, just that donating money to starving children was worthwhile. And if you compare the outcomes to other crypto exchanges that've collapsed (there are many) - hundreds of millions to 'effective projects' + crypto scams versus ... hundreds of millions to luxury goods plus crypto scam?
"I think the EA’s failure to have any effective impact on Bankman’s moral calculus is its complete absence of emotional salience" is compared to " Its stories are designed for emotional salience, using novelty/paradox/shock in key moments to illustrate the moral point", yet
The effective altruist movement started with Peter Singer’s Drowning Child scenario: suppose while walking to work you see a child drowning in the river. You are a good swimmer and could easily save them. But the muddy water would ruin your expensive suit. Do you have an obligation to jump in and help? If yes, it sounds like you think you have a moral obligation to save a child’s life even if it costs you money. But giving money to charity could save the life of a child in the developing world. So maybe you should donate to charity instead of buying fancy things in the first place.
How can you seriously claim this "lacks emotional salience"? drowning child you are personally causing to die? really?
Otherwise, as in the case of Bankman-Fried, our passions and our greeds prevent us from following through on what we ought
christianity, again, doesn't actually stop this from happening. christians constantly "sin". plus, utilitarianism/EA contests your deontological claim about what "we ought" to do, and effectively, the local wholesome 'feed the homeless' drive really does just save fewer lives than malaria nets, so how on earth is the former more christian?
I think half of the 'EA isn't morally salient' claim comes from things like - donating lots of money made from facebook stocks to global health charities. In one sense, it's incredibly technical and complicated, and isn't a group emoting session around an altar - more like a spreadsheet of estimated disability-adjusted life years saved. But even given the deep philosophical problems the spreadsheet has, the money is still going to global health causes, and the EAs seem to care emotionally about the recipients.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Trump going to jail seems unlikely, but investigating and prosecuting can take a long time, so if he were to be it taking this long isn't that much evidence against
How much does it actually cost to maintain YouTube, cloud hosting, Gmail and Google Search (their only valuable products
Also apps / workspace / education (presumably valuable for the same reason gmail is), and investments in AI (driven by hiring high quality people from hardware to researchers). I'm not sure if chrome, maps, android, and hundreds of other services are 'valuable' in that sense of shareholder value - but should google just drop chrome development or maps?
There's also all the non-coder staff to support operating in 100+ countries, culturally, legally, physical infrastructure, etc, which a small startup needs much less of.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Race realism, killing the civil rights act, and 'tough on crime' without slurs is going to polarize more than that with slurs?
When the seams of angry young men are mined out
"angry young men" aren't really an independent class and that doesn't describe most of the specific things driving people to the far-right - but taken literally, no they won't, because every year a new 1/100th of the population is born, and a new 1/100th turns 18!
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Yeah, every time I've had a serious debate about biden dementia I just search 'biden full speech' on youtube and find 30m - 1h long straight speeches that are almost entirely coherent. This doesn't seem like a person with dementia, at all. And it's very annoying that so many people (other platforms or irl, not here) just say 'he has dementia, wow us is in bad shape collapse' when ... it just doesn't seem right. Especially since during trump, the same thing, with a ton of out of context clips of trump seeming stupid on twitter and many dems saying trump had dementia (he didn't).
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
The US depends much more on those with 3-4 or higher standard deviation higher IQ than it does having a mass of 100IQ people. The latter already just believe what smarter people come up with and work in jobs, entertain themselves, in ways said smarter people come up with. Whereas the latter ... physics, philosophy, finance, law, math, engineering, etc.
So if you're worried about tens of millions of lower IQ people added to the nation, why not worry about the hundreds of millions of similarly lower IQ people already here? There are still 15% of the population below a standard deviation anyway.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
I've heard - They are taking vulnerable people and sending them somewhere where there aren't resources or support from them, a city has social programs and food banks, does martha's vineyard? Also, it's a transparent PR ploy, the migrants weren't even from texas
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Also, in the absence of porn people will just jerk off to non-porn naked women, and then almost-naked women, and then mostly-clothed women. (in current modern conditions, upon which that depends very finely. no idea if hunter gatherers masturbate or how often, etc). Or they'd just torrent it. A better argument would probably be directly against masturbation as opposed to for banning it.
Due to the nature of human habit and memory, obtaining satisfaction from a woman promotes and orients a man’s sexuality toward women, and not oneself
Why isn't this also true of masturbation? It orients one towards women because it's images of them!
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Reminds of a graham factor article arguing something similar, that the US is ineffective at catching criminals because of civil rights/due process protection and thus needs more severe punishments.
Elaborate? Programming is very varied. People are different, but while I can see a physics grad disliking copypaste webdev stuff, most physics people I know find something like neural net interpretability or datastructures or programming language design interesting? (not really specific suggestions just illustrating)
Also, a physics degree is good evidence that you're very smart and capable of doing complex work, and a variety of employers that pay well look for physics grads (although often for coders).
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