georgioz
2d ago
Sure, what they share with porn is that they are age restricted and represent health or other legal risk to customers and in general are mired with similar web of local/regional/state regulation. Similar issues exist if let's say small craft beer company wants to open webshop and searches for payment processor. Nobody wants to be on the other side of a lawsuit when kids get alcohol poisoning by buying booze with mum's credit card.
georgioz
2d ago
Porn is a huge liability as some subgenres are risky or even illegal. From relatively small things similar to other content platforms such as copyright issues but to wacky stuff like gore and bestiality to outright illegal content such as child abuse or revenge porn. There are other items that are similarly problematic be it "bath salts", gambling-like businesses, legal drugs and so forth.
Hoe_math actually has a very good chart where he describes male attractiveness for women as two dimensional matrix. The "nice guy" axis is how much resources is the guy willing to provide the "bad boy" axis is about physical attractiveness, assertiveness, dominance and confidence.
If you are ugly nerd like Aaronson, then you either literally not a person to any random woman, or if you attract attention by some lame attempt at niceness such as holding the door then you will only creep them out. It will take some grand gesture of generosity - such as a nice gift or some such - in order for a woman to suppress her disgust and keep you around in eternal friend zone. Also women do not give a shit about "success" such as solving Rubik's cube or winning MtG competition. Math and science is of similar significance. Women of course care about success such as athletic prowess, ability to exert one's will over other people such as being top salesman or politician and so forth. What matters is status, money, power and respect of other manly men and envy of other women. Math and science is good only in as much as it translates to these things. Grigori Perlman may be the most accomplished and important mathematician alive, but to any normal woman he is is nonexistent.
In a sense nerds like Aaronson are even more lame and pathetic as they feel their general niceness is supposed to humanize them in eyes of women. What they actually express is incredible lack of social awareness that they do not even understand their own deficiency and instead of being quiet in the corner and contemplating strategies of how to make themselves, they dare to creep them out. That is what I think @DaseindustriesLtd talks about.
Nicely put post, it also touches one of my findings years back that basically all this fuss about utilitarianism EA style is mostly for its aesthetics and as an intellectual pastime, but potentially dangerous if somebody takes it too seriously. Yud himself even used the concept called Adding Up to Normality, he likes to use eating babies as such an example - if your utilitarian train of thought leads you to eating babies, then stop. Except of course this begs the question of why eating babies is such a sin? Child canibalism was considered as normal in some cultures, it is not as if an angel with fiery sword shows up and stops you if you think about it. But I like this example as you have these enlightened thinkers like Harris or Pinker and others - who already have some implicit moral system - and then just use utilitarianism to rationalize it, because Christianity or Judaism is so cringe. One issue I have here is that I am not sure if three generations down the road - when this background morality of "normality" disappears - we actually won't end up eating babies as the new normal. In the end we already consider flushing unborn babies down the drain as a normal thing in order for people to enjoy nice things in life without burden of parenthood - net positive for utils, right? Eating aborted fetuses for benefits that stem cells provide for human wellbeing is not as far fetched in this context. See, we are nicely getting there eventually.
Another issue I have with rule utilitarianism is that it is often indistinguishable from deontological moral system. In general most people don't have time, inclination or intellect to deeply investigate all their moral intuitions, so they end up just following some "utilitarian rules" like Christians follow ten commandments. Donate 10% of income also called tithe to your local church Effective Altruism where priests experts know best how to use it. Always ask yourself what would Jesus Peter Singer do. There is a lot of weird stuff going on, to me it feels as if we are just reinventing the wheel all the time, because traditional thinking was so backwards and we are now much more refined and sophisticated. Heck, St. Augustin did not even know who Bayes was. And after all this innovative thinking more often than not we just find out, that as in the spirit of the saying tradition is experiment that works we end up reconstructing it, often worse and clunkier.
An act is good if it follows the rule that leads to "good" outcome. Good outcome means maximizing utility, which according to Harris is described as "maximizing human flourishing" or at least "minimizing human suffering". Am I the only one who sees it as very religious style of thinking? Maximum flourishing is literally heaven - or at least heaven on Earth - and maximum suffering is literally hell. So if you want to be a good person then act so that you will bring about heaven as opposed to hell. And this is supposed to be rule utilitarianism as opposed to Christian deontology, mind you.
If NATO, with cca what, 900 million population, GDP (ppp adjusted) maybe 4x of Russia, cannot somehow manage to have conventional forces supremacy in Eastern Europe to prevent Russia from attacking, what use is NATO?
Exactly, and Putin may put this into a test, especially to test how will let's say countries like Portugal or Italy or even Hungary or Slovakia or Finland or Romania react to the situation when their soldiers will return in cardboxes by thousands in peer-to-peer warfare. And we already see the pathetic situation we are in right now - US cannot get a bill of $60 billion passed to support Ukraine, and even that has some Israel support as well as organizational support for European theater inside. And we are still talking about 7% of US military budget and 0.2% of US GDP. And let's not forget that USA and UK actually have some obligations towards Ukraine as part of Budapest memorandum where Ukrainians gave up their nuclear arsenal in exchange for guarantees of territorial integrity from US, UK and Russia. Of course Russian word is as usual not worth the paper it was put onto and US/UK try to weasel out of it by saying it was actually "assurance" and not "guarantee". Anyways even besides that, this is still seems crazy to me - you are supposedly willing to pour trillions of dollars to build up defense against hostile power threatening NATO but you are unable to spend comparatively infinitesimal fraction of money to actually fight it? To me it seems like an invitation for Putin to test the resolve.
Plus the reality check of actual efficacy of all that GDP put into military. Fucking North Korea who is economical dwarf was able to send 3 million shells to Russia. US production is around 30,000 a month so North Korea was able to send years of production to Russia. And we are not even talking about what Russia was able to do since the war started - triple the production of artillery shells to 300,000 a month.
So why am I now hearing this defeatism ? Eastern European countries joined NATO because they were told it'd make them 'safe' against Russia ? Was that just a bluff ?
I actually see it as the opposite. The ultimate defeatism is things I reacted to such as "too many Ukrainians are dying, let's give Putin what he wants" or "don't support Ukrainians by 0.2% of GDP when they are in hot war against an actor that threatens NATO, it is too much money that can be spent on social security". So if we care about non-NATO soldiers dying and spending on level of peanunts, then how is NATO going to absorb tens of thousands of their own citizens dying or spending hundreds of billions or even trillions on potential hot war? Will it not be too tempting to again give Putin what he wants and effectively dissolve NATO as a defensive alliance? These two things are related in my eyes and I bet that those new NATO members are watching it in disbelief, they may have been hoodwinked by mushy allies. Also it is not as if this happened for the first time, Czechoslovakia could talk about that a little bit
But why would Putin attack the Baltics?
I thought we are beyond this already, the same was said before invasion of Ukraine. If anything - why should he not invade? He is already considered a pariah, Russia is sanctioned, NATO already sent a lot of available weapons from their military storage and with other conflicts in Middle East and potential issues with Taiwan he may just try it. Rhetorically Russia already claims that they are effectively at war with NATO so it is also nothing that the Russians themselves would be shocked about.
But this was not even the point of my post, which was focused more on Ukraine and Ukrainians who would be at the mercy of what whatever Putin sees as his pet project and his legacy. They would be the buffer zone, they would be Putin's shocktroops and their role would be to do whatever is needed in order for the Russian core to be as shielded from any negative impacts of regimes decisions as possible. I can imagine imposing some sort of reparations in the same way Soviets did it to East Germany. We can see more pressure for russification and myriads of other things that could ruin the nation culturally, economically and morally. So the point is that just saying "Ukrainians are dying" is not some ultimate argument it seems to be, one always has to also add "compared to what" - as they may continue dying while achieving nothing after "peace" with Russia. Again it would be good to ask people in Luhansk and Donetsk or even people now living in other occupied territories in Ukraine about how happy are they not being "pawns of NATO" but being part of Russian Mir nine years after "peace" negotiated in Minsk. What an upgrade.
It is not "whatever dynamic", it is the greenhouse/florb phenomenon as opposed to hothouse phenomenon using the language of the discussion. If you have IR absorbent glass that captures almost 100% of IR light, it should be the best case scenario for the florb effect. It is weird to me to handwave it away as some logical flaw without specifying why.
Also non sequitur should be a general flaw in the logic of the argument, I did not see it used in the context that some experiment/model does not correctly approximate the reality because of some specific or even unknown physical variable they did not take into account - it should be shown using the logic of the argument itself. Additionally if that was the case, then the Climate Models would be the ultimate non sequitur in this discussion given the complexity of modeling the climate.
But what of Ukrainians themselves? Will they tire of being NATO's cat's paw? It's impossible to find good numbers on how many Ukrainian men have been killed so far in this war. It's likely in the hundreds of thousands. Towns and villages throughout the country are devoid of men, as the men (hunted by conscription) either flee, hide, or are sent to the fronts.
As others said, this is absurd version of the events at hand. If Ukraine loses this war, they are fucked in the same way Donetsk and Luhansk are fucked now, only worse. It may very well happen that they will end up according to the map that Medvedev shown with Ukraine being what Donetsk/Luhansk was in since 2014 - just a puppet state and source of expendable shock troops for the new Russian Empire. The next move? Putin attacks Moldova with forced conscripts from newly annexed Ukraine thus potentially solving two problems at once by expanding the territory and sending potential rebels into the meatgrinder. He already uses this tactics to some extent by conscripting mostly ethnic minorities and rural population. The same tactics Mao utilized when he sent surrendered Kuomintang soldiers to Korea: win-win scenario for him.
And we are not even talking about a scenario where Putin with his newfound strength may test the article 5 and actually conduct Baltic offensive on Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania. It is not as if NATO will fire nukes in face of conventional assault - so what will they do? Will Spaniards and French and Italians send enough troops to the meatgrinder to save some faraway countries? At worst Putin can always say "my bad, I just want part of Estonia and make peace" and play peacemaker or he can withdraw after testing the waters. It is not as if NATO countries will ever muster courage to actually wage full fledged war with the aim to physically oust Putin from Kremlin when he hides behind nuclear ICBMs and torpedoes. And in the meantime Putin will have enough Ukrainians to send ahead of his barrier troops.
Don't forget, things are never so bad that they cannot get worse.
What non-sequitur? Lets say we know that air in glass greenhouse is 2ºC warmer than the outside air. And we had two competing hypothesis for this phenomenon: florb effect and hothouse effect. So we constructed plastic greenhouse that does not absorb as much IR radiation and saw that the temperature in the greenhouse was also 2ºC higher thus proving that IR absorption does not play any significant role in greenhouse effect whole it would be in line with florb effect given that the only thing needed is to prevent convection with no role given to IR.
What did I not get?
My rule of thumb is that anybody who solely uses the unit of power for battery storage like "12 GW" is a moron and should not be part of the discussion at all. Peak output of storage is not the hard problem, the overall capacity is.
I had to look into several sources to check what we are talking about. Here is Bellefield solar + storage that claims to have battery storage of 1 GW output for whole 4 hours for overall capacity of 4 GWh. California consumes 259 TWh of electricity per year, Texas uses 365 TWh. Even if the output of this battery was infinite, it could power California or Texas for around 8-10 minutes. You would literally need thousand of such storage sites to cover potential output loss for one week.
Sabine Hossenfelder had a good video about economics of nuclear power here. She specifically investigates two claims: that it is slow and that it is expensive. Her counterarguments are as follows:
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The overall building time varies from project to project and country to country. In Japan the median construction time is 4 years and 3 months with record being Kashiwazaki-Kariwa unit 6 built only in 39 months and finished in 1996. There is nothing intrinsic in nuclear power for it to be built slowly as is proven by very recent history.
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As for price, using levelized cost of energy the nuclear supposedly pricier but only by factor of 2 or 3 compared to the cheapest gas power plants. The biggest disadvantage of nuclear is huge capital cost upfront with related cost of financing the capital. Here the construction time is very important as pouring billions of dollars that sit idle for years or decades ramps up the costs significantly, it may be around 30% of the cost for a project that takes 7 years to finish.
Nevertheless I looked into cost for electricity of two latest finished nuclear power plants. The Olkiluoto-3 power plant that provides Finland with 12TWh or around 15% of electricity a year caused significant drop of electricity cost in Finland to the level of around EUR 60 per MWh. The latest Mochovce 3 reactor also started in 2023 in Slovakia , which together with two older nuclear reactors provides 55% of electricity in the country will help local energy company to fulfill the promise of keeping the electricity price at the level of EUR 61 per MWh.
The biggest advantage of Nuclear is that you can build it where you need it and connect it to the old infrastructure providing good base load of energy. No new grids needed. You have to shell out onetime payment for construction and then you are fixed for decades to come. Which may also be a good thing as was shown during the peak of gas crisis where energy prices exceeded EUR 200 per MWh due to sky-high costs of gas. Additionally it is hard to undersell the benefit of energy independence from volatile countries such as Russia or Middleast even for backup gas plants. And another addition, to me the high upfront capital costs are actually a good feature in a sense - you can build the power plant and then have very low operating costs. But more importantly the revenue from the electricity goes into homegrown industry be it construction companies and other high-tech industry while operational costs also support high-skilled operators of this huge projects at home as opposed to buying solar panels from China or even worse sending money to Russia or terrible petroregimes in Arab world or Africa.
Just to add my two cents into the whole disgusting affair - it reminded me of genre of movies and documentaries in my homeland of Slovakia with respect to Romani people, so I was somewhat inoculated. There is even a "thriving" boutique tourist segment where people are shown the worst gypsy slums either the urban ones such as Lunik IX or literal 3rd world villages we call "settlements" in Slovakia (here is aerial view of another one), where we have news pieces such as rats feasted on a body of little Roma boy, aged 18 months. Here is a video from that particular gypsy settlement related to another fatality due to fire.
Roma people live in Slovakia and elsewhere in Europe for centuries since they moved there probably from Punjab region of India. As far as I know, they faced incredible levels of racism with laws such as in Switzerland in 1510 where they were supposedly put to death on sight. The problem seems to be intractable, during communism gypsies were forcefully integrated with somewhat mixed results: while in some cities such as capital of Bratislava the effort was relatively successful - they literally put Romani families into blocks with soldiers and police officers. But elsewhere such as with Lunik IX it resulted in unbelievable slum. The sad thing is that while relatively substantial proportion of Romani people are assimilated and have decent life, there seems to be this permanent underclass of gypsies living in slums rife with alcoholism and cheap drugs such as toluene. You may integrate/save individuals but culture and population as a whole just propagates into the next generation.
Exactly. Germany itself has the same issue as they want to connect offshore wind in North Sea to industrial heartland in the the south. The cost of 700 miles long SuedLink with transmission capacity of only 4GW widely fluctuates between EUR 10 billion and EUR 24 billion and it is not even started as it is mired with thousands of municipalities waging lawfare against having high-voltage lines crisscrossing the countryside. Tell me again about political impossibility of nuclear power.
As the OP said, people vastly underestimate the numbers we are talking about when it comes to electricity storage. Germany consumes around 500 TWh of electricity a year. One pump-storage power plant like Goldistahl has capacity of 8.5 GWh built at the cost of EUR 600 million in late 90s and early 2000s. This capacity is consumed in around 10 minutes in Germany even without any consideration of actual potential output of the storage. If you want to have reserve for weeks of electricity generation at a time, we are talking about thousands of such pump-storage power plants with the cost of hundreds of billions of EUR - even if it is literally impossible to build more than couple of dozens in Germany due to required geological conditions, not to even talk about ecological and other problems these power plants represent. For the cost of 1,000 pump-storage power plants to cover the demand for 1 week if needed, you could literally build 54 newest Olkiluoto 3 style super expensive nuclear reactors and produce 648 TWh of stable base electricity a year - so 30% more than is needed.
georgioz
28d ago
Yes, the OP mentioned the fact that even if we take the EA utilitarianism into account it is hard to calculate utility lost by killing untold number of moths and larvae compared to inconvenience of not crushing them when walking around the tiny apartment. Another interesting thing that jumped at me was that the EA poster decided that next time she has to kill the insect ASAP, informed by emotional response of seeing moths dying slowly. To me it is interesting to compare with how EA is so obsessed by saving future unborn people. I am very glad that this got posted, unlike your accusatory oneliner.
Maybe you are not aware of it but many countries - including USA since 2013 - declared obesity itself as a disease. The decision makers in American Medical Association openly admit, that they completely abandoned long-standing criteria for diseases such as disease having some symptoms as opposed to being symptom by itself. Imagine for instance declaring malnutrition itself as a disease, it makes no sense. Malnutrition can be simple lack of food and thus not caused by anything special, or it can be a symptom of some other metabolic or psychological disease. The same with obesity, we can create a "cure" that will work 100% of the time, just admit people into anti-obesity camp where they will have their food intake as well as exercise managed. As the saying goes, there were no obese victims in Gulags or other prison camps, the "cure" is easy.
Instead what AMA did was stick with "utilitarian" definition of a disease in order to "destigmatize" the condition as the word "disease" suggests, that people may not have a control over it such as with some pathogens. Additionally if we allow this definition we can now direct the whole infrastructure used to treat diseases into this new problem. I guess this it the precursor of the new trend such as when CDC declared racism as a public health threat, who knows maybe in the future racism will become an official disease that will treated institutionally or by some brain surgery or pills.
I think a lot of that can be viewed through immense impact that boomer generation had on culture. Sixties and seventies when boomers were young adults, it was all about celebrating teenage revolt, and drugs, rock n' roll and all that. Eighties and nineties when boomers were at their prime, it was all about making money, and celebrating being fit and healthy and being full of vigor, and above all else being sexy - it was time of masculine men shagging fit women like in Baywatch. Aughts and tens is when boomers are becoming old and it is time of moralization and experiencing their failing bodies and being aware of their mortality - so suddenly grey is gorgeous and of course sex is suddenly all about power relation of men over young women of young healthy women over old desiccated boomer hags; which means that healthy sexuality has to be suddenly forbidden.
It is all display of cultural power of objectively the most powerful and narcissistic generation of the last century imposing their self-centered worldview on broader culture.
georgioz
1mo ago
Link for research: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4RgSmkm5S-k&t=1m55s
georgioz
1mo ago
Gaza is already cut off even from neighboring Egypt. So what Israel should have done is basically no change - meaning that they should continue providing water, electricity and support the Gaza in the same way as in the past. Basically pretend that nothing changed, correct?
georgioz
1mo ago
For many generations the natives of the Belgian Congo, for example, endured the most unspeakable atrocities at the hands of the Belgians, at the hands of Europe.
Those "many generations" were around two - between 1865 and 1908 when Congo was run as personal domain by king Leopold II with all the horrible atrocities, probably one of the worst if not the worst in whole colonial Africa. The whole situation ashamed Belgians and after they annexed the country from the king the invested heavily into Congo making it one of the most developed countries in Africa be it infrastructure and industrialization, literacy or population health and growth.
georgioz
1mo ago
Just curious, what response do you think would go against what Hamas wanted Israel to do?
georgioz
1mo ago
Of course I do understand that what follows is a lot more complicated, but I think that in general medicine should always be driven by primum non nocere - first do no harm principle and I would be much more strict in enforcing this. So for instance transhumanist things like most forms of esthetic medicine such as breast implants, trans surgeries, contraception pills, sterilizations, euthanasia, abortion and other similar or procedures or drugs would be considered outside of core publicly funded medicine. It could still be provided but under different scope let's say akin to getting tattoo or going to nail saloon and thus it should be automatically clear to the customer that the primary goal is unrelated to certain standard of this no-harm principle and that he or she should accept the risks as well as costs associated with it.
As for the part where people do not follow the medical plan or even actively sabotage it, which then requires even more resources from the system, I think having a system of deductibles like let's say in Singapore can partially resolve the problem. So the principle is that state pays for your medical bills because it is a prosocial thing to do in order to have healthy population but only up to the point. A level up from that is to involve immediate family so for instance part of the costs will be coming from their savings so that the immediate family (children, spouse, parents) has incentive to pressure that person to do something about themselves or they will be at least partially held accountable.
georgioz
1mo ago
As far as I understand the $200 trillion is the difference between liabilities and tax income if taken from the perspective of government's infinite horizon intertemporal budget constraint. It takes into account the net present value of such liability and the number is 200 trillion. I actually like this calculation even for home budget as you can put on the same playing field different type of spending. Imagine that you want to compare value of drinking a $3 coffee every day compared to let's say once in a lifetime expenditure you are about to undertake such as let's say some medical procedure or even a voucher entitling you to one free coffee for the rest of your life, which for that $3 coffee is around $20,000 net present value with around 5% interest rate. You can use this method to discover ponzi schemes if somebody tries to do magic with cash flow - as the US government wants to do.
Similarly here, the solution can only be to increase taxes to increase income to finance those liabilities, or decrease payouts which means reneging on those liabilities or some combination of thereof. Also you are correct that Social Security is a transfer from young to the old but with implicit assumption that the young will receive similar from young if they themselves are old. Except there is a huge risk that by the time it should happen the boomer or even Gen X generation will be long dead and the Millenials and Zoomers will end up with no place to sit in this metaphorical musical chairs game.
georgioz
1mo ago
What exactly is the strawman in my argument? That progressives in general believe that there is a thing called privilege, that it manifests itself not necessarily in any particular situation or person (e.g. that somebody is sexist) but that it manifests itself in systemic ways? So yes, the fact the somebody has more privilege - e.g. they are white woman as opposed to black woman - it does not mean that no sexism or racism takes place. Maybe the thing about the revolution is a little bit too on the nose, but in the end it is closer to the truth: the fact that there are women in managerial position in our company is not the issue, the systemic sexism (AKA patriarchy) is the issue.
Or let me put it this way: do you think it is strawman to think, that "run of the mill progressive" believes that there is such a thing like systemic racism or systemic sexism (AKA white supremacy and patriarchy) respectively and that it is present and can be detected in mundane situations like workplace interactions? Does run of the mill progressive believe in privilege in context of gender or race? If not, what does run of the mill progressive believe in this area?
Czechoslovakia does not exist for almost 32 years, maybe you meant Czechia? And if yes would you care to elaborate what is going on? It seems interesting to me.
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