fishtwanger
No bio...
User ID: 2896
fishtwanger
4hr ago
Will do, thanks!
fishtwanger
1d ago
All smart whites/asians/indians will quickly register as Republicans (whether they vote as such or at all is of course irrelevant).
Hmm, this could theoretically apply to everyone: a queer black woman Republican would check a lot of boxes. It would be ironic if this backfires and moves the Republican party leftward. ("Polls show that over 60% of Republicans believe...")
fishtwanger
1d ago
When we're doing janitorial triage, and come across a comment that's so good that, in addition to sorting it as "high-quality", we have a strong urge to report it as "high-quality" ourselves, should we do that? Would it only add noise, or would it somehow help the process?
fishtwanger
2d ago
Adding political party registration as a protected class
I'm unclear on how "political party registration status" will be interpreted. Does it mean that they "can't create" "have to pay attention to" a disparate impact on Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, etc.? Or does it merely mean that they "can't create" "have to pay attention to" a disparate impact on people who are registered and people who aren't registered?
"Original public meaning" is failing my poor spectrum-y brain.
fishtwanger
5d ago
Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Years of Rice and Salt" has some of this. The premise is that the Black Death killed 99% of Europeans in the 1300s, instead of 30-50%.
fishtwanger
2d ago
When we're doing janitorial triage, and come across a comment that's so good that, in addition to sorting it as "high-quality", we have a strong urge to report it as "high-quality" ourselves, should we do that? Would it only add noise, or would it somehow help the process?
fishtwanger
10d ago
This is probably not what you want, but "Remnants of the Precursors" is a MoO1 adaptation with a number of flavor-retaining enhancements. I think the largest galaxy I ever played for a while was something like 50,000 stars and 500 empires, but it's possible to go up to over 500,000 stars. The game interface can be made to work crudely at that scale (but it's open source and allows mods), and at some point your machine may grind to a halt between turns, once there are enough large empires. But it was a fascinating experience.
It felt like I was an orchestra conductor, shifting the pressure and direction of expansion. And it was very much in keeping with the grabby aliens theory: my empire was surrounded by an ever-expanding wave of scouts, followed by a wave of colony ships and guard fleets, and here and there actual battle fleets, all pulsing out from factory worlds on the rim of the developed core, with dozens of turns before they get close enough to the front to even be pointed at an enemy. (The deep core of my empire being too far away, and thus devoted to research and taxation.) I no longer cared about individual ships, it was more about how best to allocate the ones that had arrived at the frontline waypoints this year. When a new serious threat emerged, I had to do some long term balancing, figuring out what technologies and resource base they had, whether my fleets could defeat it in sufficient numbers or if I'd need a new design, which of my existing ship designs could afford to be scrapped, whether all my other ongoing conflicts could stand the loss of a class of ship, and so forth.
Eventually, as I expanded along the spiral arm of a galaxy and into the body and reached the dense core, I found that I was too late. Instead of being 1-2 orders of magnitude more powerful than the empires I'd been encountering, a Meklar empire had taken over the core and had expanded so much that, although I still had a slight tech lead (Psilon pride), my size graphs were indistinguishable from 0. Alas, then the game started taking too long between turns on my 10-year-old laptop. But it's been a number of years, and the game engine has improved substantially since then.
fishtwanger
20d ago
Where do I even go in 10 years?
We're on a site five steps removed from a LiveJournal called squid314, and I certainly wouldn't have predicted this back in April 2014. Scott had been doing SSC for about 14 months, the events that would result in GamerGate were still playing out, and I don't think /r/slatestarcodex was even around then (June 2015?).
I'd posit something like "the openness of the system can only be in proportion to the quality of the general population". As the population gets worse, more gatekeeping is required. Unified logins, generic codebases, and modern web design are on average bad signs; single-site authentication, custom codebases, and archaic design are on average good signs. A lot of commercial web design is to make it easy and attractive for anyone to participate, and in a way, I think we want the opposite. We want people who value the content enough to step outside the path of least resistance.
But there's also the problem of keeping population growth above replacement.
fishtwanger
11d ago
fishtwanger
6d ago
This sounds remarkably similar to the problems the Union faced in the South, after defeating the Confederacy.
fishtwanger
9d ago
Probably an international conspiracy of people who share my musical taste; Croatia was my clear favorite.
fishtwanger
28d ago
So how does things look for Israel?
Frankly, I blame Israel, either for failing to discipline the IDF, or for failing at PR. Those videos of Palestinians being shot dead for no apparent reason ought to have been treated like the pictures of naked human pyramids from Abu Ghraib, as a national scandal. Instead, what I've seen is justification via showing worse atrocities committed by Hamas. Maybe I've missed a debunking or something, but for someone who is essentially pro-Israel because they're a modern liberal democracy, this has been extremely disheartening.
fishtwanger
7d ago
7 A lot of people care a lot about Israel-Palestine, but the pro-Israelis could dump all 20 of their votes onto Israel, while the pro-Palestinians in the audience couldn't coordinate.
8 A conspiracy by rich Jews to buy votes (1 euro per vote).
Personally, I think 1 and 7. I wouldn't describe the song as a "banger", but I put it at 4th, after Croatia, Armenia (I sometimes have quirky taste), and France.
fishtwanger
11d ago
I think @JTarrou called it a year ago - Trump is Tiberius Gracchus. After he goes down, every future populist leader will know what's waiting for them.
fishtwanger
28d ago
fairly reasonable(cops wear body cams)
I am all for this. But then when it started to be implemented, BLM's rhetoric turned around, at least locally. The stated rationale was privacy. But cynically, I think it was because too many (but not all!) of their rallying cases wound up having video evidence that contradicted the simple narrative that spun out of the initial reports.
fishtwanger
10d ago
I'd say...
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He's T. Gracchus if they manage to keep him out of power this time, and cut his political career off in some way which seems illegitimate to the right. (Which is what I weakly predict, but you're better off listening to the markets than me.)
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He's Marius If he becomes President again, and puts it down after 4 years, but keeps being a kingmaker in Republican politics for the rest of his life, hobbling the right wing by his compulsive thirst for publicity/glory.
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He's Julius if he becomes President, possibly staying in power more than 4 years, but then gets killed.
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He's Octavian if he becomes President and stays in power more than 4 years, and makes it stick. "First Citizen" is too on the nose, but maybe "President Emeritus" would work? The perpetual Putin to the elected Medvedev. Sure, he's a Representative and Speaker of the House, and also a Senator and President Pro Tempore of the Senate, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and most of the Cabinet, but that's totally normal for the greatest politician ever!
Or it could go some other way. Mostly I think the T. Gracchus resemblance is about what happens next. The next right-wing populist to successfully run for national office will know what they're up against, and if they're smart they'll plan for it. And maybe it's Trump, and he gets to be Marius, too.
(Was January 6 a symbolic journey to the underworld? There was a shaman and a human sacrifice...)
fishtwanger
18d ago
I... was making a joke about the problem of getting new members to this forum, if we're deliberately not making it easy to join.
But OK, if we can get the makers of virtual boyfriend (or girlfriend) app to insert hypnotic suggestions to follow the "Courtesy" rules in the sidebar, that'd be a major win for humanity. Heck, even "don't be egregiously obnoxious" would go a long way toward making the Internet usable again.
fishtwanger
14d ago
There's at least some text from big names in the github from the TotsNotBlueTriberJustUsingTheirAssumptions, and not much explicit red triber, but that doesn't exclude the porque no los dos.
I was vaguely assuming that the Red tribe didn't want to paint targets on themselves, that this particular clan of the Blue tribe is addicted to their word-salad obfuscatory approach, and that the Grey tribe is genuinely upset about the corruption of the process. (For versions of R/B/G that are closer to conservative/leftist/liberal.)
For whatever reason, most of them seemed to feel it in their interests to frame the conflict as about moderation policies and formal structure. The quote about hypocrisy being "the tribute that vice pays to virtue" came to mind when forcing my way through some of the tortured language used by the mod team and their supporters. Also something Tolkien said about evil not being able to create, only twist.
fishtwanger
24d ago
specifically targeted by social media companies
If you look at this in relationship terms, this is gaslighting and abuse. Entity A is trying to act according to entity B's rules, but B is deliberately altering natural feedback in order to keep entity A isolated and weak. All A sees is that they try things that should work, but there's no sign of those things working, and so their model of the world gradually disconnects from reality.
divorce is a social contagion of sorts
I didn't see a link to the paper, but the article gave no indication that there was a reason to suppose a causal link. It seems entirely plausible that there's a hidden 3rd factor that contributes to divorce rates in both the subject, and in the subject's social circle. It seems like a lot of "post hoc ergo propter hoc". (And you identify a potential mechanism and cause for a 3rd factor later!)
Could Silicon Valley, not unlike how they targeted Crowder's business through the algorithm, having also targeted his marriage?
I doubt very much that it's deliberate. Bullies don't usually set out to cause the exact set of symptoms that their victims develop. Perhaps there were people who were deliberately pushing this guy's buttons to see what kind of damage they could do, but even if someone takes credit for intentionally causing the result, I suspect that it'd just be narcissistic post facto justfication at work. ("Yes, of course I planned that, aren't I smart?")
Yeah, it's strange. I got curious, so I decided to poke around in some of the links gattsuru provided. There's talk about toxic governance, but very few specifics. And I've seen stuff like that, and I know it can be hard to make a truthful list that would convince an outsider. But still, it feels weak, a lot of words talking around issues, from people who can't or won't come to a point.
One part, about banning one person (JR), seemed to be a controversy over whether a defense contractor (Anduril) should be allowed to sponsor the project, with the losing faction being "NATO defense contractors are what prevent Russia from conquering Ukraine and the rest of the world", and the winning faction being "defense contractors kill people and are icky and we don't want their name near us" (various positions were put forth, but I can't come up with a coherent charitable interpretation). One thing that jumped out was that the mere fact of his applying to become a Board observer was treated as a problem. And what really got my attention were the comments by people speaking in support of him that were "flagged by the community and temporarily hidden".
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/why-was-jon-ringer-banned-from-github/44114
That led back to this earlier thread (also linked to by gattsuru) where JR was opposed to reserving a board seat for a woman. The conversation went as expected, these days: he's out of step with the progressive majority.
And those led to this Reddit post, where JR says goodbye in a fairly professional manner:
https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1cd5fod/in_case_im_unable_to_return_wish_you_all_the_best/
But the Reddit comments had links to a bunch of stuff, including this (somewhat overheated) explanation, which is solidly culture war, and which apparently got the authors banned immediately:
https://github.com/nrdxp/rfc-evidence/blob/master/rfc_evidences_experiences.md
And then this bit of aftermath, again mostly notable for the attitude of the moderators and the content of the flagged comments:
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/delroths-muting-in-the-moderation-matrix-room/44090
I still can't figure out what side of the culture war the people fleeing the project are on, and that's probably intentional.
fishtwanger
12d ago
Together they fight crime?
fishtwanger
14d ago
Given the timeframe you're looking at, it's probably not this ACX article, "Give Up Seventy Percent Of The Way Through The Hyperstitious Slur Cascade", but that has a link to "Respectability Cascades", which might be it?
fishtwanger
26d ago
This is a great way to get on the bad side of judges. They are not amused by people trying to game the system.
fishtwanger
24d ago
Depends on the type of game, but largely agreed.
Also, voice acting is a mistake. Too many resources get locked up in creating art that only applies to one or few paths. The result winds up being either a bad movie that stops every so often so you can press buttons or play a minigame, or a game that cripples itself to cater to the needs of the bad movie that's been grafted onto it like a second head.
I meant, it's clear that someone else reported the comment as high quality, and I just validated their choice while doing janitor duty. So should I report the comment as high quality myself, thus giving it 2 HQ reports, and forcing some other volunteer janitor to read the same high quality comment? The answer appears to be "yes".
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