faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
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User ID: 884
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
The argument is that despite some of the questionable things EA has been caught up in lately, they've saved 200 thousands lives! but did they save good lives? What have they saved really? More mouths to feed?
Yep. Some of those "mouths to feed" might end up becoming doctors and lawyers, but that's not why we saved them, and they would still be worth saving even if they all ended up living ordinary lives as farmers and fishermen and similar.
If you don't think that the lives of ordinary people are worth anything, that needless suffering and death are fine as long as they don't affect you and yours, and that you would not expect any help if the positions were flipped since they would have no moral obligation to help you... well, that's your prerogative. You can have your local community with close internal ties, and that's fine.
More cynically I think this sort of caring is just a way to whitewash your past wrongs, it's pr maximizing, spend x dollars and get the biggest number you can put next to your shady bay area tech movement that is increasingly under societies microscope given the immense power things like social networks and ai give your group.
I don't think effective altruism is particularly effective PR. Effective PR techniques are pretty well known, and they don't particularly look like "spend your PR budget on a few particular cause areas that aren't even agreed upon to be important and don't substantially help anyone with power or influence".
The funny thing is that PR maximizing would probably make effective altruism more effective than it currently is, but people in the EA community (myself included) are put off by things that look like advertising and don't actually do it.
None of the people in that conversation, including yourself, even tried to defend the mainstream position, so there was no evasion on my end
And your responses were to an imagined opponent who defended the mainstream position, instead of the actual people who were responding to you with actual specific questions.
If you want to debate the what you see as the mainstream position with someone who supports the mainstream position, you need to go find someone who supports what you believe the mainstream position is, and then go debate them. If you want to take a stronger position than "the mainstream position is not 100% accurate", you need to defend your stronger position, not just fall back to "well you're not defending the mainstream position so I will not engage.
Lest you think I'm being uncharitable, I'm thinking in particular of this comment, where you said
It is strange to accuse Revisionists of "moving the goalposts" when you refuse to defend the core elements of the mainstream narrative. You are of course free to not take the mainstream position and propose your own historical interpretation, and that makes you a Revisionist. Congratulations.
This being in the context of someone repeatedly challenging your very specific claim that
There was no German plan for the physical extermination of world Jewry
and your repeated refusals to actually engage with their evidence that such a plan did, in fact, exist.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7mo ago
Because horse-trading is necessary to achieve anything in politics no matter how strongly you feel that your political opponents should just give you what you want with no concessions on your end?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
8mo ago
shouldn’t you be more worried about white nationalists using sophisticated and high-effort argumentation in order to make our side look respectable and interesting
I personally think attempts to recruit by stating and a clear thesis and defending it by engaging with the central points of the counterarguments would be a significant improvement over the current trend, which seems to be "copy/paste kinda incoherent rants and hope it resonates with someone".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Burning bodies is in fact energy-positive, as worked out in my other comment, and as you could have worked out yourself if you had done the math.
"That's rich coming from someone who is arguing that bodies are flammable and cremation is an energy-positive process" is quite a hostile take. It would probably be a good idea to be damn sure that burning bodies is not an energy-positive process before you drop a take like that.
Ultimately, the credibility of that particular piece testimony does hinge on the question of whether it is possible for a meat-powered fire to generate enough heat to self-sustain once it gets started.
But let's actually do the math ourselves, instead of just parroting the arguments of ChatGPT, which is a language model which infamously has trouble telling you which of two numbers is larger unless you tell it to work through the problem step by step.
Enter the bomb calorimeter. It is a reasonably accurate way of measuring the energy content of various substances. Measurements using bomb calorimeters suggest that fat contains 38 - 39 kJ / g, proteins 15 - 18 kJ / g, and carbohydrates 22 - 25 kJ / g.
Humans are composed of approximately 62% water, 16% protein, 16% fat, 1% carbohydrates, and 6% other stuff (mostly minerals). For the cremation story to be plausible, let's say that the water would need to be raised to 100ºC (4.2 J / g / ºC) and then boiled (2260 J / g), and the inorganic compounds (call their specific heat also 4 J / g / ºC -- it's probably closer to 1, which is the specific heat of calcium carbonate, but as we'll see this doesn't really make much difference) raised to (let's say) 500ºC.
So for a 50 kg human, that's
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31 kg water: - 12 MJ to raise to 100ºC, 70MJ to actually boil
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8 kg protein - 132 MJ released from burning under ideal conditions
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8 kg fat - 308 MJ released from burning under ideal conditions
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500g carbohydrates - 12 MJ released from burning under ideal conditions
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3 kg other - 6 MJ to raise to 500ºC.
So that's about 450 MJ released by burning, of which about 90 MJ goes towards heating stuff and boiling water. That sure looks energy positive to me.
Sanity check -- a tea light is a 10g blob of paraffin wax, which has a very similar energy density to fat. So a tea light should release about 400 kJ of energy when burned, which means that a tea light should contain enough energy to boil off about 150 mL of water, or to raise a bit over a liter of water from room temperature to boiling, if all of the energy is absorbed in the water.
And, in fact, it is possible to boil water using tea lights. A tea light takes about 4 hours to burn fully. That video shows 17 tea lights burning for 8.5 minutes, which should release about 60% as much energy as is contained in a single tea light. It looks like that brought about 400ml of water to a boil, so the sanity check does in fact check out.
I really don't think that random british dude who is showing you how to use candles to boil water during a power failure is in on a global conspiracy to cover up a lack of genocide, but, just in case you think he is, this is an experiment you can try at home with your own materials.
Edit: clarity
Because it doesn't have to be 'widespread' to have a significant effect on outcomes. Even accounting for how ambiguous that term is. If 50,000 fraudulent votes are cast in one precinct, that might not count since it wasn't taking place elsewhere?
I am not aware of anyone pointing out 50 fraudulent votes within a single district, let alone 50,000. If something like 50,000 in a single district was something that had actually been shown to have happened, that argument would be a lot more relevant. Particularly if those 50,000 fraudulent votes came from individual people who should not have been allowed to vote individually deciding to vote.
Basically my issue with this is the type of fraudulent vote they're going after here isn't the type of fraud that I would expect to swing elections.
Of course, the Dems spent years alleging Russian 'interference' with the 2016 election despite no direct evidence, so I also don't think they've demonstrated good faith on the issue anyway.
Agreed.
Honestly I feel like all the talk of fraud is a distraction from things that are legal but have significant effects on voter turnout (e.g. polling place locations, canvassing, changing laws around mail-in ballots, etc).
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
and some of them will become rapists and murders. Maybe they already are. Have you stopped to check? Are they worth saving as well despite the harm they have done / will do?
Yes. Is this supposed to be a trick question? "Some people in a group might become rapists, or might even be rapists, and thus most of the people in that group should get malaria and maybe die of it" is the sort of position a children's cartoon villain would hold. If that's your sincere considered position based on the things you have seen online, I suggest touching grass.
I think it worked better for progressives
Most EAs are sympathetic to progressives, but most progressives are vehemently opposed to EA ideas like "you can put a dollar value on life" and "first world injustice doesn't matter much compared to [third world disease / global extinction risk / animal suffering, depending on exactly which EA you ask]".
It feels too inhuman for most.
I am aware of that. I think most EAs are aware of that. The question is, is the marginal discomfort of a few people feeling more inhuman than they otherwise would worse than a few kids in Mali dying of malaria when they could have lived.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7mo ago
"I support everyone else following principles that benefit me, but I don’t want to follow those principles myself because they dont benefit me" is like the definition of hypocrisy.
Whether or not you can perform a cremation without additional fuel will depend on how much heat is lost to the environment (plus the question of achieving ignition in the first place). My contention is that body mass contains sufficient energy to perform a cremation. This is based on the following logic:
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Humans are made of meat
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Meat with a nontrivial fat percentage contains enough energy to boil all of the water in the meat.
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Meat without the water is called "jerky".
The patients in question are minors, respectfully, they don't know what the hell they want.
And then when they turn 18 they become legal adults, famous for making good decisions that align with their long-term interests.
Some guardians approve it, but many have their arm twisted into it by dishonest statistics about risk of suicide. Doctors also mostly wash their hands of the responsibility...
Yeah this is pretty terrible, and the "the statistics on how things actually tend to go in practice are shit to begin with and then further obscured by biased parties on all sides" bit means that it's very hard to make a well-informed decision here. Such is life in an environment of imperfect and sometimes hostile information, but it still sucks.
Why is it beyond the pale to regulate an industry that functions this way?
I don't think it's beyond the pale, I just expect that the costs of regulation here, as it is likely to be implemented in practice, exceed the benefits. I don't actually think it's a good thing that a bunch of teenagers feel like they're trapped in the wrong body and that their best shot at happiness is major medical interventions, I just expect that any attempts by our current regulatory apparatus to curb the problem will cause horrible "unanticipated" problems.
If you have some statistics that show that, actually, regulation here is likely to prevent X0,000 unnecessary surgeries per year, which in turn will prevent Y,000 specific negative aftereffects, I might change my mind on that. But my impression as of now is that this is a small enough problem, and regulation a large and inexact enough hammer, that it's not worth it.
You are not the main problem here, no. Although I don't know who you're referring to as someone who both substantively agrees with you and also engages with difficult questions (rather than e.g. changing or dropping the topic when challenged and then coming back with the same points a week or two later).
Edit: or at least I don't consider you to be the main problem. I don't speak for everyone.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
I think television news broadcasts are uncool in the same way banks are, though not in the way that trees and grass are.
My impression of normies, and particularly of the type of normies that exhibit "woke" sentiments, are usually pretty anti-establishment, despite the establishment trying to pander to them. So my judgement about banks is mostly driven by the idea that banks are about as "establishment" as you can get, and when the establishment starts supporting your ideas, you need new, better ideas that the establishment is not willing to support to prove that you are not one of them.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
I cannot capture the prevailing mood of the movement better than they did themselves in destroying and discarding a statue and replacing it with "black is beautiful" - they made the world uglier in a small way and told us that it was beautiful.
I think it is more like "this statue says that equality and justice is important to you, but we judge that to be a lie, and we will prevent you from having nice things that imply that equality and justice are important to you for as long as we do not think that the world is just".
Still a destructive mindset but I don't think anyone was trying to say that the spray-painted plinth was more beautiful than the statue, just that nobody can have nice things until all of the perceived injustices of the world have been corrected.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Looking at wikipedia, it does appear to me now that the modern convention is indeed to classify the murders of non-jewish people by Nazis as "not holocaust victims". So, for example, the over 3 million Soviet POWs who died during the time period of the Holocaust, while in Nazi custody, to things like starvation, murder, and death marches, are not considered "Holocaust victims".
You are thus technically correct that there were not "12 million victims of the Holocaust" according to modern definitions of who is considered a "victim of the Holocaust". Consider me corrected.
Your "12 million" estimate was not errant based on any changes to "who is considered a victim of the Holocaust." The implication of your about-face would be that you were also counting 3 million non-POW-non-Jews as Holocaust victims, a number which has no basis no matter how you arbitrarily define a "Holocaust victim". Neither the 11 nor 12 million number are even approximately consistent with any of those definitions at any point in time. It was a pure propaganda figure.
The phrase "for example" was included in the GP comment, but I have bolded it this time because apparently you missed it last time. There were additional victims of the Nazi regime besides 6 million Jews and 3 million Soviet POWs - some more examples are
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13 millionSoviet civilians, which is in turn estimated to be 7 million deaths directly due to violence (bombings, etc),4 million deaths due to famine and disease in occupied regions, and2 million who died as forced laborers (though the "forced laborer" number does not seem to me to be backed by anything in particular) -
1 - 2 million non-Jewish Polish civilians
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Hundreds of thousands of Romani people (credible estimates vary widely but at least 130,000 total)
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Hundreds of thousands of disabled people (estimates here vary less, wikipedia says 275,000 to 300,000)
I do agree, though, that the specific "12 million" number does not seem to correspond to a specific subset of the people who died outside of combat as a result of Nazi actions during WWII - the total number seems to be much higher than 12 million, and the number specifically killed by ethnic cleansing related activities as opposed to more generic "stuff that would retroactively be classified as a war crime" seems to be quite a bit lower (though note that the treatment of Soviet POWs was already considered a war crime). It makes sense to me now why modern-day historians limit "the Holocaust" to refer specifically to the attempted extermination of European Jews.
As I said before, consider me corrected on my earlier vague impression that "about 12 million people were murdered in the Holocaust" -- upon reflection both the "murdered", and "in the Holocaust" parts were underspecified to the point that they did not correspond to falsifiable beliefs about the world as it is.
For the "in the Holocaust" part, I was just plainly wrong about how the term is used. For the "murder" part, I had never actually considered the following questions:
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Does it count as "murder" if you invade someone's country and then steal their food such that they starve to death? Does the answer change if the "and then they starve to death" was explicitly called out in your plans before you actually went and did it?
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How about if you abduct them and use them for forced labor, with poor safety practices, on starvation rations, and then they die on the job? If a factory full of forced laborers is bombed, and you don't let the laborers use the bomb shelters, is that murder? Maybe it counts as murder for the other side?
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Or maybe you relocate them from one slave labor camp to another, in the dead of winter, again on starvation rations, on foot, and then they die during the march?
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Okay, how about if the people you murder are people who might hypothetically be able to organize resistance to your invasion?
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If you say "We are invading your country now. For every German killed in the invasion, we will round up 50-100 of your citizens and execute them," and there is resistance, and you follow through on your threats and do the mass executions, is that murder?
Depending on your answers to the above questions, two people can look at the exact same set of people killed in exactly the same circumstances, not disagree about any of the material facts, and come to quite a wide range of estimates of how many of those people were "murdered".
But I don't get the impression that's what your argument is. In fact, I'm starting to get the impression that you don't have any specific affirmative beliefs about what happened during WWII, and instead you're operating by looking at what claims other people make about WWII, and saying "that one does not seem particularly well-supported, I will request clarification on that point, and if it turns out that point is correct I will not change my mind but instead just move on to the next point and never mention it again".
And on the topic of specific claims
The authoritative source of the new, by-over-half reduced death toll at Chelmno (1995 Julian Baranowski) is reproduced in a table by Mattogno here. It places 167,540 Jews in Lodz in December 1941, and records about 78,000 "Number of Murder victims" in that city.
No, it records 78,000 as "number of murder victims of the Chelmno camp in that city". Which makes sense, as the ~70,000 inmates of the Lodz ghetto at the time the ghetto was liquidated in August 1944 were instead sent to Auschwitz.
This is a good example of why reversing the burden of proof, making a claim with no support and then demanding Revisionists debunk your claims is an alluring strategy but massively fallacious.
I would be a lot more sympathetic to this point of view if the Nazi regime had not specifically made significant efforts to destroy evidence. The man in charge of that initiative was Paul Blobel. Here is his affidavit on the topic of the burning of bodies and the destruction of evidence:
I, Paul Blobel, swear, declare and state in evidence:
- I was born in Potsdam on August 13, 1894. From June 1941 to January 1942 I was the commander of Sonderkommando 4A.
- After I had been released from this command, I was to report to Berlin to SS Obergruppenfuhrer Heydrich and Gruppenfuhrer Muller, and in June 1942 I was entrusted by Gruppenfuhrer Muller with the task of obliterating traces of executions carried out by the Einsatzgruppen in the East. My orders were that I should report in person to the commanders of the Security Police and SD, pass on Muller's orders verbally and supervise their implementation. This order was top secret and Gruppenfuhrer Muller had given orders that owing to the need for strictest secrecy there was to be no correspondence in connection with this task. In September 1942 I reported to Dr. Thomas in Kiev and passed the order to him. The order could not be carried out immediately partly because Dr. Thomas was disinclined to carry it out, and also because the materials required for the burning of the bodies was not available. [...snip due to character limit, full text available here ...]
- According to my orders I should have extended my duties over the entire area occupied by the Einsatzgruppen, but owing to the retreat from Russia I could not carry out my orders completely....
Blobel's last words were
Whatever I have done, I did as a soldier who obeyed orders. I have committed no crime. I will be vindicated by God and history. God have mercy on those who murder me.
That does not sound like "there is no evidence of bodies because there were no bodies", that sounds like "there is no evidence of bodies because the evidence was deliberately destroyed". Claims about how there's no physical evidence ring a bit hollow when there were specific, documented efforts to destroy the physical evidence.
Yad Vashem has a database of 4.8 million known holocaust victims. You can search that database by name, or by place of birth. Each entry says where and when that person was born, and what their name was, and how they died (or, in rare cases, that they survived). In that database, there are 139,692 people who were born in Lodz. I will ask, one last time before I give up and conclude that you're either a troll or just not someone who agrees that there is a physical underlying reality, and it is important to have accurate beliefs about what that physical reality looks like:
Do you think those 139,692 people are just fictitious people? Do you think they survived somewhere else? Do you have any beliefs at all about the physical world beyond "historians are lying about the Holocaust?
Edit 2023-01-24T08:08:03Z: character limit bug showed I was under 10k chars, but I was actually just barely over
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
I mean it's more that it's quite obvious that "kys" is bad advice for you, so maybe you should examine the reasons why it's bad advice for you and see whether they're also true of a random farmer's kid in Mali.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5mo ago
Tuskagee was a spit in the bucket compared to what's happening, not to mention George Floyd, or MeToo. If you can link to making that s sort of argument about these cases, I'll believe that you actually made this argument in good faith.
Huh, apparently reddit is more of a tire fire than I thought, because I definitely made the "what exactly do you hope to accomplish, how does what's currently going on accomplish that, and are there any downsides to normalizing looting unrelated businesses and homes in response to injustice" point during the 2020 riots. But apparently it's been memory-holed. IIRC it was my second most downvoted comment ever.
I've got quite a lot of "measures to contain covid have costs as well as benefits, and I've seen no evidence that the benefits exceed the costs and quite a bit of evidence of the reverse" of you're interested in that.
Honestly though, you will probably not have much success modeling me as "on your side" or "against your side" - I would like to grill, and I object to moral busibodies who get between me and my grill with their schemes to make society better. And I especially object when those schemes aim to solve tiny problems that affect a few thousand people in a country of hundreds of millions, or when those schemes obviously won't help with the problem they're supposedly trying to solve, or when the cure is clearly worse than the disease.
If she's still unmarried and childless in 4 years, I would be pretty surprised (call it 3:1 against). I am not sure how that would affect "my grasp of the reality of the founding members of the bay area rationalist circles" because I am not sure what it would mean to affect my perception of someone's grasp of a reality of a group of people.
Do you anticipate that she would have philosophical objections to surrogacy? Because I generally expect "transhumanist enough to support cryopreservation" would very strongly correlate with "willing to use 'unnatural' solutions like IVF and surrogacy".
I very much expect that was one of the planned-for contingencies, yes. I would not be shocked if she had explicitly put numbers on the probability it would come to that, and already made a decision on what she would do in that contingency.
I think you're modeling her as "typical 36-year-old woman who happens to exist in bay area rationalist circles" and I'm modeling her as "one of the founding members of the bay area rationalist circles, who has bought very deeply into the transhumanist philosophy of that community, and who happens to be a woman".
See her post stating that is not just true, but too obvious to say that you should cryonically freeze yourself when you die, on the off-chance that you may be revived in the future. I think the set of people who can earnestly write that post and the set of people who object to having another woman carry their baby to term, on a deep enough level to not even consider the question, have very little intersection.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
You have to dehydrate it first, but jerky is in fact flammable. We're not talking about a single body, we're talking about a pile of bodies with fuel and accelerants at the bottom.
SecureSignals keeps coming back to the assertion that "pile a bunch of bodies on a grate, put wood and accelerants below them, and ignite" is not a viable way to burn bodies, and that it is not viable because burning bodies is a strongly energy-negative process, as evidenced by normal cremations taking a lot of fuel. This would actually be a pretty good knock-down argument against the reliability of that testimony if burning bodies was in fact strongly energy-negative.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
I'm probably using a non-standard definition of normies. I'm not sure there is a standard definition of "normie".
The context was "to a normie, banks are just these things that are part of the environment", which was in the broader context of "to someone inclined to be woke, banks are uncool", so I was figuring we were operating under a very broad definition of "normie" that included "woke" people.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
How is the government in question distinguishing "cooperators" from "defectors" here, such that they are specifically taking the stuff of "defectors"?
If "defector" is a broad enough category, it might still be better to take only some of their stuff rather than all of it, even from the perspective of a government that only cares about obtaining resources for itself.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
Or have translations made for every language, etc.
Or build tools to allow everyone to translate anything into their native language. Technological solutions to social problems are great!
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5mo ago
Possible. My guess would be that if you took each user's comments over the past year, you would see minimal change in the decouplishness of that user's comments over the year, but if you looked at comment volume by decouplishness the fraction of comments by low-decouplers has increased substantially over that same year. Though I have not actually run such an analysis -- if anyone does, I'd be super interested in the results.
"Goes to great lengths to engage in constructive discourse" is definitely not the pattern I have experienced when interacting with SS (nor, for that matter, has "follow the rules of the forum", though on that count I'm not sure he's actually worse than the median strongly-opinionated-poster here).
Example of the non-constructive discourse pattern of "throw out a bunch of claims, then when those claims are refuted don't acknowledge that and instead throw out a bunch more expensive-to-refute claims" here.
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