guajalote
1mo ago
The likelihood of a quantum system collapsing into a given state is rigorously mathematically specified by the wavefunction. If a will or agent was making a "choice," we wouldn't expect those choices to perfectly obey the wave function. It's like spinning a roulette wheel or rolling dice - just because we don't know the outcome in advance doesn't mean any free will is involved.
guajalote
4mo ago
Yes, many examples. And I think there's at least some degree of truth to these arguments:
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There are hundreds of millions of guns in the US, so any large scale attempts at gun control cannot work.
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The government cannot significantly tax or otherwise confiscate the wealth of the ultra-rich because they will just leave the jurisdiction.
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Attempting to regulate carbon emissions at this point won't stop climate change, and many of the biggest carbon emitting countries won't get on board anyway.
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It's not possible to introduce effective mass public transit in most US cities because they have already been designed around cars.
guajalote
4mo ago
So I am willing to bet that even today Catholics and protestants know that it was mostly political strife. As were the other major Christian schisms and fights. If you look it is very often some inter elite fight.
I think this is partly true, but to the extent it's true you can say the same about the current culture war.
If you asked a devout Catholic in the 1600s whether people should be burned at the stake for questioning the transubstantiation of the consecrated host, most of them are going to say "yes," and their reasoning isn't going to invoke political strife or other secular reasons. They are going to give a religious account of why it's important to burn heretics - e.g. if we suffer a heretic to live, they might lead my children into heresy, causing them to suffer in hell for eternity. It's certainly true that this underlying belief and reasoning was stoked and amplified by political actors who stood to benefit from the conflict, but the reasoning itself stands apart from the political strife going on in the background.
I think you can say the same about culture war issues today. Much of the culture war is being driven by inter-elite conflicts or by conflicts between elites and the common man. But the underlying reasoning stands apart from this conflict - e.g. if you ask someone their opinions on trans issues they are going to appeal to object-level arguments to support their views and they won't perceive their views as being the product of cynical elites stoking the conflict.
guajalote
1mo ago
There is an element of behavior and not just emotion because dance is universal.
The fact that certain types of music promotes certain types of dancing does not imply that it promotes specific types of behavior off the dance floor. You haven't provided any evidence of this and it certainly contradicts my experiences.
So when you pair pro-drug visual media/lyricism with a low-impulse rhythm, that’s a recipe for immorality.
You claim this based on what evidence? It sounds like in your worldview music is almost a hypnotizing force, something that changes people subconsciously, but then you contradict yourself with statements like:
That’s because you have the social intelligence to understand that the Beatles are not extolling murder. The music behind the lyrics is upbeat and devoid of anger. The juxtaposition was chosen to make a humorous and interesting song.
It sounds like you think Maxwell's Silver Hammer is fine because if you intellectually analyze it you realize it's not pro-murder. But if it's just a hypnotic or automatic response to lyrics + rhythm, why should this matter? I can tell a just-so story about how pairing an "upbeat and devoid of anger" melody with lyrics about serial killing actually conditions people to thinking killing isn't a big deal. But that story would have as little evidentiary basis as yours does.
Also you seem to be claiming that if Paul McCartney turned out to be a serial killer, and stated that Maxwell was meant unironically, this would transform it from a "good" song to a "bad" one?
I should probably also note that Charles Mansion credited Beatles songs as inspiring his murders. How do you square that with your claims?
This is why you might hear a phrase and suddenly remember a song, or might have a song stuck in your head due to some emotional problem you are dealing with.
Any evidence for this claim? In my experience the songs that get stuck in my head are random and have no connection with my emotional state.
guajalote
10mo ago
The question for the floor is: why the high degree of correlation? Is there an underlying principle at work here that explains both positions (opposition to AA plus opposition to debt relief) that doesn't just reduce to bare economic or racial interest?
In practice, I think things like party affiliation are the driving factors behind the correlation. But I also think there's a rather simple "underlying principle" that ties both decisions together.
Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine you find an intelligent person who's fluent in English but totally ignorant of American history and law. You hand this person a copy of the US Constitution and have him read it carefully. Then you ask him to answer two questions based on his understanding of the plain text of the document:
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Does the Constitution allow the government to treat people differently based on their race?
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Does the Constitution allow the president to spend money without congress's approval?
The answer to both questions is clearly "no" if you're just reading the text of the document without bringing any external knowledge or biases to bear. In order to answer anything other than "no" to both questions, you either need to come up with complicated interpretive arguments or you need to just not care about the text of the Constitution.
So I think a rather simple underlying principle unifying both decisions is: "the plain text of the Constitution is binding."
guajalote
1mo ago
You are asking for a peer-reviewed longterm study proving that a statistically significant amount of at-risk hip hop listeners will go on to try drugs relative to controls — yes, I would also like that study. But you understand that they haven’t done this study, right?
No, I am asking for literally any evidence at all. Even an anecdotal story of a middle class kid joining a gang because of hip hop would at least be a data point. Or a study suggesting that certain types of musical structures produce aggression. Anything at all besides your own opinion, really.
Is it your opinion that the 60s and 70s did not see an increase in both LSD and eastern spirituality?
Is it your opinion that this was causally related to the music of the 60s? If so, why do you single out hip hop as special and different in its influence?
“If you cheat on me I kill you” is not exhorting people to beat their wives, it’s a song from the perspective of an obsessive male partner that should be interpreted with exaggeration in mind.
This is special pleading. Lennon beat his wife and wrote a song about beating or killing a woman. If you want to argue this isn't meant to be taken seriously, you have to be willing to say the same about hip hop lyrics about killing written by murderers.
Qualitatively different as I explained in my last comment. You’ve ignored everything from the publicized lifestyles of the artists, to the visual culture (guns), to the aggression embedded in the actual musicality.
The publicized lifestyles of the Beatles included infidelity, heroin use, beating women, leaving Christianity, etc. Appeals to "the aggression embedded in the actual musicality" is special pleading. You're just saying hip hop is different because it feels different to you.
Youve misunderstood thr metaphor. Black gangs don’t recruit white suburban kids, they just sell them drugs.
But surely the violent lyrics and "aggressive" music should be inducing suburban kids to violence too, right? Why are they magically immune to this?
guajalote
1mo ago
You talk a lot about how things are "supposed" to be, but it's clear that there are no consequences if things don't happen the way they are supposed to. So why does it matter what is "supposed" to happen?
There's no refusing to work on things here because other people are incompetent.
Then be incompetent like Bob, since there are no consequences for this and others will be forced to pick up your slack. If they tell you to fix Bob's mistakes, say "sure, I'll try" then just don't (or only try as hard as doesn't inconvenience you).
Parts regularly fail on our tools and it is our responsibility to make sure we have them in stock, including parts that have never failed before.
So order the parts you need for your tools. I don't see what this has to do with Bob.
If Bob made a system-wide change and that messed up my tools, I would still be responsible and have to report out on it.
So just factually report what happened, and "try" to fix it, but don't put in any extra effort because it's ultimately not your problem.
guajalote
4mo ago
Cats are definitely trainable, but dogs are so optimized for trainability they make cats seem untrainable by comparison. I think the biggest difference is that dogs are good at processing human social cues - voice, facial expression, and gestures. But cats are looking for cat social cues. This is why the cat always climbs into the lap of the party guest who hates cats. For a cat, avoiding eye contact and turning your back to them is a sign of friendliness; you're saying "I'm not threatened by you and I'm not a threat to you." To relate to a cat you have to think and act like a cat, but to relate to a dog you can think and act like human.
guajalote
8mo ago
It seems plausible that the absence of affordable housing for the first type of person creates a pipeline whereby they are more likely to become the second type of person.
guajalote
5mo ago
Could you call it a "taboo" if most people were capable of calmly and dispassionately discussing the topic? By definition, what makes something a taboo is that most people will have such a strong emotional reaction to it that rational discussion is impossible. I'm surprised that you're surprised to see people behaving this way.
We live in a world of complex issues that demand thoughtful consideration, yet it appears that a significant portion of discourse is reduced to emotional outbursts.
Because we live in such a complex world, most people are not capable of giving due thoughtful consideration to most topics. Taboos are a way of preventing people from reasoning on first principles about certain topics and arriving at socially harmful conclusions. Not all taboos do this job well, but I think some do. "Don't commit murder" works better as a rule than "don't commit murder unless you're able to determine that doing so would increase the net wellbeing of society." "Don't commit fraud" works better than "don't commit fraud unless you believe you can get away with it and you plan to donate your earnings to effective charities, thereby increasing the net utility of society." If people are allowed to engage in "thoughtful consideration" on these topics, they will often find ways to justify bad behavior as being for the net good of society. Because this kind of reasoning is so often self-interested and unreliable, it's sometimes better to just have a "no exceptions" taboo that forbids any reasoning about the topic.
guajalote
7mo ago
I mean that's kind of my point. In text form this exchange can be read many different ways by different people.
If you imagine it as a verbal conversation where both parties statements are dripping with playful sarcasm, then it's clear they're flirting. If you imagine it as a verbal conversation where both parties are being dead serious, then they're both being pieces of shit to each other. It's impossible to create a neutral set of rules to decide which is which, especially when it's happening via text.
guajalote
6mo ago
How you dress is never an invitation to be mugged, but that doesn't make it a good idea to wear a flashy diamond Rolex in a bad neighborhood. You have every right to do so, and if you're robbed the perpetrator is still 100% at fault, but that doesn't make it a smart idea.
guajalote
9mo ago
At least in some recorded cases the Romans seemed to feel quite sorry for the Christians they killed. There are a bunch of accounts of Roman judges basically pleading with Christians not to make them sentence them to death, saying things to the effect of "listen, nobody cares if you want to worship your god, just go through the motions of paying obeisance to the emperor's genius and be done with it." The Christians would often be given long periods of time to reconsider their obstinacy and save themselves from the lions. The Romans generally didn't see true belief as a necessary component of religion, it was all about the ritual, so couldn't understand why Christians wouldn't just go through the motions like everyone else.
guajalote
2mo ago
It seems to me that secular Judaism is more of an ethnic or cultural identity than a religion. But I don't really know enough about the topic to have an informed opinion. And I doubt that secular Judaism is actually capable of succeeding at the goal you mentioned in your OP: "to take ground among the growing percentage of persons who do not believe in god." It doesn't evangelize and doesn't seem capable of "taking ground."
I think most of them actually do believe that adultery and murder are wrong, etc.
They may agree with these statements, but they don't give any weight to the fact that they're part of the 10 commandments. And there are a number of commandments that atheists explicitly reject, such as the first four.
The atheists basically already believe the underlying moral framework of Christianity but don't identify their beliefs and behaviors as such.
They agree with certain aspects of the Christian moral framework, but reject many other aspects. And most of the aspects of the Christian moral framework they agree with are not specific to Christianity and are common in most cultures all over the worlds (e.g. murder and theft are bad).
guajalote
3mo ago
Declined, happy: saw the writing on the wall, jumped ship at the right time
I think "sour grapes" is more like "declined, regretted, doubled down." You're doubling down on the decision you regret by claiming you wouldn't have been happy if you'd done things differently, the grapes would have been sour anyway.
Similarly, for "invested, regretted, doubled down" you could use the term "throwing good money after bad" or "sunk cost fallacy."
guajalote
7mo ago
Same way I make peace with any other set of mutually exclusive choices I have to make. Say you choose to become a doctor instead of a professional musician. Certain doors are opened by that decision, and certain doors are closed. You gain certain experiences, you lose out on others. If those tradeoffs aren't ones you can live with then you need to make a different choice. Otherwise, you have to accept the tradeoffs. Nobody can have everything. You have to choose what you care about most and decide accordingly.
I say this as someone who's mostly convinced of Big Yud's doomerism: Good lord, what a train wreck of a conversation.
Couldn't agree more. In addition to Yud's failure to communicate concisely and clearly, I feel like his specific arguments are poorly chosen. There are more convincing responses that can be given to common questions and objections.
Question: Why can't we just switch off the AI?
Yud's answer: It will come up with some sophisticated way to prevent this, like using zero-day exploits nobody knows about.
My answer: All we needed to do to stop Hitler was shoot him in the head. Easy as flipping a switch, basically. But tens of millions died in the process. All you really need to be dangerous and hard to kill is the ability to communicate and persuade, and a superhuman AI will be much better at this than Hitler.
Question: How will an AI kill all of humanity?
Yud's answer: Sophisticated nanobots.
My answer: Humans already pretty much have the technology to kill all humans, between nuclear and biological weapons. Even if we can perfectly align superhuman AIs, they will end up working for governments and militaries and enhancing those killing capacities even further. Killing all humans is pretty close to being a solved problem, and all that's missing is a malignant AI (or a malignant human controlling an aligned AI) to pull the trigger. Edit: Also it's probably not necessary to kill all humans, just kill most of us and collapse society to the point that the survivors don't pose a meaningful threat to the AI's goals.
guajalote
6mo ago
I clerked for a federal judge and I agree with your assessment, but it doesn't change the fact that a broad gag order has constitutional problems.
guajalote
7mo ago
No, it makes it even less legible. Is this "pressure" or is it playful banter that both parties are enjoying:
Him: "Let's have our first date at XYZ Mini Golf."
Her: "No way, I hate Mini Golf. And if that's your idea of a good first date then you aren't getting a date at all."
Him: "You're just saying that cause you're scared you'll lose."
Her: "Ugh. Fine. But I'm only agreeing because you're being such an asshole about it."
guajalote
5mo ago
I think Sam Harris would say both sides' theologically motivated claims are bullshit, but that support for Israel nevertheless makes sense from a utilitarian perspective.
guajalote
1yr ago
The Onion filed an amicus brief a few days ago in a case called Novak v. Parma. It's been making the rounds on social media lately because it's a legitimately funny and well-written document. It may well be among the best briefs I've read in my ten years as a litigator. Attorneys often seem to forget that job one of writing is to produce something readable. Nowhere is this more important than in amici, since judges are not required to read them in the first place.
What's the culture war angle here? Surprisingly (to me, at least), the brief is an unreserved and unapologetic defense of free speech by a respectable mainstream organization. This wouldn't have been so strange a few years ago, but it seems like the mainstream line on free speech has recently shifted from "free speech is important and must be defended" to "free speech is important and must be defended as long as it's not that kind of free speech." The ACLU has famously moved away from its robust defense of free speech, and nearly every publisher and platform has caveated any pro-free-speech views with disclaimers that carve out "bad" free speech like "disinformation" and "speech that causes harm."
But the brief doesn't even allude to caveats, and in some ways can be read to expressly repudiate them. One heading is titled "A Reasonable Reader Does Not Need A Disclaimer To Know That Parody Is Parody" and boldly proclaims "True; not all humor is equally transcendent. But the quality and taste of the parody is irrelevant." Nowhere do words like "harm" or "hate" or "disinformation" appear in the brief. Nowhere does the brief even allude to the popular idea that free speech can be used to "punch down" or "marginalize."
What makes this perhaps even more remarkable to me is the fact that Novak v. Parma isn't primarily about free speech, it's primarily about qualified immunity. It would have been extremely easy to dodge the free speech issue and emphasize a much woker angle, e.g., qualified immunity prevents people of color who have been harmed or killed by police from recovering damages to compensate them and therefore qualified immunity contributes to systemic racism, etc. I suppose this theme would have made for a dour and un-funny document, but given how woke schoolmarmery has tended to destroy humor over the past decade (see, e.g. The Daily Show), it's still a pleasant surprise to see they didn't go this route.
Maybe my optimism is unwarranted, but I'm marking this down as one small data point in favor of the theory that the woke tide is receding. I don't think it's going away completely, but I do think people are getting tired of it and I'm hopeful we'll start seeing a bit less of it in our daily lives.
What I don't understand is how she thought this one random dude isn't "really" non-binary on the basis of his toxic mansplaining, but a trans woman who commits a violent crime (up to and including raping a female person) is still a woman.
I think if you gave her a specific example of a trans person committing a sex crime, she would likely use the "they're not really trans" argument. But because you quoted statistics she can't do that as easily; it would imply large numbers of people who claim to be trans aren't really trans.
Also, as @Pynewacket alludes to, statistics don't hit "the feels" the way anecdotes do, so she didn't have the same emotional reaction to the statistics that she had in the case of her male NB friend. If she doesn't feel the same way about both situations, she won't interpret them as analogous and therefore won't feel the need to be logically consistent. This is a pretty common way for normal, average IQ people to behave. For example, people like this will often reject arguments by analogy they disagree with by saying something like "those two situations are totally different" without being able to articulate why they are different in any relevant way. They simply feel differently about the two situations and therefore refuse to see them as analogous.
guajalote
5mo ago
There is nothing new about that. Even in the Bronze Age, it was true that a house made of wood was a lot more valuable than a bunch of logs lying by the side of the road.
The only thing that's new is the magnitude of the effect. Raw materials represent an ever dwindling fraction of the value of the good.
But I would argue that in a sense, the contract law is actually itself quite tangible because cops and their guns are very tangible.
Sure, but once you start counting the cops as tangible now you're agreeing with my point and negating the premise of the original argument I was responding to: people and the activities they engage in are far more important than natural resources to the wealth of a nation.
guajalote
7mo ago
I think it's a feature, not a bug, in more ways than you're giving it credit for. Saying stuff that makes the other person slightly uncomfortable is an important component of flirting for both sexes. It's a way of testing the other person a little to see how they perform.
It's similar to how a job interviewer might ask "what are your three greatest weaknesses?" That's a completely batshit insane thing to ask in the context of a normal conversation, but it's typical in an interview. The point is to see how the other person responds to an uncomfortable question - can they stay focused and give a socially appropriate response instead of getting flustered?
A woman saying "I hate your first date idea" is basically the same thing. It's (often) not a literal statement. It's about seeing the quality of the response from the other person and communicating that she isn't desperate for a date. "You're scared you'll lose" is basically the same thing. It's a little jab back designed to get a reaction and communicate a certain sense of aloofness. It's a delicate dance because you have to push a little but not push too much, and everyone will screw it up at some point given a long enough timeframe.
Could you explain the exact procedure? Maybe I didn't read your original post carefully enough, but it wasn't clear to me exactly what you were doing. What is the dose/timing/delivery method, etc? How do you avoid just consuming the nicotine and not doing the housework?
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