cuwurious_strag_CA
No bio...
User ID: 190
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
It's literally the exact same people and content as before. The CWR thread currently has 2.2k comments, close enough to a random thread two months ago. It's probably just random.
I didn't do it because it maximized efficiency. I did it because it made a human being happy
Utilitarians literally want to maximize efficiency of making people happy, though. The greatest happiness of the greatest number! And malaria nets and givedirectly are actually "helping people" instead of praying for them after they die of crack, etc. Not watching your children die of malaria presumably creates much more happiness than candy. So what specifically does the sneer about efficiency mean here?
You will never be satisfied that THE AGENCY TASKED WITH PROBLEM SOLVING will solve the problem
okay, well being 'satisfied' clearly isn't the issue, it's the actual people who are dying, right? Let's say all of the EA people were forced to do a bunch of LSD and MDMA and 'satisfied' themselves, and then donated $300/month to homeless people, and then a hundred thousand people who would've been alive died of malaria.
How on earth does giving the guy candy actually accomplish anything? Would giving him more meth? The meth would certainly make him - for the moment - much happier than the candy.
His birthright is the stars, the same as yours is
But he probably doesn't have the physical capability to go to the stars, or contribute to a way there. So what does this mean? "Everyone deserves everything, nobody deserves anything" is a zen koan, a way to notice that "deserve" doesn't necessarily mean anything by itself, not to declare doing meaningless symbolic acts is the greatest good.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
It's like you guys intentionally wanted to preclude people from attempting to have fun
yeah, no shit, this is a site for writing essays about the costs of hospital insurance or 5000 words on how the wokes are taking over movies (grr), people dont want heckin valid images in their essays. same for image uploads
One specific criticism:
"I walked down a street with 20 cars, each one with windows smashed - there's no amount of law enforcement funding that could prevent this". The standard hard-right, or moldbug, response is just "that's not true, just put all the people doing that in jail for a long time, that'd stop it" - which is true! It might not be feasible under the constraint of 'we want to be kind to the poor battered homeless addicts', but that's the thing preventing it, not funding.
Also was interesting he explicitly noted an influence of "fascist philsophy" and the "dissident right" - not that I mind, but it's interesting if that's becoming more common among "conservative / centrist" internet people. (obviously, he follows with a "and I don't want either the far-left or far-right to be in power", and means it)
Between March and July 2022, an average of 760,000 people quit jobs in accommodation and food service
Does this mean anything without context for: how many people were hired, and how many people on average quit jobs? The food industry has high turnover - 70% generally, so with 10M workers in 'accommodations and food service' generally, that many people quitting over three months is expected. An increase in turnover or quitting existing may happen, but saying '760k' doesn't show much. When you refer to an article, please link it so people can investigate claims made! Also: info comes from a few googles, not expert, could be wrong, etc.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Imagine if a democrat arrested 20 republicans for possessing an illegal firearm because they misunderstood an ATF statute and the ATF webpage said that particular modification / accessory was legal. And when Rs got mad about it, a democrat said "think on the meta level - from a pure signaling standpoint - if we want to prevent people from knowingly committing gun crimes, we have to arrest people who commit gun crimes, even if they possess a defense.".
This argument doesn't make sense, at all. If voter fraud is a real and massive issue, surely they can find at least 4 people who really did it and arrest them? Er, except it does actually happen, and people are convicted for it! wikipedia shows many convictions. So ... how does this make any sense?
Whatever your opinion on HBD may be, what do you believe the world would look like if the opposite were true
Nobel prize winners, high achievers generally in technical fields, as well as the most accomplished scientists and mathematicians and philosophers as well as would be at most 3%jewish, and at least 10% hispanic, and 10% black. The internet would've led to a wave of achievement from all races and genders. Scott Alexander, who we know because he's intelligent and blogs, wouldn't be jewish - someone of a uniformly distributed race would've done something else instead. Same for Big Yud. Also, intelligence would be less obviously heritable and cluster in families, as it clearly does from any amount of personal experience.
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.
Kiwifarms, again
From the telegram, kiwifarms is back up at kiwifarms.top - in addition to the onion address. Their new IP seems to be from orcatech/vanwatech, who host 8kun - 8kun had trouble during the jan 6th hearings.
In a featured post, Josh is locking the threads of keffals and associates, and asking people to leave them alone for the moment. User responses range from "well, that sucks" to "yes, sir" to "probably the best move at the moment". Probably partially cope, but none of them want the farms to go down every two days.
Yesterday a discussion about this pitted "blocking some keffals posts strategically" vs "that's giving into the leviathan, never flinch, it's what they want". Ignoring the political violence detour, josh's probably making the right choice - and probably should've done something like it days ago. I'd still prefer lighter (very strict wordfilter? banning doxxing/anything implying violence or doxxing but allowing any other posts?) restrictions a week ago to banning the thread outright a week ago ... but if that wouldn't have worked, temporarily lock the thread outright might've saved the rest of the site.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
This would also apply to many historical kings / military leaders, and suggest they didn't make the many catastrophic mistakes that they did make despite that.
If he doubts the quality of information, surely he can arrange a randomized controlled trial and order 10 independent analysts to report to him
Every autocrat who is fed up with sycophants arranges a RCT? Can you name even one who has done that?
Whenever something violent happens to a congressperson, or even when there's a newsworthy bomb threat or police shooting, there's always a few thousand people who intuit that it was a false flag or a crazy soap opera event. They read a few dozen paragraphs in news stories, note perceived inconsistencies, and start posting. Some do it on discord, some write for 'fake news' websites. A few are making stuff up for clicks, but afaict most genuinely believe it. Almost always this ends up being completely made up, and when it isn't it's usually coincidental. (this guy was a FBI PLANT! [two weeks later] yeah, I called that he was a generic schizo instead of being politically motivated, the libs overreacted so hard lmao). It's really uninteresting to ask 'what are the consequences if it really was a gay lover' - it's like asking 'what if steve bannon and the russians really did personally fund republican stochastic terrorism'
but appears to have a set a life circumstances far outside of the standard Trump supporter. (Is that fair summation of the facts
This doesn't mean he wasn't a trump supporter, though, there are plenty of violent and insane members of both parties, given each is ~ 1/3 of the us population. Obviously this doesn't mean any republican beliefs or policies are wrong either.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Not sure what the point of this post is
That "race determines culture" is just wrong, compare the culture of any race X000 years ago to that of any race today. Vikings to middle managers, aztec blood sacrifices to gardeners, japanese empire to efficient japanese manufacturing systems. Both the american upper-class, intellectuals and scientists and managers, contains a lot of indians, middle easterners, asians, jews, and whites - as do the lower classes - and the culture of the upper-class indians sure is closer to that of the upper-class whites or jews than the lower class indians.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
I'm not really sure a single business insider article from a single analyst (and, iirc business insider leans more towards the content-farm style where anyone can write an article - not that it'd be much more credible in the NYT opinion section) is enough to conclude it's a "serious misfire". (even the article itself says things like "Still, Forte is now trying to quantify the risks to Amazon if the show isn't a megahit" - if it was surely a misfire, why would it say "risks if isn't megahit"?)
The article itself is light on numbers, and I'm not sure what "worsening performance with every episode" means (won't that always happen? nobody is going to pick up episode 5 without watching 1 first), but I don't think this is enough. Same for "they literally staked the future of their whole studio on this show" - could be true, but what precisely does that mean, source?
Finally, 'tom forte, analyst at D.A davidson' comments a lot to the media on a variety of stocks and companies. In general, aren't the reports of those people often unreliable, given both the intrinsic difficulty of assessing the future performance of large companies, and that readers or viewers rewards 'being interesting' more than 'accuracy'? ("If their stock picks were good, they'd be buying them / working at a fund that did, and not telling you")
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
I don't think this is true at all, the people who are adversarially attacking the legal system are usually ... lawyers, it's their job, many mediocre arguments are made that judges have to understand and discard, and maybe some of the lawyers are committing sophisticated fraud, collusion, etc. Meanwhile, sovcits come in and talk like schizophrenics. Maybe the first sovereign citizen forced the system to stay honest in some way, like, make sure they have the proper procedure for handling nonsensical babble, but the next ten thousand aren't proving anything. If you're testing a program for vulnerabilities, sure, just feeding it random strings a few times (or more, computers are fast) to see if it crashes is useful! But when it does and you've fixed that, feeding it more random strings isn't going to catch anything. You need more subtle guided fuzzing or actually reading the code, understanding the mechanics and low level details, or prodding specific features for vulnerabilities in the course of use. Which sounds a lot like being a lawyer and not at all like sovcits.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
I spend so much time here on The Motte that I end up feeling like people who are anti-progressive are probably more thoughtful and less crazy than progressives and more in touch with reality. But that's probably not true
Well, they have nothing to do with each other. Even if moldbug/NRX is the future, that doesn't make aryan prison gangs any more intelligent. The highest points of what one could call Christian European society coexisted with plenty of stupid villagers who were also christian and european. And the best progressive intellectuals coexisted with low brow tabloids / yellow journalism and street gangs. It's very easy to take something quality and make it less so, whether by genetics or drift, and it doesn't indicate at all the high quality version is not so.
Is there any evidence that we're not just rambling buffoons in our own echo chamber, just like I'd find on either end of the spectrum?
Well, there's no "outside view" evidence of that by definition, but that can't prevent themotte from being better. The posts here need to stand for themselves, and some do!
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
can you summarize the 1h40m video? Or ... explain this?
If I said "mitch mcconnell is a grifter with no principles. whatever he has to say is worthless. he is unironically evil". There's probably some truth to that - but, it's sort of true for many politicians, some R some not R (as well as those in other countries) - it's not useful, it doesn't explain why, how he is - and it doesn't even attack the arguments he's making.
Which is surprising, given that researchers almost uniformly agree that phonics is more effective. It's been settled all the way back in the 60's.
Even when summarizing articles, please avoid "experts agree that" in favor of a few sentences on who the experts are, what the evidence / research is, etc. Because the entire case and article rests on that, "researchers agree" communicates very little about what is agreed on or why, and mottzizens have a lot of experience in when 'experts agreeing' were very wrong. "The science is settled" was a mocking term - and while "the science" was often correct, and the skeptics wrong, saying "it's been settled" is not useful.
In particular, the comments here seem confident that phonics works and the alternative doesn't, and the progressives are so ridiculous for believing it - but with little discussion of the methodology by which they settled it! But before you move to "clearly these people are wrong and making a stupid mistake because they are progressives that's what they do", you should take a look at how precisely it is a mistake.
As for vague reasons why "immersion" isn't just feel-good vibes, consider how people learned spoken language historically and still do today ... immersion, just picking things up as they go listening in context, rather than 'phonics'. It's not obviously wrong.
[will read article now and edit]
In fact, the brain of a very young child does perceive letters differently than an adult brain: not as fixed, flat symbols but as three-dimensional objects rotating in space. That’s why kids who are learning to write so commonly exchange “b” and “d,” for example, or “p” and “q.”)
Absolutely no idea what this means, or how it can be true at all. Kids who are learning to write exchange b and d or p and q because they're similar, not because they "rotate". That's like saying if you confuse a and q, it's because the tail is morphing in your brain.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Doesn't matter either way. Risk of myocarditis from vaccine is tiny, and is plausibly lower than the risk of myocarditis from covid itself. On the other hand, the risk of death from covid for a 25yo person is significantly lower than that of the flu. And 'stopping transmission' doesn't matter because it's endemic anyway.
unpaywalled: https://archive.ph/Z4uxN
The stakes here are renaming a few species with weird names, so ... seems unimportant tbh. Taxonomic names are regularly changed, often because species weren't related in the manner previously thought, so it wouldn't be that disruptive to do a few more. Obviously the motivation for doing so is very dumb, it accomplishes nothing and creates needless work, but it won't be destroying taxonomy or anything.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Please stop blaming everything on the "liberal media" without even reading the first two paragraphs of the wikipedia article - "In 2010, the American white nationalist Richard B. Spencer launched The Alternative Right webzine". There was also https://old.reddit.com/r/altright, which has one capture in 2010 but only takes off in 2016. There were a lot of people who were far-right and explicitly called their movement "alt-right".
Browsing this stuff is a bit tedious - I use a combination of web.archive.org and pushshift's api and just read the json... but there's a lot of positive mention of white nationalism.
Amusing aside, one random post: "As a gay anarcho-capitalist and white nationalist (both are organically tied together), I find it quite annoying when I encounter vulgar, violent and vitriolic homophobia on the right. Such hateful focus on what people do in their intimate moments surely most be one of the most useless things one could spend their valuable time on. ..."
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
If there's anything at all to this question, it'd be much better when elaborated in a few paragraphs at least, rather than just one provocative sentence. Good sounding thing [x] is superficially similar to bad sounding thing [y]. Did you know democrats want to SEGREGATE black people with affirmative action? Hitler also segregated. 10k comments, 5k quote tweets, 30k retweets, 50k likes.
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.
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
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.
Taking the federalist (please don't link to political/general news websites about science/study stuff, they're universally terrible sources) at their word for the moment - "[...] within a week of receiving the “Dose 2 Primary Series” of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, there were 14 verified cases of myocarditis or pericarditis among the 102,091 males aged 16-17 who got the shot. Among the nearly 206,000 12-15-year-old males [...] 31 cases were confirmed within a week". This comes out to a rate of 1.3/10k for 16-17 and 1.5/10k for 12-15. Using a relatively recent table of the age distribution for approximate numbers, and just multiplying that number by the 10-19 population, and just assuming they all got vaccinated, gives 3135 cases of (using their claims) vaccine-induced myocarditis or pericarditis.
From another study - In COVID-19 mRNA-vaccine-associated myocarditis, >90% of patients will functionally completely recover, usually after a chest pain syndrome (see Supplementary information). To date, only eight deaths owing to COVID-19 mRNA-vaccine-associated myocarditis have been reported (>99% survival) (see Supplementary information)." (1-.99) * 3135 = 35 deaths. Which is less than the number of covid deaths in the '5-18' age group (which i'm guessing is mostly the 10-19 age group) - 910 - by quite a bit. The supplementary information was just a list of case reports or studies, and the ones that include fatalities were: (i may not be interpreting this correctly fyi) were "27yo male with trisomy 21", "22yo male with fatal outcome, from Korea", "351 cases (8 fatal", "62yo female with fatal outcome", "42yo male (fatal)", "Case series of 136; one fatal; rate 150/million after 2nd dose in 16-19yo males, in Israel", "70yo female with fatal outcome", "18 post vaccine deaths ... 1 myocarditis", etc, and a many more studies with no deaths. I'm not sure where precisely they got 99% from given the SI is just a big list of references but if you add up all of the studies they present, 99% seems accurate. There are also a bunch of studies evaluating risk/benefit for covid vaccines for adolescents, most claiming it's worth it but a few claiming it is not. (in practice, i'm not sure it matters either way, given the very low risk of both covid harm and myocarditis harm. also, covid itself causes myocarditis, probably at a similar rate to the vaccine in young people, but idk). There's also a funny withdrawn article, "Case series of 32 patients in Canada. Although case series was clinically valid, initial estimate of rate was inflated by using denominator of 30,000 instead of 800,000".
It also has "By contrast, the incidence of COVID-19-associated cardiac injury or myocarditis is estimated to be 100 times higher (1,000–1,400 per 100,000 people with COVID-19) than that of COVID-19 mRNA-vaccine-related myocarditis7. Moreover, in contrast to the overall mild presentation and good outcome of vaccine-associated myocarditis, COVID-19 is associated with a major risk of cardiovascular complications8. Among patients with COVID-19, 10% of outpatients and 40% of hospitalized patients have clinically significant myocardial injury, mostly in the absence of clinically significant coronary artery disease8. Advanced age and pre-existing comorbidities (obesity, diabetes mellitus, hypertension or renal dysfunction) are the main predisposing factors for cardiovascular complications in patients with COVID-19".
For people under 20 specifically - for myocarditis from covid infections - here we get "Results: For the 12-17-year-old male cohort, 6/6,846 (0.09%) patients developed myocarditis overall, with an adjusted rate per million of 450 cases (Wilson score interval 206 - 982). For the 12-15 and 16-19 male age groups, the adjusted rates per million were 601 (257 - 1,406) and 561 (240 - 1,313).". This is higher than even your estimate of 1.5/10k. Now, this is comparing 'covid cases' to 'covid vaccination recipients' - which obviously aren't the same, if only 1 in 100 adolescents ever got covid (or, if they all got covid but only the severe cases were counted as 'cases'), that'd mean the vaccine was worse (again assuming those numbers are fine). But they probably are given the large-scale testing etc.
I haven't triple-checked all the math estimate stuff and very likely one or more of them is wrong. But this isn't "mass murder". Healthcare has plenty of disgusting parts - giving obese people pills mildly improving QALYs while they're fattened by well advertised corn, wheat, sugar, and oil paste, unnecessary surgeries, spending tens of thousands on cancer treatments that extend life by like a month, or not at all, pumping all sorts of treatments into barely alive old people to prolong their painful, pointless end, etc. This isn't one, afaict, the effectiveness of vaccines compared to their cost (one shot per year vs one pill per day?) is an outlier for most of medicine.
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