fmaa
2yr ago
Fairly sure this was not an uncommon topic in the Less Wrong of 10 years ago. How do you have a functional military in your rationalist utopia when it is always rational for the individual to flee and/or surrender? Except if everyone does that, your utopia gets conquered by the nearest group of marginally less 'rational' barbarians.
There's nothing strange or unreasonable about history being full of groups of people willing to risk their lives for the abstract concepts of their group. Because groups without such memes generally don't last long enough to leave a mark on history.
And from a game theory perspective, the credible pre-commitments of MAD are how all military defense functions, really. If you attack us, we commit to fighting a bloody war instead of rolling over. Even though the cost for the defender will be greater, the cost for the attacker will be much greater. And the only way to make that pre-commitment credible is to follow through even after the deterrence has failed. Because it is an iterated game, both from the defenders perspective, assuming they survive, and evolutionarily - "fuck with me and we'll both end up worse" is credible coming from humans because humans have evolved to follow through often enough.
fmaa
2yr ago
First off, you're massively overstating the unnaturalness of the mouse. It's already fully proportional movement pointing, with the added advantages of not obstructing your view with your own hand and being able to rest your hand on a supporting surface instead of having to flail around.
Second, you can already dictate essays, most people don't do that because it's a pain in the ass compared to typing. Drawing is either highly technical detail work which massively benefits from the exact precision inputs of a mouse, or largely about muscle memory which is why artists already draw on high precision pressure sensitive tablets, benefiting from practice in drawing on paper. You're proposing they remove the tablets for no real benefit.
Third, music editing, like programming, if fundamentally a fiddly task requiring talent, practice and an understanding of the field. Both already have a billion different approaches available, someone will probably hack something together for this and someone else will have it as their favorite editor. But on the margin it will turn out that no, in fact there wasn't a massive pool people who are naturals at programming or editing except for the pesky detail of having to learn one of the billion existing options.
fmaa
2yr ago
Fully outside the context of conspiracy theories, recent history and existing upcoming plans on bans vs pricing in externalities hasn't been promising. Or even just letting people judge internal costs themselves, in the case of incandescent lights.
And I'm not even sure to what extent the pushback comes from elites, versus populists. Some brands of populist like bans because many people read 'pricing in externalites' as letting rich people keep sinning while the masses suffer, vs the fairness of everyone suffering.
fmaa
2yr ago
The first analogy doesn't really work, the fire is entirely separate from the clown's job or attire. Whereas to a modern atheist, the christian faith (among others) is the circus, and there's no fire. Or, if the fire is some modern moral failing, any theological arguments on preventing it are like the clown, instead of breaking character and pleading for help, hoping that if he's just funny enough the people will do what he says. Whether or not you also dress up in millennia of navel gazing is secondary to that base disagreement.
fmaa
2yr ago
The problem with this narrative is that McFaul and Person omit crucial context about those statements that totally undermines the conclusion they draw from them. First, while the statements they quote make it sound as if Putin had no problem with NATO expansion, he made it very clear even at the time that he thought it was a bad idea. For instance, in the same November 2001 interview they quote, Putin also said that he didn’t think that expanding NATO “[made] any sense” because NATO had been created to deal with the threat posed by the Soviet Union and “there [was] no Soviet Union anymore”, so NATO expansion wouldn’t increase anyone’s security. Similarly, during a press conference in 2004 with Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, then Secretary General of NATO, he stated that “Russia's position toward the enlargement of NATO is well known and has not changed” and repeated his view that it wouldn’t increase anyone’s security, but strangely those statements and many others like them didn’t make it into McFaul and Person’s article.
You'd be hard pressed to find a single person in the Baltics who thinks joining NATO didn't increase their country's security. The only difference of opinion is that some soviet Russians living in the Baltics think this is a bad thing, stopping Putin from restoring their rightful place as part of the Russian Empire.
fmaa
1yr ago
We get sick much less often and die much later than ever. Hate is hard to measure but death by violence is also rarer than ever. Coveting and lusting are possibly as popular as ever but much less clearly bad. Theft and rape are both, again, rarer than ever. As in that previous post, you're just going on about how the lack of perfect solutions means everything is exactly the same as centuries ago.
I didn't make any claims about how strong the evidence is in any of the cases, just that it's there and newer than a fucking millennium. It also goes the other way, every religious person expressing a personal experience of miracle is also new evidence in favor of there being a god. I think the overall evidence is absurdly in favor of there not being one, but it's even more absurd to claim this question has stayed unchanged in centuries. And by simple statistics, for e.g. novel false religions to not be evidence against christianity, a lack of such would also have to not be evidence for it. Would you honestly not take "novel false religions stopped popping up after the spread of christianity" as evidence for it?
For the mind, we can insert electrodes into to the brain to make the housed consciousness go through various experiences. We can affect it much more strongly in predictable ways with various chemicals, for which we know which specific receptors they bind to. We have numerous studies of various forms of brain damage to see how they affect the conscious experience. None of these are things that would have made any sense a 1000 years ago. And yet you claim they don't impact our understanding of consciousness any because Disney hasn't invented mind control rays, again the insane binary worldview.
And again, from simple statistics, the only way these things aren't evidence against a soul is if their negation also wouldn't be evidence for a soul. If drugs or brain damage could affect your motor control but not your conscious experience, for example, you'd also have to not count that as evidence for a soul separate from the body.
Free will is either perfectly compatible - just because my brain is deterministic doesn't mean it doesn't go through a choice-making algorithm, which is what I'm experiencing - or it is currently unfalsifiable, requiring probably impossible cloning technology or time travel.
Lastly and most importantly, I don't want to hold you to previous generations of christians or care much for the many stupid views other materialists, past or present, hold. I fact quite the opposite, I want you to acknowledge that you are vastly different from the christians of a thousand years ago, and your belief system and worldview are different from theirs, because it has been informed by an entire millennium of new evidence. Materialism can be both a breakthrough and a ideology like many others, they're not really exclusive. But unlike yours it doesn't particularly view deforming its ideology as a bad thing.
fmaa
1yr ago
An NFT is a receipt, meaningless without an external authority validating it. Most NFTs are receipts for links to a private webpage currently hosting a jpeg. Unless this is accompanied by legal contract linking this receipt to some government using their monopoly on violence to enforce copyright on this jpeg (most NFTs are not), the ownership of this receipt does not in any way correlate with ownership of the art. But once you have an external authority validating it, and government enforcing any real world effects, you don't need a blockchain anymore.
fmaa
2yr ago
I think that for many people's moral intuitions, the severity of a crime is how much negative value it brings other people, but the "scuminess" of a crime is at least partially the ratio of this value lost to the value gained by the criminal.
By this measure littering feels worse than some forms of theft.
fmaa
1yr ago
Good to see that the brazen fiction of a "paid by employer" part to hide your true tax burden is in some form alive everywhere. I realize it is too diffuse a problem to meaningfully lobby against, but it is fascinating to me that both the original post's 9M rubles and your 100k are abstractions inbetween the sum you cost the employer and the sum you receive.
fmaa
11mo ago
I in no way want to endorse scolds going on moral crusades, but I do think that the boobs+butt torso twist pose is stupid, and that mage is very clearly drawn in said pose.
Also, agreed on wingspan.
fmaa
2yr ago
There are Goodhart's law problems with historical torture. Regardless of its usefulness at extracting information, torture has always been excellent at extracting confessions. So any organization rewarded based on confessed criminals/spies/traitors caught will find torture very effective, regardless of how little it actually serves their purported goal.
fmaa
2yr ago
The linked essay is so extremely shoddy that I'm not sure who you imagine would be swayed by it, at least in your direction. And the last paragraph just reminds me of Asimov's relativity of wrong.
fmaa
1yr ago
I think meritocracy is a bad name for the concept, as it implies a particular system of organization. When really it's a metric you can apply to any system. And all systems are very much not the same in how meritocratic they are.
To structure society such that intelligence is privileged over every other human trait is to create a very dumb underclass, and to reduce the average intelligence of the working class as many of the smart kids are siphoned off to the middle classes. It also naturally creates a social division between those who meet the arbitrary and changing benchmarks for "education", and those who do not.
And this incongruous with the rest of your post, essentially "meritocracy isn't real, and it's bad that it's real". But yes, depriving lower classes of highly capable representatives is an inevitable consequence of meritocratic systems. I think that's a vastly preferable outcome to forcing these capable people into roles below their potential.
fmaa
2yr ago
I think the atheist/agnostic distinction (outside of models where an explicitly unknowable god has meaning) is special pleading. Denying the existence of god, unicorns, Santa, Russel's teapot and Sagan's dragon are all in the same category of statement. But only one of them is so frequently met with "well, technically, you're only saying they probably don't exist".
fmaa
2yr ago
I'm not sure a white nationalist and a classical liberal would be indistinguishable on 6.
fmaa
7mo ago
Gifting keys to sympathetic people is free, you can just generate keys for your own game. But those don't count towards the review score. Review manipulation requires buying the game from dummy steam accounts with actual money and probably obfuscated payment methods. Which is not to say it doesn't happen, but there is a pretty clear line between marketing and probably steam tos violating review purchasing.
fmaa
7mo ago
I feel like you just keep describing systems the Steam review score already has.
It a positive/negative aggregate which only counts steam purchases (hard to game review numbers when each review requires giving money to Valve), weights the descriptive categories based on the total number of reviews, has a recent reviews subcategory to downweight early reviews.
Since it only counts paid Steam purchases, it works especially great with niche genres. The steam review percentage doesn't correspond to what fraction of people like the game, it corresponds to what fraction of people who looked at the game and thought it interesting enough to spend money on liked it. (it works less well when the game has a divisive feature that doesn't neatly cleave across genre lines, such as any game with timers getting like a -10% to the review score)
My one big issue with the steam store is not with the reviews, but that recommendations of similar games seem to weigh popularity way more than similarity. Though I don't think there's a magic fix to discoverability, there is just too games coming out for that.
fmaa
1yr ago
You are positing an ability significantly stronger than reading/writing minds. The mind is not a closed system, so 100% accurately predicting behavior would require simulating not just the brain, but all the external stimuli that brain receives, that is, their entire observable universe down to the detail level of their perception.
fmaa
2yr ago
The last argument is one for corporal punishment over prisons, not for mob justice.
And the big issue with mob justice isn't that thieves get beaten up, it's that sometimes the person getting beat up didn't actually do anything except be an outsider and look funny. Or more generally, that the less formal the mechanisms of justice, the more they become about social standing. India does keep popping up in international news about various gangrapes and coverups thereof because the rapists are friendly with/members of the police, which is enabled by the same mechanisms that enable your beatings.
fmaa
2yr ago
They would laugh at him for getting caught, and not taking the punishment stoically enough, and then go right back to being his friends and bullying the previous victim/the snitch. Friends laughing at each other does not make them lower status amongst themselves.
fmaa
2yr ago
This is a terrible solution. A punishment can't really be embarrassing unless the one doing the punishing is higher status, and I don't think bullies generally respect teachers. A teacher spanking a bully wouldn't lead to him being bullied by his former friends, it would lead to him and his friends beating up the previous victim for snitching to outsider authority.
fmaa
1yr ago
I wanted to correct you, but I suppose the very fact that a Scottish game series symbolizes American superiority in your mind reinforces your point, if in a different way than intended.
fmaa
2yr ago
Yes, this is actually incredibly useful. For instance even with a limited interface like Talon, I will map certain phrases or words I use frequently in my job to a keyboard shortcut, or a noise. This mapping means that I save probably ~5 minutes of work per day. Over time if we can map more of these things to even more minute/simple actions, we are looking at serious efficiency gains.
Not only is this something you can do right now on existing computers, it's much easier to do than with a noise/gesture system where the need for disambiguation makes custom definitions a much harder proposition.
Unless you're the sort of person who already has a bunch of autohotkey scripts for those tasks set up, you sure as hell aren't going to do that in a worse interface.
A list of steps I disagree with (edit: fixed list formatting):
1. There's probably millions of words on Less Wrong about dealing with Pascal's wager, because precisely formulating a consistent decision theory that deals with it is is extremely difficult. At yet every human manages to operate under one - as AhhhTheFrench's examples show, everyone is already rejecting infinitely many such wagers at every point in their lives. The big problem for your argument is that most of these difficulties don't really require infinities, basically every stupid gotcha works about the same with just extremely big rewards for extremely low probabilities. You're also not giving him money if he promises he's invented life extension technology that will allow you and your family billions of years of happy (and fully-christian-compliant for all you afterlife worries) life. One rejects that offer by the same internal mechanism as the infinite version. But your steps 2.-4. rely precisely on the infinite.
5. Technically true in that there's no reason to think any way is likely, but this doesn't lead into the following steps.
6. This isn't even an argument, just a baseless assertion. If I had to pick one I'd say hallucinogens have stronger standing than religion here, but I don't actually have to pick.
7.1. You smuggled in some christian assumptions in the formulation in this statement - many religions involve a multitude of supernatural forces with differing agendas and power levels. Large religions could be such because they are led by evil forces or whatever.
7.2. Even assuming monotheism, that may be how a reasonable god would operate, but so much evidence from our world shows that, were there a god, it would be very far from a reasonable one.
8. Straightforwardly false. Especially when you nicely worded it to include nirvana.
9. If you're going for appeasing multiple religions at once, there's an infinity to choose from, so why stop at judaism and christianity?
10. As others have already mentioned, this one is very weak if you haven't already bought into a christian worldview.
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