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faul_sname

Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.

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joined 2022 September 06 20:44:12 UTC 

				
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faul_sname


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 06 20:44:12 UTC
				


				
					

					
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User ID: 884


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


provide vouchers to homeless people and to require hotels to report vacancies daily and accept vouchers if they have room




New startup idea: uber for staying in hotel rooms, where hotels pay background-checked people to stay in hotel rooms to prevent them from being vacant.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I challenge the premise "somewhat optimized", we are currently living in dysgenic age.




The optimization happened in the ancestral environment, not the last couple hundred years. Current environment is probably mildly dysgenic but the effect is going to be tiny because the current environment just hasn't been around for very long.




Alternatively, we could just skip detection on which alleles have low IQ and just eliminate very rare alleles, which are much more likely to be deleterious (e.g. replace allele with frequency below given threshold with its most similar allele with frequency above threshold) without studying any IQ.




I expect this would help a bit, just would be surprised if the effect size was actually anywhere near +1SD.




In your hypothetical bet, how would result "IQ as intended, but baby brain too large for pregnancy to be delivered naturally" count?




If the baby is healthy otherwise, that counts just fine.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Why do discussions of white nationalism always feel the need to explicitly mention rejecting violence?




Rhymes with "Yahtzee". The last notable time white nationalists gained power did not go so well, and it is generally agreed that it did not go so well, so people with opinions that resemble that generally want to clarify that their viewpoints do not end up in that generally-agreed-to-be-bad place.


As to why the same isn't true of e.g. communists? Honestly I have no clue, but I think that indicates a problem with the communists.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
An economic zone that cannot or will not pay its soldiers sufficiently well that they are willing to fight because the pay is worth it considering the risk does not deserve the name of "economic zone". It's legitimate for economic zones to exist, and there are benefits of being an economic zone rather than a nation, but if a geopolitical body goes that route they should not expect to reap the benefits of being an economic zone while getting culturally-unified-nation levels of devotion in their armed forces.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


How the heck does anyone accumulate a bankroll of $20M if they can only make at best $50/hour grinding at the lower stakes?




They don't. The people playing those games are not professional poker players choosing that particular game because they've done the math and established that playing that game is Kelly optimal. They're compulsive gamblers who are good at poker and like high-stakes bets. Making things more complicated is that you have people like Phil Ivey who are both very good poker players that have a massive edge in terms of skill, and are also compulsive gamblers.


As a side note, if you look at the most successful poker players you're going to see cases where luck played a substantial part in their success (i.e. they made Kelly overbets, and got lucky and won those bets). Asking how to be successful at that level is like asking how to be successful at playing the lottery.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Use words is for take my idea, put in your head. If idea in your head, success. Why use many "proper" word when few "wrong" word do trick?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
For reddit, the answer is "looking at who the mods are, and what their political alignment seems to be".


It's commonly accepted on reddit that the same handful of moderators moderates most of the large subs. However, I did realize I haven't verified that myself, so I hacked together a quick script to do so.


For reference, reddit proudly lists what their top communities are, and how many subscribers each one has. If you navigate to that page, you can then go through and look, for each community, at who the moderators for that community are. For example, for /r/funny, the url would be /r/funny/about/moderators, or, if you want to scrape the data, /r/funny/about/moderators.json.


So by navigating to the top communities page and then running this janky little snippet in the javascript console, you can reproduce these results.


Looking at the top 10 (non-bot) mods by number of subreddits modded, I see:



So that's 2 / 10 most visible mods that moderate extensively on the basis of their own personal politics.


That's actually not nearly as bad as I thought. Interesting.


I guess the problem with reddit is the redditors.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 7, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The Against Malaria Foundation is a pretty solid choice, and is the one that makes up most of my charitable contributions. If you care more about quality than about quantity of life, you might also consider Deworm the World. Their pitch is also refreshingly concrete and not "woke" at all:




More than 913 million children are at risk for parasitic worm infections like soil-transmitted helminths and schistosomiasis.


These infections mainly occur in areas with inadequate sanitation, disproportionately affecting poor communities. Children infected with worms are often too sick or weak to attend school because their body can’t properly absorb nutrients. If left untreated, worm infections lead to anemia, malnourishment, impaired mental and physical development, and severe chronic illnesses.


A safe, effective, and low-cost solution does exist — in the form of a simple pill taken once or twice a year. Regular treatment reduces the spread of the disease and helps children stay in school and live healthier and more productive lives.


Since 2014, Deworm the World has helped deliver over 1.8 billion deworming treatments to children across several geographies – for less than 50 cents per treatment. We work closely with governments to implement high-quality and cost-effective mass deworming programs which are resulting in dramatic reductions in worm prevalence.




Every year, GiveWell publishes a detailed analysis of the cost effectiveness of each charity in a spreadsheet that documents their assumptions and their model. If you care to do so, you can also make a copy of the spreadsheet and plug in your own numbers, though I basically never do that.


But yeah, no reason to give money to a global health charity that has politics you hate. The impact per dollar between the listed global health charities just doesn't vary by all that much.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 10, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think the relationship between game theory and morality is more like the one between physics and engineering. You can't look at physics alone to decide what you want to build, but if you try to do novel engineering without understanding the underlying physics you're going to have a bad time. Likewise, game theory doesn't tell you what is moral and immoral, but if you try to make some galaxy-brained moral framework, and you don’t ay attention to how your moral framework plays out when multiple people are involved, you're also going to have a bad time.


Though in both cases, if you stick to common-sense stuff that's worked out in the past in situations like yours, you'll probably do just fine.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I read the same doc you did, and like. I get that "Chloe" did in fact sign that contract, and that the written contract is what matters in the end. My point is not that Nonlinear did something illegal, but... did we both read the same transcript? Because that transcript reads to me like "come on, you should totally draw art for my product, I can only pay 20% of market rates but I can get you lots of exposure, and you can come to my house parties and meet all the cool people, this will be great for your career".


I don't know how much of it is that Kat's writing style pattern matches really strongly to a particular shitty and manipulative boss I very briefly worked for right after college. E.g. stuff like




As best as I can tell, she got into this cognitive loop of thinking we didn’t value her. Her mind kept looking for evidence that we thought she was “low value”, which you can always find if you’re looking for it. Her depressed mind did classic filtering of all positive information and focused on all of the negative things. She ignored all of my gratitude for her work. In fact, she interpreted it as me only appreciating her for her assistant work, confirming that I thought she was a “low value assistant”. (I did also thank her all the time for her ops work too, by the way. I’m just an extremely appreciative boss/person.)




just does not fill me with warm fuzzy feelings about someone's ability to entertain the hypothesis that their own behavior could possibly be a problem. Again, I am probably not terribly impartial here - I have no horse in this particular race, but I once had one in a similar race.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 26, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Ensure that they have lots of neutral or positive experiences with trans people, ideally in contexts where transness doesn't matter (e.g. building some cool open source tool as part of a team that includes someone trans).


Changes the question from "is trans bad" to "is Piper, who built the state visualization tool we all use, bad".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My answer would be something along the lines of "keep civilian casualties low enough that France does not regret choosing to ally with you" (or slightly more precisely, "don't have policies that impose costs on your allies that are high enough that they would not have allied with you if they knew what your policy was").


I don't have a solid answer for what that number would be, that would depend on the scope of the operation and the expected costs and benefits of doing that operation over the expected costs and benefits of doing the next-best thing. But I would imagine that number is pretty high.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Ooh, one more! Epistemic status: fun to think about.


In 1956, it was hypothesized that under certain natural conditions, you could get a natural fission reactor if uranium was sufficiently concentrated. The geological conditions required are extremely particular.


In 1972, a uranium enrichment site in France discovered that their uranium samples from one particular mine in west central Africa were showing different isotope ratios than expected (specifically different  U235 concentrations than expected). There was an investigation, and it was included that 2 billion years ago, the site of the Oklo mine was a natural nuclear reactor, and that explained the missing U-235.


As far as I can tell, there are no other examples of natural nuclear reactors anywhere on Earth.


The conspiracy theory is "some of the U-235 up and walked away, and the natural fission reactor thing was a cover story".


I don't think it's super likely to be true -- the evidence in the form of xenon isotope ratios and such is pretty convincing as long as it wasn't fabricated wholesale -- but it's still one of the more suspicious things I've seen.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


For each of the following, I think there's a nontrivial chance (call it 10% or more) that that crackpot theory is true.




Emphasis mine. Original words mine too but the emphasis was from this time.


The joke with that one was that it's an open secret that certain officials (and yeah I was also thinking about James Clapper) can lie to congress without repercussions, but it's still conspiracy-flavored to point it out.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I’ll be honest I have come down on the Toner being correct and Altman deserved to be fired side of the coin.




I think if the board had just led with that a lot of people would have agreed. "Leader tries to dismantle the structures that hold him accountable" is a problem that people know very well, and "get rid of leader" is not a controversial solution to that problem.


But in fact the board accused Altman of being a lying liar and then refused to stand behind that accusation, even to the subsequent CEOs.


There's gotta be something else going on.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Jury duty is an example of a service that people are universally compelled to provide. So looking at the working conditions and pay of jurors may also be instructive towards answering this question.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You can totally say what's wrong with this passage. Translating from Hegelian to English, Hegel is saying




Immediate perception is our direct, unreflective perceptions of the world. By contrast, intellectual perception is a higher form of knowledge that involves recognizing the unity and interconnectedness of self-consciousness and the fundamental essence of reality. Through intellectual perception, we can understand that the absolute meaning (content) of something is the same as its absolute structure or appearance (form).






Self-consciousness can be understood in three stages:










1: As a negative relation: Someone who is self-conscious can identify the part of the world that is not themselves as "other," and then define their "self" as everything that is not "other."






2: As a positive relation: Someone who is self-conscious can recognize that they exist in relation to the outside world and understand what that relationship is.






3: As a synthesis of these positive and negative relations, called "intellectual perception": Someone who is self-conscious can see that their thoughts and self-identity are both connected to and separate from the outside world. This synthesis allows them to recognize the unity of content and form, and achieve a deeper understanding of reality.






True intellectual perception goes beyond immediate knowledge derived purely from thoughts and sensory experience. It is a type of absolute knowledge.




A possible critique might look like


    

  1. 

    Someone who takes a heroic dose of LSD can experience ego death. Such a person experiences a merging of their self-identity with the outside world. This proves that their "absolute knowledge" of their personal identity is contingent on their sensory experiences, and as such is not absolute knowledge.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    Also this writing style frankly sucks. Use simple words. Use paragraphs. If you find yourself using pronouns like "it" and "that" to refer to three or more different things in a single sentence, you should replace those pronouns with their referents.
    

    3. 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Grugg only make some linguist cry, not all linguist. Grugg say language like river. When river flows, take shape of land it flows through, change shape of land in turn. Prescriptivist tribe try to write shape of river on stone tablet, but tablet stay same even when land change and river change. Grugg think prescriptivist cry because know in heart of heart he try to do thing no can be done.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Grammar transmits information, but that information frequently (not always, but frequently) serves as an error-correcting code rather than a channel for additional information. Consider the following:


    

  • I bought some apples from Jenny, but they were rotten
    • 

  • They some from Jenny apples bought I rotten but were
    • 

  • Me buy some apple from Jenny, but them is rot
    • 



Even with pretty extreme destruction of information in the original sentence (e.g. randomly shuffling word order, or ignoring most grammatical rules while maintaining word order), you can still puzzle out what the sentence means. Minor errors on the level of  using "then" instead of "than" every few sentences should have a pretty minimal effect on the reader's ability to determine what the author was trying to say.


I have an alternative hypothesis for why grammatical errors are aversive: flawless grammar demonstrates that either the author was smart and diligent enough to write the document correctly on the first try, or someone cared enough to edit the document. Either way, it serves as a costly signal of quality. Grammatical flaws demonstrate a conspicuous lack of that costly signal, and so readers develop a flinch response of "why am I even reading this, this is probably low value" whenever they hit a grammatical flaw.


Edit: Grugg had too much passion, use too many big word. Grug mean to say this. People tell Grugg "wrong words make hard understand". Grugg not believe people. Grugg think people see correlation, say causation.


Also you say is no prescriptivist linguist. Grugg agree now, but Grugg say that because prescriptivist tribe fight war but lose. Grugg point at Strunk and White.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I can't understand how people can maintain a neutral view on unnecessary surgeries on minors




If you think that minors are basically small people, and that people should largely be allowed to do things that they personally expect will make them fulfilled, it's pretty easy to keep a neutral view. Something like "I have no desire to do this to myself, but neither to I have a moral claim to prevent them from doing it to themselves". To be honest, this is pretty much where I fall on the issue. I am somewhat uncomfortable with the speed with which this went from rare to common, as it leaves people without solid information on how well it's likely to go in the marginal case rather than the average-as-of-decades ago. Still, I can't think of any interventions where the benefit of that intervention is worth the costs and the precedents it sets.




How many manias does history need to present before people learn what we are?




Empirically, people do not learn from history, only from things that they personally have seen, and so every group in every generation has to learn that lesson for themselves.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't think there are any people who are real deontologists, consequentialists, or virtue ethicists -- I think people look at what the consequences of their past actions and decision processes were, and try to do more of the things that turned out well and less of the things that turned out badly. "Try to take actions that future-you will think were good actions" sure is a decision process, and if it's gone well for you in the past I'd expect you to keep using it in the future, but if it starts going badly I would expect you'd stop using it.


And if your decision process is "consequentialism when the successes of consequentialist reasoning are salient to me, and not consequentialism when the failures of consequentialism are salient to me" then I don't think you're a Real Consequentallist™.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My suspicion is that the "on twitter" bit is doing a lot of the selecting there. If you look on discord instead you'll find that they all run incredibly boring b2c generative AI startups (i.e. thin wrappers over existing LLMs).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That sounds more likely to be a real answer. Mine was not a real answer.


Btw have 4channers tried to spread a "stoners are secret nazis because 420 is Hitler's birthday" story yet?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The significant intersection between programmers (and particularly the functional programming side, e.g. Haskell/OCaml/Rust) and trans people (and furries, don't forget the furries) has been noted numerous times. Examples: 1, 2/3, 4, 5/6/7


I personally have, several times, had the experience of "I start learning some math-heavy programming tool, I go through the tutorials but get stuck on a new or undocumented use case, I discover that the place to go to talk to people who know things is the discord server for the project, and I find a significant fraction (think "half") of the helpful and active people in the project are (vocally) trans." I've also observed the same thing in IRL meetups for those kinds of topics.


So yeah, pretty sure you're observing a real phenomenon. I, too, would love to know what's going on here. I've seen the explanation of "autism" floated, but if that were the case I'd expect there to be strong trans representation among railfans (people who really really like trains), and as far as I know that is not the case? I do suspect "a surprising fraction of network engineers are furries" is the same sort of phenomenon.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Are the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn calling for genocide, or are they instead refusing to act against the people who are?


Refusing to censor an idea isn't the same thing as supporting it. I would prefer if university presidents moved towards a policy of just not censoring bad ideas, but failing that I don’t think "let's pressure them to censor bad ideas from both sides" is likely to actually produce better outcomes.