dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
Is it wrong to demand that Israelis relocate to Florida? It’s not like they can’t move all of their holy buildings. Surely the terra itself isn’t sacred?
Of course the land is sacred to them.
/tableflip
Ok, so...
Isn't this the Israelis falling a bit below the sanity waterline? Yes it's true they're surrounded on all sides by people who are so toxic that they would rather die than coexist with Israelis, or even just share a border with them, and yes these other people are behaving really, really badly. But given that Israel is not allowed to solve this the old fashioned way (genocide), and all avenues for peace have epsilon probability of success, ... shouldn't they just nope out?
I agree it sets a terrible precedent that your neighbors can get their way just by succumbing to a deep and apparently permanent craze, and ideally you'd like to prevail against them, but at some point shouldn't you just move to a better neighborhood? Unlike the Palestinians, there are other nations of the world that would welcome them.
Israelis seem destined to be in this fight for centuries, and they're apparently okay with it.
dr_analog
razorboy
8mo ago
Seems real to me. If he was at a VC that did crypto they could have been ejaculating money over the pandemic.
Also his story seems not implausible given my own experience.
I filled out an OKC profile once and was my honest funny cute self. I also included my income, $250-500k and mentioned quant finance. I was getting about 3-4 dates a month. The women weren't amazing but not bad either. I kept this up for a year or so.
Then I came across some OKC blog post about how income is the biggest predictor of dating success for men. I felt crushed, in a lot of the ways the quoted guy did. Surely this didn't really apply to me?
So I removed my income from my OKC profile.
After that I landed two whole dates total over the course of an entire year.
Jokes on me, I'm cute and funny but not enough to cut through the noise the way possibly making $500k does.
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
It's rather amazing that the entire world was ultra eager to believe an unvalidated report from a Palestinian spokesperson that Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza and 500+ people died.
With priors like these, Israel's at a significant disadvantage in the information war here.
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
Lex is also a fucking moron throughout the whole conversation, he can barely even interact with Yud's thought experiments of imagining yourself being someone trapped in a box, trying to exert control over the world outside yourself, and he brings up essentially worthless viewpoints throughout the whole discussion. You can see Eliezer trying to diplomatically offer suggested discussion routes, but Lex just doesn't know enough about the topic to provide any intelligent pushback or guide the audience through the actual AI safety arguments.
Did you know Lex is affiliated with MIT and is himself an AI researcher and programmer? Shocking isn't it? There's such a huge disconnect between the questions I want asked (as a techbro myself) and what he ends up asking.
At any given time I have like 5 questions I want him to ask a guest and very often he asks none of those and instead says "what if the thing that's missing... is LOVE?!?"
To give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he could ask those questions but avoids them to try to keep it humanities focused. No less painful to listen to.
dr_analog
razorboy
1mo ago
I keep coming back to the fact that Japan does actual fat shaming, on an institutional level even (employers fined if employee waist sizes are too big) and as a result doesn't suffer from high obesity.
This should put the disease model of obesity to bed, unless we believe the Japanese, who love 7-11s and convenience perhaps even more than Westerners do, are somehow genetically immune or their food is still so much more pure.
Aside: I would post this in the main CW thread but it's Sunday and don't want it to get lost when the thread rolls over. So I'll just do a lower effort slightly trashier post here.
HAS LIBERALISM PEAKED IN OREGON?(!)
In 2020, the state of Oregon passed a referendum, ballot Measure 110, which decriminalized all drugs(!) with a vote of 58% in favor.
Voters in Oregon (such as myself) believed this was the path to enlightened drug policy, being informed by the revered Portugal model. Tacked onto the referendum was a bit of social justice theory as well: the police would be required to document in detail the race of anyone they stopped from now on for any reason. To ensure the police weren't disproportionately harassing the, say, 5 black people who live in Oregon. (okay okay they're 2.3% of the population)
The ensuing data was an almost perfect A/B test, the kind you'd run with no shame over which kind of font improved e-commerce site checkout conversions. By 2023, Oregon's drug overdose rate was well outpacing the rest of the country, so much so that the police officers regularly Narcan with them and revive people splayed out in public parks. Sometimes the same person from week to week. It's true this coincides with the fentanyl epidemic, which could confound the data and have bumped up overdoses everywhere but that wouldn't explain alone why deaths have especially increased in Oregon. The timing fits M110.
Anyway! At some point someone decided to compare notes with Portugal's system. Some stark differences!
https://gooddrugpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/PortugalvOregon1.pdf
Briefly, Portugal uses a carrot and stick model with a lot of negative incentive, whereas Oregon just kinda writes a $100 ticket and suggests calling a hotline for your raging drug problem maybe lol.
In the first 15 months after Measure 110 took effect, state auditors found, only 119 people called the state’s 24-hour hotline. That meant the cost of operating the hotline amounted to roughly $7,000 per call. The total number of callers as of early December of last year had only amounted to 943.
The absence of stick appears to not be very effective in encouraging users to seek treatment.
Are the kids having fun at least? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/health/portland-oregon-drugs.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/fHxWk)
“Portland [not Portugal, just to be clear --ed] is a homeless drug addict’s slice of paradise,” said Noah Nethers, who was living with his girlfriend in a bright orange tent on the sidewalk against a fence of a church, where they shoot and smoke both fentanyl and meth.
Yes. At least, that's the brightest part of the article. The rest is pretty depressing and sad and sickening and worrisome.
After a few years of this, the Oregon legislature yesterday finished voting to re-criminalize drugs.
The NYT again: https://archive.ph/3zksH
Critics are out in force, arguing that the legislature overrode the will of voters (remember it was passed by referendum) and that the state sabotaged the program by not efficiently distributing treatment resources to addicts. This poster believes the low uptake and missing negative incentives prove that drug harm reduction is not primarily about access to treatment, but about incentive not to use.
The governor has indicated that she would sign.
tbh I'm surprised Oregon repealed this so quickly. Has liberalism peaked in Oregon?
As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of. Like 1 millionth of the overdose deaths perhaps. It's good to run experiments though, right? This was a pretty good experiment. We at least have an upper bound on how liberal a drug policy we should pursue.
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
Ozempic looks like it's the real deal. I don't put much stock in people who keep muttering under their breath about some hidden catch, as if the universe works that way. A cure for obesity, as well as seemingly effective
Ozempic is probably clearly an all cause mortality improvement for people with obesity, which is a huge win, though I think the cost-benefit is worse if you're taking it for non-health reasons since it does cause an apparent decrease in muscle mass and also elevated heart rate which... probably can't be good?
I think those are the catches.
I sure do hear a lot of muttering from naturally thin types about it though!
I haven't much experience with scout and church leaders though I also was a teenage admirer of John Carmack. I realize I knew very little about him until I listened to his four hour Lex interview
What makes him a good young role model? Even in a space like video games he can make a mark and be successful
- deeply throwing himself into his work; stories about how Michael Abrash would leave him at the office on Friday and come back on Monday and see that John had been there the whole weekend hacking away trying to optimize Quake
- shamelessly learning from every source possible (he mentioned consuming programming magazines and even reading ads for educational value)
- was not credentialed but he didn't let that stop him
- was actually kind of a young cyber-criminal (black hat hacker) but that didn't define his future
- doesn't let his obsession with nerdiness have him eschew physical fitness: he's also a fit and in-shape BJJ practitioner
- still ate pizza his whole life, every day, from Domino's
- presumably still found a happy healthy relationship with a woman and is a father that provides for his family and also spends time with them?
- mentions stuff about taking vacations to hotel rooms next to an airport just so he can get away and concentrate on his work undisturbed
- oh also bought himself Ferraris to play with after he became wealthy why not
Okay he seems pretty awesome. Someone kids could look up to.
Does this stuff make him a conservative male role model though?
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
I was thinking buy condos in Florida like millions of Jews before them?
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
FTA
Actually, less than a month ago as I write, in a “type 1 conflict” in which America had no dog, two hundred thousand Armenians were ethnically cleansed.
Sorry, what? Can I have a link? I can't even find a Wikipedia article.
dr_analog
razorboy
6mo ago
Well, it's fraud if you do that on purpose. It's a mistake if you have an accounting accident. And, as per Matt Levine, I agree your accounting accident is not sympathetic if you were also spending lavishly on yourselves. Where did FTX fall here? I'm slightly inclined to believe in the accounting accident story, but only because I've made multi-million dollar accounting mistakes before, which we thankfully discovered immediately. More than once. And I wasn't in a "move fast and break things" grow to the moon kind of place that FTX was.
I realize SBF arguing "accounting accident!" doesn't sit well with people amongst all of his other horrendous behavior. Poor slob.
dr_analog
razorboy
3mo ago
Let me see if I understand this
1: we must increase diversity of ATCs
2: let’s impose AA style quotas
1: no that would cause backlash
2: what about a final exam that’s actually a biographical questionnaire?
1: what, and only hire people with black-sounding upbringings? too blatant
2: but what if the right answers to the questionnaire are random but we separately and secretly tell the people we want to hire how to answer?
1: let’s do it!
Is that really it? Tell me I’m misunderstanding this!
dr_analog
razorboy
3mo ago
If anything, working at Google actually made me a lot more confident about their PII protections. They take it extremely seriously and I'm actually surprised so many people were able to abuse it, though it's to be expected at their scale: Google has 175,000 employees and maintains billions of accounts.
To me, this is the exception that proves the rule: you're safer with Google.
dr_analog
razorboy
3mo ago
And then to smear everyone concerned as QAnon, as though fears of data collection and spying haven't been validated time and time and time again. Did Snowden happen before you were born? Has it been that long?
The vein here is that the most unremarkable people seem to believe that far-away powers that be care about looking at their private data because they're such a threat to the state because they're so edgy and subversive when the truth is the powers that be just don't care about them. Probably not even in the aggregate.
dr_analog
razorboy
3mo ago
Resulting in producers starting to add sesame deliberately. Impacting people with allergy but capable of eating products that had just traces of it.
I'm dumb. Why would this rule change cause them to start adding sesame deliberately?
I'm just about finished with a bulk phase and now doing a cut phase. That is, dieting.
My problem with dieting is that the person who decides to begin the diet., me, can be overruled by the future me through non-compliance. I cannot make decisions that bind my future self.
If I get a DEXA scan done, and weigh myself, and have blood test and take BP measurements, that puts me into a mode to really focus on my health. The problem is after a few months of it the dread sets in and I avoid weighing myself. Or I stop logging my calories. Some time has gone by and I don't want to see my BP anymore.
Biomarkers are great for me for motivation, but they rely on me to get them done, and sometimes I run out of motivation to have them done.
One idea I had writing this: when I get my DEXA scan done, immediately schedule the next one for 3 months out. There's probably not much health utility to getting them done so frequently, but I imagine it would be super annoying to pay for one and see fat gain. Looming persistent motivator.
Anything else along these lines? I could imagine a boutique health app leveraging similar persistent motivator things like this.
Alternatively, can I create a personal psycho-social environment that puts extreme pressure on me to strive for low body fat? You know, like what the Japanese have going for them.
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
Scott Adams seems to have updated quite strongly on a 1000 person poll, which included black people, over the nuance of who agreed with an apparent well known(?) racist dog whistle.
He decides from here that black people hate white people and that white people must get away from them. Then he hurls some fairly ready to go insults about black people in general that I guess he was just saving for this?
He seems as... crazed ... as usual here, but I do agree he's being taken out of context. He obviously feels betrayed because he thought of himself as a fierce advocate for black people (??) but learning that all black people might still have problems with all white people completely flipped him.
I'm trying to think of a more fair headline. Maybe: Dilbert creator decides black people are hate group after reading one small poll about a racist dog whistle, cautions white people to "get the fuck away" from black people.
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
Unless your value and pedigree are pre-established you must submit your bid in the most dehumanizing and easily disregarded possible way.
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
I don't really understand why the response to the FBI wasn't "feel free to click 'report this tweet' if you think it violates our AUP".
The fact that they wanted an inside line but still couldn't produce any legal process compelling them to take tweets/accounts down doesn't look very good? If you were Twitter would you want to normalize this? Why would you want to be in a place where you're continuously negotiating with law enforcement about what you can and can't take down?
This seems like humoring computer illiterate people at the FBI slash keeping them from getting mad and asking for burdensome regulation.
Would a different defendant have been treated differently? It's true if he was the host of Planet Money and he had an otherwise normal podcast but once in awhile he shared a deranged conspiracy theory about parents of victims of kids who died in school shootings, the damages might be lessened. But probably only because because people who show up for light hearted economics chat aren't hankering to fight a culture war and act on the defamatory information.
Running a hot culture war podcast has higher risks.
dr_analog
razorboy
1yr ago
Psychology is, therefore, the science of producing solutions that work for people that need them.
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?
Still very broad, but I assume excludes crystal therapy even if there was evidence of its efficacy.
The only way to help these people is to force them into institutions that will treat their mental illness and addiction against their will.
Even three months in jail (for possession) would probably work miracles. Break their cycle of compulsive using and let them sober up and give them a chance to try being something other than a junkie living in a tent in a park.
(The public thinks of jail as a fate almost like death but they’re not that bad. The best jail is probably better than the worst public school)
Well, not just really good computational biochemistry skills? Wouldn't it also need a revolution in synbio to access an API where it input molecules and they were then produced? Where would that get sent? How do you convince people to inhale it?
Aside: I expect this synbio revolution would usher in an era of corresponding print-at-home immunity, reducing the threat vector from bespoke bioweapons. I don't expect all x-risk from weapons defense to be this symmetrical, shooting down an ICBM is much much harder than launching one for example. I would like to be as concrete as possible about the risks though.
I don't mean to dismiss the idea of systemic white supremacy completely. Cultural baggage is obviously real and doesn't go away at the stroke of a pen.
More like immediately jumping to 5 black cops exhibiting lethal brutality towards a black civilian = systemic white supremacy at work.
This is blaming every bad thing that ever happens to black people on white people. Both the victim and the cops In this case, sorry, it's a bit much for me.
It comes across as saying black cops in 2023 are still not responsible for their actions. Give me a break?
The first Untouchables that have equal rights are probably going to be pretty baggage laden. After, oh, I don't know, 2-3 generations of Untouchables achieving the heights of power I have less sympathy for the seemingly complete disavowal of ownership of decision making.
When do we get to stop kneejerk blaming every bad thing on systemic white supremacy? That's the roadmap I want to see.
Is your debate partner an underdog fetishist?
Someone here (or maybe on /r/themotte) opened my eyes to this idea. I'm sorry I can't find the post and credit you, various searches aren't helping me find it.
There exists an apparent mini-moral philosophy of always siding with the underdog. On the surface this has good feels: always side with the weak against the strong. In every conflict, between individuals or between nations, find out who the strong one is, and find out who the weak one is. The weak one is the one you should side with.
This is not as ironclad a moral imperative as it appears on the tin. The most extreme and simple form of the imperative's flaw is such:
Suppose Mr Rogers and some random homeless guy get into a fight.
These are the facts and they are not disputed: the homeless guy demanded Mr Rogers’ wallet and he said no. So, the homeless guy attacked him. Shocking everyone, Mr Rogers fights back ferociously, sending the homeless guy to the hospital. Mr Rogers escapes without a scratch.
Digging into the homeless guy's background reveals that he has been in and out of prison a lot. For theft and minor violent offenses, except he was most recently imprisoned for pushing random bystanders off of train platforms onto train tracks. He had been arrested before anyone died. The homeless guy was released from prison a few days before he got into a fight with Mr Rogers.
Mr Rogers is a saintly widely beloved media personality with a legendary benevolence towards all.
So. Should someone here be penalized?
An underdog fetishist might say yes, Mr Rogers should be penalized because he’s actually a member of an elite class whereas the deranged homeless guy is a member of an underclass. This is a perfect example of class struggle.
In my experience, most people consider the Palestinians the underdog here, but not everyone. Some consider Israel the underdog being propped up by the US.
Anyway, while I consider it morally confused, I contend people who would condemn Mr Rogers exist, and that if you're going to spend time debating an extremely nuanced complex situation like the Israeli/Palestine conflict with others, it's valuable to at least first figure out if your debate partner would always (e.g.) side with the homeless guy against Mr Rogers.
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