felipec
unbelief
No bio...
User ID: 1796
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
I'm loving this #TwitterDown saga getting woke progressives melting: ‘Twitter Is Dead,’ 300 Million People Post On Twitter.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
A company can be comprised of 99% of geniuses, and 1% idiots at the top and fail.
All it takes is 1 idiot.
I was in Nokia with the most elite team of open source programmers and hardware engineers I've ever seen in Nokia's Skunk Works at the height of Nokia's success. Our software was way better than Android and had features many phones didn't get for more than a decade, and some they still don't have. The future was bright.
It didn't matter: one person at the top ruined everything.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
Can we consider the possibility that all of this was vaporware?
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Most people don't know what FTX is
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Most people have no idea who SBF is
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Most people have never heard of EA
Scott Alexander seems to be devastated by something most people didn't even know was a thing, much less an important thing.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
Of course USA blew it up, no one else had a motive. For more than ten years they have opposed it, sanctioned it, and straight up threatened to stop it any way they possibly can. Only a person who is not paying attention or has no deductive capacity would not be able to conclude that.
Here's a noncomprehensive list of the positions of top U.S. officials and presidents:
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Obama administration opposed the pipeline
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Trump administration sanctioned any company doing work on the pipeline
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Biden administration made opposition to the pipeline a top priority
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Biden said he was "determined to do whatever I can to prevent"
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Nuland said "If Russia invades, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 Will. Not. Move. Forward."
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Biden said "If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it." and after being questioned "I promise you, we will be able to do that."
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After the attack Blinked said the bombing was a "tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy," and "offers tremendous strategic opportunity for years to come."
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Nuland said "Senator Cruz, like you, I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea."
I believe Condoleezza Rice also said something along those lines.
But who could have the motive? That's a puzzler!
Here's a few more articles about the motives, which you will never find in mainstream media:
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
I agree. Climate change is one of the areas I'm most skeptical about. I believe that if true it's one of the most important issues of our time, and I've seen evidence that climate change is indeed happening, and it's indeed caused by human activity, but evidence isn't proof.
I have also seen enough evidence to be skeptical about the amount of damage human activity is actually causing--as opposed to random fluctuations. And also to be skeptical about the irreversible damage, for which there's evidence that it's actually reversing.
So my conclusion so far is the default position: I don't know.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
I've a hard time imagining a person who could finish it and not shed at least a solitary tear.
I did not shed a tear because the ending is reminiscent of a famous anime which I'm not going to spoil. But the whole thing isn't bad.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
The true problem with censorship is when it silences certain ideas. Child porn as he mentioned is not an idea, it's a red herring as nobody is truly arguing in favor of allowing that. The philosophical position that no ideas should be censored has been debated for centuries and it has a name: freedom of speech.
The problem is that today nobody really knows what freedom of speech actually is. The fact that moderation and censorship has been conflated is one problem, but so is the fact that the philosophical position has been conflated with the laws (First Amendment). It shows when people claim that freedom of speech is a right.
Freedom of speech was meant to safeguard heliocentrism, it wasn't meant to be a right of Galileo.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
Did their officials and presidents also spent a whole decade publicly in opposition to it, sanctioned it, and threatened that no matter what they will not allow it?
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
I want to come back to it as well. I didn't research anything at all, I just thought about it a lot. But doing a bit of research afterwards I've found some resources of interest for people who want to explore the topic more.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
I want to prompt all the contestants: @TheDag, @f3zinker, @felipec, and @Pitt19802.
Did you find the topic difficult to write about?
I think people judging our essays might be very quick to criticize and say: why didn't the writer mention X? how didn't the writer connect Y with Z? (it's obvious)
I think the readers might not be aware of the vast idea space that can be explored. It takes time to explore a branch, and as you do you realize there's many more branches that can be explored that probably would take even longer time. And if you do take the time to explore other branches, you realize that the first branch you explored was not as important as you initially thought, and might not even be worth mentioning (there's plenty of examples I ended up not mentioning).
This is particularly worse if you've never written about the topic (as I), and then of course the time limit doesn't help (although without it I probably would have delayed the work even more than I did).
It's very easy to criticize, but I think only the people that actually sat down and tried to write about the topic would understand why a particular try might not have turned out to be as fruitful as many readers would hope, but it's still worthy of praise. Also, the end result might not necessarily be a reflection of your thoughts on the subject, which are probably evolving as we speak (the very next day I had yet another insight that I feel should be worthy of writing about).
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
OK, here's my submission: My intuition about intuition.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
Except jokes contain information too. When two seemingly unrelated ideas are connected by the author, we find that funny. Jokes make ideas more accessible, and also more memorable, which makes them more likely to be remembered, and shared. That's why many quotes are funny, and so are memes.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
In my opinion a good writer is able to explain complex concepts with simple words. Obfuscation is a sign that the person is signaling intelligence rather than truly displaying it--or that he/she is a bad writer.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
Do you believe people here pretend to be smarter than they are?
I've seen many people in The Motte claim something along the lines of "that's basic" as if only high-brow discussions were interesting, or as if they were the arbiters of what's "basic" and what's "advanced", or even as if they completely understood the "basic" notion.
It's almost as if the opposite of bike-shedding was sought: everyone claims they want to discuss about the plans for a nuclear power plant (very complex), not the bicycle shed materials which are way too simple.
So everyone who aims to discuss about the nuclear power plant plans is rewarded (even if nobody really understands them), and everyone who wants to talk about something everyone can understand is punished (nobody wants to talk about what they can easily understand).
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
Just google: "not guilty" versus "innocent":
As a verdict, not guilty means the fact finder finds that the prosecution did not meet its burden of proof. A not guilty verdict does not mean that the defendant truly is innocent but rather that for legal purposes they will be found not guilty because the prosecution did not meet the burden.
Being found “not guilty” doesn’t necessarily mean you are innocent. Instead, it means that the evidence was not strong enough for a guilty verdict.
While in lay usage the term ‘not guilty’ is often synonymous with ‘innocent,’ in American criminal jurisprudence they are not the same. ‘Not guilty’ is a legal finding by the jury that the prosecution has not met its burden of proof.
Not guilty does not mean innocent.
But the reality is that no amount of evidence is going make you accept you were wrong, is there?
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
That's right. Rationalists claim it was rational to trust Sam Bankman-Fried, because if his pitch was part of an academic exam to see if this person was credible, trust would be the right answer.
But that's the thing: we are not in an academic exam, this is the real world, and people are going to try to exploit your blind spots.
I often wonder if these people play poker, video games, or any kind of board game were deception is part of the game.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
I would put it as Hume did when discussing miracles: "A wise man proportions his belief to his evidence." Evidence is never conclusive, but it can be stronger or weaker.
Indeed. This is a point I often emphasize in debates. The quote "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is wrong because it is evidence, but people often confuse evidence with proof.
But I don't see evidence as a continuum, I see certainty as a continuum. I would say for example "I believe the coin is biased with 95% certainty". 50% certainty means no belief one way or the other. This is a matter of semantics of course.
In the end what "true skeptics" should agree is that 100% certainty is not characteristic of skepticism.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
When did bias become so bad or such a negative word?
Are you serious? What is positive about confirmation bias? Cognitive biases literally pull you away from the truth.
Negativity bias, hallo effect, hindsight bias, anchoring bias, false consensus effect, band wagon effect, do I need to go on?
Biases lead us away from truth.
Being biased against smoking or junk food seems beneficial.
Being correct for the wrong reasons is still a mistake.
felipec
unbelief
1yr ago
But you don't know with certainty that it is also going to run on everyone else's machine.
Yes I do, because I follow good programming practices.
I can give you examples where I refactored code and I added unit tests to make sure that any and all changes I did retained exactly the same functionality the original code had. If it worked in someone's machine before, it should work in that machine afterwards.
This is not theoretical, I've done these refactoring, and the result works in millions of machines just fine. I can show you the commits.
My point has always been that writing is not so straightforward
Only if you don't follow good programming practices.
If you follow simple logically-independent steps, the process cannot fail.
My whole point about writing is that we rarely understand what the hell it is doing in the first place, much less what happens when we change it.
But you can make a guess, and that guess can be right. That's what writing is.
I would just say that the simplification is a lossy and imperfect form of data compression.
No, not necessarily. Maybe 99.9% of the writers would lose something important in the simplification most of the time, but not all.
If I or others seem "offended" that you claim to be able to write lossless compression of data, then think of it as the same "offense" that physicists feel towards people that claim to have invented perpetual motion machines.
So you accept you consider it impossible.
I'm a freedom of speech maximalist and I'm having a ton of fun watching the pro-censorship established media melting down about Elon Musk buying Twitter. I joined Twitter in 2007 and it's finally fun again. Trolling, memes, comebacks, I love it.
I'm glad people are questioning what "freedom of speech" actually means in this new computational era.
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