faceh
1d ago
Yes, there's certainly an argument that a well-fed and generally fit European female has less to fear from many of the individual males of certain populations on a sheer physical prowess angle, compared to most grown bears. If she can run faster and further that's all she really needs.
I can understand why that argument ("those men can't rape you, they're too small/weak") wouldn't be comforting in this context, though.
I still remember the blue/gold dress discourse.
Plenty of women go abroad alone to dangerous countries like India. Sure there are some examples of women getting raped/killed there, but plenty more aren't.
If the questions specifies that they're in the woods, this presents a situation where the male in question can reasonably expect not to be observed by a third party.
THAT much, I will grant, is reason for concern for the woman.
I would not say 20% of men across the world would choose to assault/rape/attack a lone female. And even actual criminals don't commit crimes all the time.
I'm not quite willing to say 20% of men would not, purely on the evolutionary argument that assault and rape were a common element of our ancestral environment.
Really, my concern is that I don't know to what extent all men, everywhere on the planet, are actually socially trained against any sort of violence against women... and have enough to lose that they care about that social training. I could see it being higher than 20% who would in theory be dangerous to an unaccompanied female. But the error bars on that estimate are large.
But I can say for damn sure that a tiny handful of bears is trained not to be violent towards humans in general, but some are more naturally inclined towards it than others.
faceh
1d ago
No, but it was a good example of people not being aware of how human perception works, and thus jumping right to "these people have to be lying to me" rather than "there's something weird about that dress."
faceh
1d ago
The genes that foster safety in groups and willingness to cooperate will outpace the genes that might make a man rape/assault someone.
Right, but in this situation, as stated in the question, there are no groups to cooperate with or intervene, the male's behavior is based solely on whatever he himself chooses to do in the absence of any observers, and thus no immediate social consequences.
I am going to argue that in the ancestral environment, if a random male happens across a random female, both complete strangers to the other, in the middle of the woods, nobody else around, rape WAS probably a common outcome. And this would eventually lead to general norms that women shouldn't travel anywhere alone.
I have seen decent evidence that many males of certain cultures are willing to engage in violence against females even in the full view of other people. Can't say what that percentage is with precision, but I'd have to assume a higher percentage would willingly engage in violence if there were no observers.
I think I will stipulate that the number has to be <50%, but 3% is probably the absolute lower bound.
faceh
1d ago
One possible solution is that you have people pay to have questions answered, and as part of that payment, they pay people to act as oracles who have good reputations.
Yeah, this was part of how Augur's system worked. Reward people who end up on the 'right' side of a final resolution question consistently AND anyone who is answering the question has to stake some portion of their reputation on the outcome they're judging. Eventually 'bad actors' (who are either malicious or are too stupid to reliably interpret contracts) lose out and the correct/consistent oracles accumulate more wealth so they can have more influence over future resolutions.
It helped settle into an equilibrium where it was usually not worthwhile to try to exploit an apparent ambiguity, while knowing that wealthier oracles will ignore said ambiguity and you'll lose money directly by trying to challenge them.
I've been blown away by how bad otherwise intelligent people are at writing and interpreting resolution criteria.
Yep. There are plenty of bright line rules for resolving ambiguity in legal contracts, and it can be permissible to pull in outside evidence to interpret them, but you have to think about the ENTIRE document in a systematic way, you can't just glance it over and interpret it based on vibes.
And glancing at things and going with your gut is how so, so many humans operate.
The problem is there's always a tradeoff when you try to get as precise as possible with your wording, in that it both makes it harder for laypeople to easily understand what the terms say (and less likely to read it all) and, paradoxically, can open up a greater attack surface because there's more places where ambiguities can arise.
This is where I imagine LLMs would have a role, if they are given a set of 'rules' by which all contracts are to be interpreted, and they can explain the contracts they read to laypeople, and everyone agrees that the AI's interpretation is final, then you at least make it more challenging to play games with the wording.
It definitely annoys me that "access to the financial system writ large" has become so utterly critical to doing anything useful that it immediately has a totalizing effect on what anybody can do, anywhere in the world, even on the internet.
Maybe there's one bank/payment processor that holds out and willingly acts to handle the 'controversial' transactions, but that just removes things one layer back, as other banks and processors will eventually blacklist that bank. And thus rendering that bank mostly useless for any other purpose. If it doesn't shut down it'll struggle to remain solvent.
Lets say that some pornography company was wealthy enough it could 'become its own bank' and processes payments on behalf of users and extends credit and otherwise runs all its own transactions and only has to interface with the financial system to purchase the services it needs to operate. Once it is known as the 'porn bank' it'll probably be impossible to find any other financial services willing to interface with them unless they comply with all the sames restrictions the other banks are working under... which defeats the purpose of 'self banking' to begin with.
It comes down to the fact that the financial system is a tightly connected web, and the main value any bank or payment process can provide is access to the network, so maintaining that access is their primary concern.
From the moral standpoint, it bugs me when there's very little evidence(indeed, I've seen none) that digital artwork depicting heinous, illegal, or otherwise disgusting acts is actually causing harm to nonconsenting parties. The reasons we find CSAM objectionable and worthy of legally crushing are generally not present when it comes to digital art. One party or group wants some art, the artist produces it and gets paid, nobody else even need be aware of what it contains!
It'd be nice to think of our financial system as mostly as set of dumb tubes that transmit the data representing our money around without caring much about the start and endpoint... with a lot of protections in place to mitigate fraud, theft, and user error. But ultimately a financial company is operated by humans who are subject to legal jurisdiction of some country or other, and have to maintain access to the global finance system if they want to take that money to any other jurisdiction, so in reality the 'rules' are set based on what all participants are willing to tolerate.
Anyhow, this is ultimately the impetus for the protagonists in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon to create a private, heavily anonymized bank/data haven in a location outside of the U.S.' sphere of influence. And in order for them to pull it off it required a chain of events that seems even more fantastical now than it did then, such as finding an island nation that is independently wealthy yet also politically stable enough to act as a headquarters for such an endeavor.
faceh
5d ago
Indeed, I read the exact arguments on lesswrong and elsewhere that humans would dive headlong into AGI because the military incentives to build one, and to build it before the other guys, was irresistible.
Countries throwing billions of dollars at reckless research because they don't want to be conquered is EXACTLY what doomerists warn of.
A lot of markets become mainly bets on how the creator will decide to resolve it rather than on what the question is purportedly about.
Yes. I've seen problems arise even with fairly 'objective' markets because even if you can measure a given phenomenon with precision, people might still mistrust the sensor doing the measuring. The market asks "what will be the high temperature in Miami on [date]" and we have to consider whose thermometer? Is it calibrated correctly? Are there any conditions that might throw it into an unexpected/error state?
So now the question is somewhat less about climate conditions and more about the quirks of the measurement system.
In theory you could solve this by attaching a reputation market to the system, so that a given resolution source can have their 'trustworthiness' rating impacted if enough people suspect they're fudging numbers or intentionally writing ambiguous questions/resolution criteria.
But that's just yet another system that is susceptible to gaming.
Augur had a seemingly solid system for avoiding this, but probably couldn't handle the volume, being dependent on Ethereum.
I am literally a practicing attorney and I have had my mind blown at some of the rules-lawyering/munchkin behavior that has come out of the space.
Ironically this perhaps goes to show why sports betting is so popular, because sports rules are uniformly understood, well-defined, and the bets are set on easily determinable outcomes like "Who won" and "what was the score", outcomes which are rarely ever walked back after the fact.
I speculate that we'll see some kind of AI-based solution arise and different markets will become popular with different segments of the population based on the quirks of how, say, Kalshi's AI resolves questions vs. Polymarket's vs. Manifold's.
In this case prediction markets might not actually 'solve' the issue of people having different reality bubbles, but at least there'll be some competition.
Guess I can understand WHY China, Iran, Russia and such would not want to be plugged in as part of the U.S. extended financial network, since that's basically giving them root level control of your citizens' finances, let alone your government's.
And with the implementation of the Corporate Transparency Act, it is also way harder to hide behind corporate structures.
Pretty crazy how while constant culture warring was going down during Trump's term, the Fedgov just quietly picked up all the tools it needs to surveil every aspect of the financial system from top to bottom without any alarm whatsoever.
faceh
9d ago
I had noticed that under the current regulatory regime, the U.S. government in theory should have information pertaining to literally every large monetary transaction that takes place with any regulated bank attached to it.
So almost all of them.
Also can't help but feel like this will eventually enable an end-run around the need to actually investigate crimes and make arrests to enforce the law. Instead they can just haul you in to ask why you made that strange $5000 transaction on July 23, 2026 when you happened to be visiting a known purveyor of badthink?
Frustrating, but inevitable because there's no way that government would CHOOSE to turn blind eyes to the wealth of transaction data that is now electronically accessible.
faceh
9d ago
Well, when you put it like that…what’s the alternative?
I think in the hypothetical ideal in my mind, the payment processors/financial system are 'forced' to be agnostic as to the source of funds they receive, even if they themselves will decline to send money out to certain uses or to take certain types of people or businesses as customers. Money is money when it comes in, as long as all else is legal and fraud protections are cleared.
I suppose it should in theory be 'impossible' to have your funds locked away from you, and your funds should always be withdrawable to some base physical currency or transferable to a different bank, so you will never have to forfeit money sitting in your account because the bank determines it came from some sketchy source.
Government doesn't like this because people will evade taxes and launder money and pay for activities the government dislikes.
Society at large might dislike this because various vices are enabled by an open payment process.
But the point is that if you are operating in sketchy-but-legal industries and you have a contract with a payment processor to help you receive money from your customers, you should not be getting 'debanked' completely without warning and should be able to know you can get those funds out of the bank without too much hassle, even if they ultimately decide to stop processing your payments.
faceh
3d ago
in practice you don't need 99.9, you need better than alternatives in at least some cases.
Agreed. And thus I strongly support prediction markets as a concept for making personal decisions, hedging risks, and predicting important events.
Just noticing that centralized prediction markets are yet another sort of institution that can be captured and/or sabotaged if they become important to guiding/controlling society.
Would really hope we have robust competition between them to ensure no player ever becomes fully dominant in the space.
faceh
4d ago
The final issue is that if it is common and good then it will alter the very things it is trying to predict. Does predicting it make it true when we trust predictions at a 99.9% confidence ratio? Is there then a rebound effect where they become worthless and you need a meta meta meta meta meta prediction market to determine the accuracy of the prediction market you're trusting to verify the accuracy of prediction market that you're using to make the initial prediction?
Nah, I think the issue that precedes and largely supercedes this is the oracle question. Do people trust that whatever entity is reporting the final results is doing so accurately and isn't fudging numbers to give an edge to its allies or to cover up some other outcome that TBTB are trying to disguise?
Do we trust that ambiguous results will be resolved in good faith and correctly more often than not?
Who do we actually rely on to be the final arbiter of 'truth' such that these markets can continue to settle reliably where there's incentive to capture such institutions to divert them from the purpose of accurate reporting.
In other words I personally doubt we'll ever reach 99.9% confidence in prediction markets if only because we can't reach that confidence in the platforming hosting the markets or the entities producing the results which are deemed as 'truth,' and I don't believe these are easily tractable issues.
I could perhaps imagine a rule that provides that no payment processor can deny a customer the right to engage in any 'legal' transaction that is <$500 in a single day with a $10,000.00 total limit on a rolling 30 day basis, which is cumulative for the customer in question across any processors they use.
In exchange, the banks/processors get some kind of 'chargeback insurance' up to that $10,000.00 limit, analogous to FDIC insurance on deposits.
So "basic guaranteed processing" is a fundamental 'right' which any regulated bank has to provide.
I'm certain there would be abuses of this system, and second order effects.
But yeah, the idea is to HOPEFULLY prevent average citizens from being 'debanked,' and allow certain 'sketchy but legal' companies to eke out an existence if they have enough customers and not have to worry about an arbitrary policy change from one of like three major companies putting them out of business.
faceh
10d ago
Got some of those in the 'leadership' positions independently wealthy.
faceh
24d ago
The eternal question is 'compared to WHAT?'
Feudalism 'works.'
Slavery 'works.' We had it in place for eons of human history. Rome was built on slavery, and Rome outlasted the USSR in pure duration.
And perhaps the oldest 'economic' system of all: invading the neighboring tribe, killing them, and taking their shit 'works.' It still gets some use in the current age.
But if there's a system that is completely outperformed along all the metrics that actually matter, and the alternative system survives over the long term, 'working' is not a sufficiently convincing qualifier.
Capitalism (admitting that the definition is somewhat ambiguous) solves virtually any economic 'problem' you throw at it, and it does so more effectively than any other system we've devised or evolved so far. I don't think there's ever been ANY country that collapses due to being "Too capitalistic."
So I don't hold my breath than any of the current contenders are going to replace it.
I do sometimes wonder how a military determines the appropriate size of a strike to launch in order to send a sufficiently stern message but with minimal risk of actually crossing a line that isn't easily uncrossed.
Requires accurate estimates of your opponent's defensive capabilities and expect that they'll be able to intercept enough that the damage is limited.
I suppose the selection of targets is more important overall, if you can mitigate loss of life AND not strike something that the other side finds particularly valuable then there's less risk of some miscalculation causing worse consequences.
One memorable scene from the SciFi Series The Expanse sees the forces of the Earth Military blow up one of Mars' Moons which was itself the response to the Martian Military destroying one of Saturn's moons which housed an earth-controlled research station. The argument being "a barely populated rock in exchange for a barely-populated rock" was a fair tit-for-tat to discourage further aggression.
BUT, (light spoilers) the actual underlying intention of certain players on Earth was to trigger an all-out war and they were hoping that blowing up a moon that close to the home planet would actually lead to immediate retaliation/escalation. (/light spoilers)
I thought it was a good illustration of how these sorts of calls end up being made, AND the delicate dance that it can entail when you risk misapprehending your opponent and what you think is a slap on the wrist could be an unforgivable offense to them.
faceh
9d ago
That would be for the government to investigate, ultimately.
But point being if a person isn't breaking the law, then they should not be getting debanked.
I'm standing by my commentary on this:
Literally nothing Rowling has actually said or done indicates she believes anything other than bog-standard third-wave feminism, applied to the current social environment. The current 'threat' to women, as she sees it, are those who are eroding the biological definition of 'female' and thus allowing biological males to invade women's spaces and likewise pose an emotional or physical danger, to the detriment of biological women.
It is not on any level a surprise that an ardent feminist who maintains a stricter definition of 'female' would see this as a bad thing, and speak out against it.
It does not require her to have a single bit of animus towards trans people as a class, or any individual trans person.
It just requires her to continue applying the same pro-female beliefs she's applied for decades. Nothing is inconsistent or hypocritical there.
The version of her words that is being presented by the activists who hate her is leading me to conclude they are not convinced that she's a danger to trans people, but rather she's an impediment to their broader social agenda who must be removed at all costs, and they are increasingly distressed and annoyed that she will not cowtow and has the platform and wealth to fight back.
i.e. they want to squish a dissident and every year that passes where she resists them makes them ever more determined to do so, and thus employ ever more aggressive methods.
faceh
19d ago
I don't think you can confidently rely on an adverse party's word when judging whether their actions, even negotiated in advance, don't conceal alternate intentions which will only be revealed when they are taken.
Why would you think "Iran says that was it" is good evidence when Iran can say whatever they want but do something else entirely?
That's not even an uncommon tactic.
Russia was of course claiming the troops along Ukraine's border were a training exercise or what-have-you right up until they crossed over.
Famously, many Russian troops themselves didn't know the plan was an actual invasion.
So I'm not inclined to be CONFIDENT that any given action is what the adverse party is saying just because they say it.
Yeah...
I am old enough to remember, even though it's now been about 4 years, Nancy Pelosi telling people to go out and Celebrate Lunar New Year (as in telling people to go out in public around large groups) when fear of Coronavirus was right-coded. Its right there in an official communication.
This position was, later, switched towards banning any sort of large gatherings altogether.
Which THEN switched to allow people to gather as long as it was a BLM protest.
I saw this with my own eyes in real time, while all the while I'm becoming increasingly afraid of the implications of the virus itself and the politicization crippling our ability to respond to it.
I could pull my old posts from the motte subreddit at the time to back this up.
The left initiated almost every major action that drove the politicization of Covid.
Some days it seems like having memory better than a goldfish is a superpower.
That's about the most sane take possible, to be quite honest.
The reason 'tech' has gotten so far without being regulated is simply because Gov't doesn't understand it, and it moves/changes so fast that they can't get out ahead of it to put down serious roadblocks before its already jumped to the next big thing. They've only JUST NOW sort of caught up with Social Media tech with this recent TikTok bill.
Also the general gridlock and incompetence that's accumulated lately.
Now that the tech sector is becoming more centralized, it is more legible to government actors since they can identify the chokepoints to control to bring the industry and customers to heel.
So expect it to keep getting worse, but slowly, and in fits and starts, even if there is no grand central conspiracy.
Perhaps the even more blackpilling perspective is that this is just how things naturally trend when there's a 'commons' resource that manages to elude being exploited and enclosed by existing entrenched players. Free Software is a somewhat nonclassical example of a 'commons' that throws off tons of benefits as externalities. Lord knows I've used dozens upon dozens of free, open source, and other non-commercialized programs over the years. I hate hate hate the idea of subscribing to a piece of software I'd only use intermittently and, even after paying, could lose use of at any time.
VLC, Windirstat, 7zip, GIMP, LibreOffice and Coretemp, just off the top of my head are some of my favorites that each have a very specific role and do it very well (or well enough) so I can thumb my nose at commercial alternatives.
But unlike a 'classic' commons, the software well can never 'run dry' since as long as someone, somewhere is willing to eat the (trivial!) cost of hosting the software download, then copies can be distributed endlessly without ever depleting the supply, and the marginal cost of each additional copy rounds to zero.
But every other player in this system aside from the cooperative users sees this commons as an opportunity. And what they always want to do is enclose the commons, exclude free-riders, parcel it up, and then sell access to it. If you can make people pay even $1/copy for something they were previously getting for 'free,' you've diverted part of that that huge 'surplus' into your pocket.
You already see the low-grade version of this with sites that will re-host free software but bundle it with something else that they can use to make money, or at least have ads on the download site.
So whether it's governments cracking down, OSes limiting the code that can be run to an approved list you have to pay to get on, or Software companies buying up the licenses to open-source software and shutting down the free distribution of same (apparently the VLC guy has turned down sizable offers), eventually this commons WILL be enclosed, and you WILL be made to pay to acquire and use it on your own machine. For now, at least, you're allowed to fork projects before they sell out.
Of course, I also worry that they're going to remove consumer access to hardware altogether, allowing you to only purchase gimped, centrally controlled machines and most of the programs you run will be on an Amazon Web Server somewhere such that if they DID decide to lock out certain software, you wouldn't even be able to futz with the machine itself to hack it into compliance.
Because whenever the market sees some kind of consumer surplus, the incentives ultimately push it to attack it from every possible angle until it wiggles in and can consume said surplus, returning us to the 'efficient' equilibrium it really wants to maintain. And since you can't really get rich by advocating for open-source software, few are likely going to man the wall to defend the surplus against these attacks.
faceh
8d ago
The booze-and-meth of the masses. Get 'em all riled up and take away inhibitions so they get distracted brawling each other.
As someone who has not read the books but certainly enjoyed the first film (never seen Lynch's take either, though the memes from that have percolated into my brain), and also enjoy Villineuve's brand of filmmaking (Blade Runner 2049 was a triumph, I don't think Scott himself could have made such a sequel) it hit all the buttons I'd want but also left me somewhat dissatisfied.
Mainly:
A) Minimal additional worldbuilding. The tiny bits and hints of 'how things work', some of which were directly stated and some which were merely hinted made the first film engaging and rewards a second watch. Second one seemed to throw certain concepts at us without giving out the information needed to understand what it means. Lack of mentats and guild navigators has me wondering WHY a shortage of spice was such a critical issue for anyone but the Harkonnens who had to make a lot of money fast.
B) Christopher Walken can monologue with the best of them and always delivers. Even when the movie is shit. Feels like a huge waste to not give him his minute or so to shine, EVEN IF the minute was used to purposefully show the emperor's desperation and decline.
C) Similarly, the motivation and stakes of the emperor arriving on Arrakis seemed unclear. Might have been helpful to know just how much his attempted show of power on Arrakis 'cost' him to pull off, given how we're informed that the earlier anti-Atreides battalions mostly bankrupt the Harkonnens, bringing the full army to bear must have been prohibitive. How much did it deplete the emperor's wealth to show up? Was there anything particularly special about his ship?
D) This is going to sound 'heretical' (heh) but SO MUCH of the movie was set in the desert environment that it made the universe really feel smallish. Yes, I get that Arrakis is literally the most important planet there is, and the entire universe hinges on who controls it. It's the damn title of the series. But it's worth noting that the scenes on Gaedi-Prime this time around were the most memorable overall for me, so I kind of wanted to see the 'diversity' of environments present in the imperium. Being honest, though, this was probably compensated for by peeling back the layers on Fremen culture (which also counts as worldbuilding, so partially obviating my first complaint up there).
That said, hard to be truly critical of such a well-crafted experience. Feyd-Rautha. I have no notes, honestly. The brilliant move of having him sound like Baron Harkonnen immediately makes you disdain him by association, while explaining said Baron's affection for the guy and why he's the preferred heir. He's established as clear danger/threat but also very much NOT invincible, which is to say actually tactical and intelligent and not just handed everything he needs to threaten the protagonist by plot fiat.
All-in-all, the one who honestly carried the films for me was Lady Jessica. As an effective personification of the Bene Gesserit's influence, virtually every scene she's in you can see her nudging outcomes but you're never certain where. There was no point when she seemed irrelevant and even the slightly more ridiculous concept of her chatting it up with her unborn child was done with gravitas. Hats off.
You comment on the lack of reference to the Butleran Jihad, but I think part of the brilliance of the two films is managing to DEFY straitforward analogy to 'present day' political, economic, or cultural issues. The movie manages to be meaty and yet escapist at the same time, I was more than happy to immerse myself in the world (despite craving more detail) that they had crafted and forget real world issues for 3 hours. Reminded me of when movies were consistently able to present epic, mindblowing entertainment that carried you out of your own world for the duration.
If I, as a male, want to be a bit cheeky, I can actually agree that a random bear is less dangerous to an American woman than a random male.
Statistically speaking, if the male is chosen COMPLETELY at random from all living males, then the odds are more likely you're getting a middle aged guy from Asia (esp. China), India, or Africa. I really have no direct frame of reference for what I expect such males to do in this situation, but the stereotypes are concerning.
Cursory Google search shows there are about 200,000 brown bears in the world, and around 800,000 black bears. Then presumably negligible numbers of Pandas, Koalas, and Polar bears, along with more exotic types.
So odds are that the randomly chosen bear is a relatively less dangerous black bear vs. the "will attack you instantly" brown bear.
So playing the odds, I might say yeah, a given woman is better off with a randomly selected bear in most cases, vs. a randomly selected male human.
But if we restrict the question to American males, and we specify that the bear WILL be one of the more dangerous varieties, I think the answer is clear.
More options
Context Copy link