fmaa
1yr ago
He literally states his goal in the article:
I care because there’s a lazy argument for censorship which goes: don’t worry, we’re not going to censor honest disagreement. We just want to do you a favor by getting rid of misinformation, liars saying completely false things. Once everybody has been given the true facts - which we can do in a totally objective, unbiased way - then we can freely debate how to interpret those facts.
His isn't talking to you and his point isn't to trust media. He's talking to people who want to ban 'disinformation' and his point is that the way media lies already precludes any simple bright lines for that.
It is quite questionable whether any of this target audience reads Scott, though.
fmaa
9mo ago
Treating bureaucrats and architects like malicious genies might not be wrong, but would hardly make them blameless. Though really the most fantastic part of this scenario would be them caring what you say in the first place.
fmaa
1yr ago
LED lights should still go in the 'against' column, as their significant advantages could have easily lead to adoption even without regulation. And unlike your positive examples, the primary cost of incandescents wasn't external.
fmaa
9mo ago
I'm aware of the difference. Part of my point was that naming a specific artstyle "modern" and then sneering when people use that word to mean contemporary is just being a condescending asshole and bad at communicating.
The other, bigger part was that no, you don't need to know the jargon to complain about things being forced on you. I'm not going to find lists of NYC buildings, but I think like 90% of that Pritzker prize list is ugly and about half of it is concrete boxes. It really doesn't matter to anyone living in/near them if these particular ugly concrete boxes don't count as brutalist according to architects.
fmaa
1yr 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
9mo ago
Hah, this is so hidebound and backward I can't tell if you're being serious. I could just as easily say "click at the wrong time, you just deleted an hours work!" Get real.
The difference is that in one case there's a bright line distinction between when you are and are not using the interface. Which becomes more pronounced in real world use vs tech demos. A gesture system that's comfortable when it's what you're focusing on can become much less so when you're casually using it and want to combine it with eating, drinking or just scratching your nose without accidentally triggering a gesture.
fmaa
1yr 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
5mo ago
I feel like putting all this together is mixing very different categories of errors.
There are errors more common with native speakers that stem from learning the language phonetically and unconsciously, without thinking about the logic or formal meaning of what you're saying, such as "should of", then/than mixups or "irregardless".
There are errors more common with ESL people that stem from English spelling and grammar being arbitrary nonsense. It is impossible to derive irregular verb forms of which there are many, and impossible to derive the spelling of a word from hearing it.
As a mix of both, many ESL people struggle with using the correct article because their language doesn't have an analogous concept of definite vs indefinite nouns.
And there are "errors" which are prescriptivist nonsense. By whose measure is "noone" not an acceptable compound but "someone" is? Why does the moronic norm that the comma and period at the end my second paragraph should be inside the quotation marks persist?
fmaa
1yr 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
3mo ago
I also wonder if there just is a significant population of them who kind of suck at their job, the way many of ours do, but don't face many consequences because of the inherent difficulties of evaluation.
I like this analogy specifically because spies are famous for their insane fuckups due to lack of oversight and a conviction that their ends are more than important enough to justify their means.
Shit like MKUltra or the way multiple separate US agencies have financed and supplied various militias and cartels without any control over them are public knowledge, but by the very nature of spying there's probably 5 fuckups for every one that goes public.
And that's the big ticket items, a spy who just collects a steady paycheck while not gathering any useful info and/or sends back fictional info because that's way less risk is too common a WW2 story to even be notable.
But, like science, this doesn't mean that spying isn't a useful job, just good luck controlling it.
fmaa
9mo 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
1yr ago
I'm not sure a white nationalist and a classical liberal would be indistinguishable on 6.
fmaa
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
5mo 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
8mo 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
1yr 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
5mo 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
9mo 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.
fmaa
1yr ago
I think changing the setting has to be the start. That some teens are abusive dicks is one thing. That you (and I) felt obligated to go back everyday to the place where you are regularly abused, to sit in forced confinement with people you hate, is insane.
fmaa
1yr 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
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 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".
This is the usual facile reply to complaints about the ugly architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries. Uh, you complain about the ugliness of modern brutalist buildings, but actually modernism and brutalism are separate architectural movements, and the current-year trend of ugly concrete boxes and geometric turds is called something else.
You don't need to be versed in the jargon of an insular artfield to criticize its output, especially for architecture where this output is forced upon millions of unwilling victims to suffer daily.
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